This one is actually interesting: The statistical difference highlights that the people who eventually quit were actually better at following the scientific protocol than those who went to the end.
And also this: The most frequent violation in obedient sessions (those who shocked till the end) involved reading the memory test questions over the simulated screams of the learner. Doing this effectively guaranteed that the learner would fail the test and receive another shock.
Basically, being willing to shock other people without stopping was more about violence itself being permitted then about being obedient person. Rule followers followed the protocol until they concluded "nope, this is too much" and stopped mistreating the victim.
Yeah, this reminiscent of Bandura's moral disengagement work.
The differentiating factor isn't "do you follow authority?" but "do you maintain attentiveness to the consequences of your own actions."
The refusers likely weren't necessarily more heroic or principled in some deep character sense. They were just still paying attention.
Interesting. If we can assume the experimenter's failure to enforce the rules was mere clumsiness or incompetence, rather than an indicator of underlying intentional manipulation of the experimental conditions à la Stanford prison experiment, this can be interpreted in many different ways.
The (eventually) disobedient subjects were better at respecting the experimental process they were given than the "obedient" ones who went all the way to the maximum voltage. Why was that?
Could it be a sign that the disobedient subjects were on average more concentrated on the task at hand (smarter? less stressed? better educated? more conscientious?) than the ultimately obedient ones, and therefore were more likely to realise they were "hurting" the alleged learner and stop?
Or could it be that the obedient subjects were more likely to realise there was something fishy going on, suspecting the "learner" wasn't really being shocked, and thus were paying less attention to the learning rules?
Or was it, as the article suggests, that the obedient ones may have shut down emotionally under pressure to follow through, and their mistakes are the result of that?
Or were the obedient ones more likely to be actual sadists, who were enjoying the shocks so much that they didn't even care if the "learner" didn't hear their question, giving them a greater chance of shocking them again?
Unfortunately I think the Milgram experiment has become so entrenched in popular culture that there's absolutely no way it can be properly repeated to explore these questions.
The reason you have psychology experiments with controls and parameters is that extracting definite conclusions from the simple observation of human behavior is extremely difficult given the wide variety of individuals, groups and cultures.
Once you have an experiment that degenerates into just an event, a situation where the controls have failed, you come up with many potential conclusions but you've lost any science-specific-conclusion to the observations and you may as well look any series of events.
That said, I think experimental psychology just generally fails to establish enough controls to merit the scientific quality it aspires to.
Without study of the internal motivations, the conclusions of the study are pure conjectures.
You are trapped in an experiment and you have the impression that things went too far and you think you can't escape? You rush it. You hear horrible noises? You just pretend you don't hear them. These are all classical mental patterns. There are million ways to explain them.
> By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish.
Many people are cruel. Not all people, maybe; not most people, also maybe; but some people enjoy hurting others. We see this everywhere. Isn't it possible that this kind of profile jumped on the occasion to inflict pain on people with no fear of repercussions?
In other words, isn't this study just a sort filter to triage / order students from most cruel to less cruel?
I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results".
Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think about how other people think/behave? Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?
I wonder what percentage of "obedient" teachers saw through the facade, realized that the learner wasn't a very good actor, and was just having a good time playing along with what must've seemed like some psychology professor's weird pain kink.
That's an interesting perspective, and it does expand how we can interpret the Milgram experiment
That said the study has been replicated many times since the original, with researchers adjusting different parameters like participant screening, changing the gender balance, or varying the roles (teacher/student, researcher/technician...) Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things.
Other experiments have also looked at which factors make this more likely, and for example, diffusing responsibility seems to be one of the most effective ones.
To be clear, this doesn't seem like it invalidates anything in the original experiment.
The "rule-breaking" isn't referring to anything the researchers were doing.
It's referring to what the participants were doing. It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow instructions 100% perfectly all the time, and especially not the first time they do something.
> Kaposi and Sumeghy interpret these patterns as a complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment. The subjects were not committing violence for the sake of an orderly memory study. With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence.
This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.
> This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.
I found the idea pretty reasonable: Yes, the "scientific environment" was fake, but the "teachers" (i.e. actual subjects) didn't know that, so it should have appeared real to them.
The study tried to analyze the events strictly from the subjects' POV.
The point was that those mistakes would have broken the (fictional) experimental setup, and in a way that was obvious for the subjects too.
If they were really delivering the shocks only because "they were following procedure", then it's strange that they did so many mistakes that in fact broke the procedure. (and resulted in an even more aggressive shock regime than the procedure would demand)
Another interpretation exists too: maybe obedience and compassion were orthogonal. They reported an increase in the error rate in parallel with the increase in voltage, right? Maybe those who continued into the more dangerous voltage ranges, committed more errors because they felt flustered. So in direct contradiction to the image of their being driven into some kind of hateful bloodlust, perhaps they felt more compassion and distress as the experiment proceeded. But just didn't act on it.
This study is so flawed in so many ways that it doesn’t prove or disprove anything in any way. The most obvious thing is that the assumption that the test subjects did not realise it was fake. It was not controlled in any way and many of the subjects (presumably Yale students and so hardly complete dumb-dumbs) propably thought it was just a lark.
Milgram gets thrown around as proof that everyone is just a few steps away from being an agent of evil. Finding out that it actually shows that there are psychopaths among us, and most people actually refused (left the experiment), somehow "clicks" and fits with reality a lot better. We see this in historical genocides - not everyone is in on it, and in fact it has to be covered-up internally because only the psychopaths are able to stomach it.
This is well-documented in Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It's worth a read, as it also dispels other experiments in human behaviour that have subsequently been difficult to replicate (for a variety of reasons).
It should have been rejected from the outset. What Milgram did in his experiments was nothing less than construct an elaborate setup so he could psychologically torture dozens of well-meaning people. The ethical violation was already recognized at the time, and given that, nothing else he claims about method or implications can be trusted.
This isn't an experiment. It's just some idiot running pseudoscience. Predictably the pop science morons have decided this fake 'research' needs more attention than just dismissal.
> With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence.
> The study authors propose that the experimenter played a major, passive role in establishing this dynamic. When the participants broke the rules and skipped steps, the authority figure rarely intervened to correct them or pause the session. By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish.
This sounds like looting scenarios to me. ie. When a situation descend into chaos, some people will just surf/leverage that chaos, instead of attempting a return to normalcy, for whatever reason.
If you read Gina Perry’s critique, her conclusions is that fewer than half of the participants thought it was real.
These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average, and the study didn’t do a very convincing job make it seem believable from what I’ve read.
When I took psychology in college I had to submit to random experiments to as part of my grade (there were alternatives but the experiments were easier). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately.
When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.
That's pretty fun that your teachers did that. I wish teachers attempted to immerse students in the things they're teaching about more often, rather than just reading about it in abstract through a textbook or whatever.
> Interviewing the original participants―many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did―and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram.
Just reading the Amazon summary, I feel like there’s a contradiction. If subjects were just trying to get it over with, yes it invalidates the study but the only troubling conclusion is that the study wasn’t scrutinized more closely.
I also don’t see why they would be “haunted” by what effectively amounts to a chore to get their $20 participation check.
I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.
What they teach undergrads about the experiment: People blindly follow orders. If the Nazis ordered you to commit atrocities, you probably would!
What the experiment actually showed: People follow orders when the orders are justified within a persuasive ideological context, e.g. you value science and the scientific researcher is telling you to proceed for the sake of science.
In the first, people who follow the orders of Nazis are not necessarily ideologically aligned with the Nazis, they might just be in a brainless order-following trance. But this isn't real, and in reality the people who were "just following orders" were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly.
This seems like something that people would very quickly discover if the data were freely available to listen to. As of now we need to take this study’s authors at their word that the metadata is accurate, and before that we had to take Milgram at his word that his interpretation was accurate.
Apparently if you want to get access to the raw audio, you need to ask Yale. Why?
My hypothesis: we are social creatures and have an innate instinct not to hurt others, but we’ve been trained to various degrees (through upbringing/trauma/school/work) to disassociate from the pain of hurting others.
The people who did continue to administer shocks were attempting to focus on what they thought was the most important part of the task (pressing the lever), but internally the unconscious effort to habitually dissociate from their own discomfort led them to make more mistakes.
Combine this dissociation with a desire for power or status and you get the world we live in today.
36 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadAnd also this: The most frequent violation in obedient sessions (those who shocked till the end) involved reading the memory test questions over the simulated screams of the learner. Doing this effectively guaranteed that the learner would fail the test and receive another shock.
Basically, being willing to shock other people without stopping was more about violence itself being permitted then about being obedient person. Rule followers followed the protocol until they concluded "nope, this is too much" and stopped mistreating the victim.
The refusers likely weren't necessarily more heroic or principled in some deep character sense. They were just still paying attention.
https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-moral-disengagement...
The (eventually) disobedient subjects were better at respecting the experimental process they were given than the "obedient" ones who went all the way to the maximum voltage. Why was that?
Could it be a sign that the disobedient subjects were on average more concentrated on the task at hand (smarter? less stressed? better educated? more conscientious?) than the ultimately obedient ones, and therefore were more likely to realise they were "hurting" the alleged learner and stop?
Or could it be that the obedient subjects were more likely to realise there was something fishy going on, suspecting the "learner" wasn't really being shocked, and thus were paying less attention to the learning rules?
Or was it, as the article suggests, that the obedient ones may have shut down emotionally under pressure to follow through, and their mistakes are the result of that?
Or were the obedient ones more likely to be actual sadists, who were enjoying the shocks so much that they didn't even care if the "learner" didn't hear their question, giving them a greater chance of shocking them again?
Unfortunately I think the Milgram experiment has become so entrenched in popular culture that there's absolutely no way it can be properly repeated to explore these questions.
Once you have an experiment that degenerates into just an event, a situation where the controls have failed, you come up with many potential conclusions but you've lost any science-specific-conclusion to the observations and you may as well look any series of events.
That said, I think experimental psychology just generally fails to establish enough controls to merit the scientific quality it aspires to.
You are trapped in an experiment and you have the impression that things went too far and you think you can't escape? You rush it. You hear horrible noises? You just pretend you don't hear them. These are all classical mental patterns. There are million ways to explain them.
Many people are cruel. Not all people, maybe; not most people, also maybe; but some people enjoy hurting others. We see this everywhere. Isn't it possible that this kind of profile jumped on the occasion to inflict pain on people with no fear of repercussions?
In other words, isn't this study just a sort filter to triage / order students from most cruel to less cruel?
Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think about how other people think/behave? Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?
That said the study has been replicated many times since the original, with researchers adjusting different parameters like participant screening, changing the gender balance, or varying the roles (teacher/student, researcher/technician...) Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things.
Other experiments have also looked at which factors make this more likely, and for example, diffusing responsibility seems to be one of the most effective ones.
The "rule-breaking" isn't referring to anything the researchers were doing.
It's referring to what the participants were doing. It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow instructions 100% perfectly all the time, and especially not the first time they do something.
> Kaposi and Sumeghy interpret these patterns as a complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment. The subjects were not committing violence for the sake of an orderly memory study. With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence.
This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.
I found the idea pretty reasonable: Yes, the "scientific environment" was fake, but the "teachers" (i.e. actual subjects) didn't know that, so it should have appeared real to them.
The study tried to analyze the events strictly from the subjects' POV.
The point was that those mistakes would have broken the (fictional) experimental setup, and in a way that was obvious for the subjects too.
If they were really delivering the shocks only because "they were following procedure", then it's strange that they did so many mistakes that in fact broke the procedure. (and resulted in an even more aggressive shock regime than the procedure would demand)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The performance, or signal, or whatever we're calling it. That's the important thing.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind
> The study authors propose that the experimenter played a major, passive role in establishing this dynamic. When the participants broke the rules and skipped steps, the authority figure rarely intervened to correct them or pause the session. By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish.
This sounds like looting scenarios to me. ie. When a situation descend into chaos, some people will just surf/leverage that chaos, instead of attempting a return to normalcy, for whatever reason.
These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average, and the study didn’t do a very convincing job make it seem believable from what I’ve read.
When I took psychology in college I had to submit to random experiments to as part of my grade (there were alternatives but the experiments were easier). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately.
When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.
Just reading the Amazon summary, I feel like there’s a contradiction. If subjects were just trying to get it over with, yes it invalidates the study but the only troubling conclusion is that the study wasn’t scrutinized more closely.
I also don’t see why they would be “haunted” by what effectively amounts to a chore to get their $20 participation check.
In my experience, Ivy League students are some of the most profoundly stupid people I've ever met
Here is Derren Brown's attempt at repeating the experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq4QtK3j0Y
What the experiment actually showed: People follow orders when the orders are justified within a persuasive ideological context, e.g. you value science and the scientific researcher is telling you to proceed for the sake of science.
In the first, people who follow the orders of Nazis are not necessarily ideologically aligned with the Nazis, they might just be in a brainless order-following trance. But this isn't real, and in reality the people who were "just following orders" were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly.
Apparently if you want to get access to the raw audio, you need to ask Yale. Why?
The people who did continue to administer shocks were attempting to focus on what they thought was the most important part of the task (pressing the lever), but internally the unconscious effort to habitually dissociate from their own discomfort led them to make more mistakes.
Combine this dissociation with a desire for power or status and you get the world we live in today.