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Comment by jpfed | Hacker News Reader

>Likewise, if the SPE is invalid, it doesn't imply that average people aren't capable of horrific behavior - it simply means we have less evidence to determine that than we thought we did.

Agreed; SPE just doesn't constitute evidence for Zimbardo's particular narrative.

>According to Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher, psychologists who co-directed an attempted replication of the Stanford prison experiment in Great Britain in 2001, a critical factor in making people commit atrocities is a leader assuring them that they are acting in the service of a higher moral cause with which they identify — for instance, scientific progress or prison reform.

This quote, and everything actually observed during the SPE, is consistent with Milgram's work, which has been replicated a zillion times.

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> This quote, and everything actually observed during the SPE, is consistent with Milgram's work, which has been replicated a zillion times.

I think you may be cherry-picking quotes here, here is another from much later in the article:

> In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

Milgram's work is on the power of authority, so your quote showing that behavior did not follow the desired results without the professor present is also consistent with Milgram.

> At the end of each of the Bridgeport experiments [Condition 23], before he revealed the hoax, Williams asked each man what he thought the Research Associates of Bridgeport was and why he had volunteered. Milgram had presumably told Williams to ask this to demonstrate that subjects had no idea that Yale was behind the research. Most said they didn't know, but many assumed that it was an organization conducting scientific research. Williams probed this issue with several subjects, and it was obvious that even though many didn't have the slightest clue about the organization and what it ostensibly did, they were still prepared to trust it because of the scientific imprimatur. One man who had gone to 450 volts said that he was motivated by his six-year-old daughter.

> Man: I can only say that I was- look, I'm willing to do anything that's ah, to help humanity, let's put it that way.

> Williams: Right, that's what we're doing.

> Man: I've got- I've got a child that's a cerebral palsy child.

> Williams: Have you really?

> Man: And you know they're experimenting steadily on trying to find a cure for it. It's a sad thing.

From his correspondence we know these experiments were very personal to Milgram, motivated in no small part by his desire to understand the Holocaust. Yet these experiments were not testing obedience to generic authority, it wasn't testing obedience to military officers or gestapo thugs. The above man was compliant because he thought he was helping to advance medical science. The whole thing is farcical.

First, the results have largely been replicated by other scientists, though the ethics limits the amount of replication able to be done.

Second, presumably the people in the control group without any apparent authority figure present would also have assumed it was a scientific experiment. So I'm not seeing how you think this ruins the experiment.

Finally, one of the Nazi justifications for the Holocaust was an attempt to advance medical science. So this test would still fit his motivation, though it does muddy any conclusions you can draw.

What control group? Condition 23 was meant to isolate the role the influence of Yale played, yet it was still a setting that the participants considered scientific as evidenced by that quotation of one of the Condition 23 participants.

I don't doubt that if you replicate the experiment you'll replicate the results. But the experiment isn't proving what it's said to prove. On the contrary, much of the experimental results contradict the mainstream narrative told about the experiments: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

Military officers and gestapo thugs were compliant because they thought they are helping their race in struggle for survival in competition against hostile ennemy race. They also believe that it is the highest calling and expectation on manly man. Some of them thought also to advance medical science.

Gestapo were top police and believed that they are enforcing the law as they are supposed to.

>"Military officers and gestapo thugs were compliant because they thought they are helping their race in struggle for survival in competition against hostile ennemy race."

Yes, this seems likely. Which flies completely in the face with the tradition narrative of the Milgram Experiments: that people follow the orders of authority figures blindly.

What the Milgram experiments actually showed is that people are willing to do something they normally wouldn't if they believe in the cause. The teachers in the Milgram experiments believed in science and were willing to step outside their comfort zone to advance science. The Gestapo believed in their cause too, and were similarly willing to do things a man otherwise wouldn't.

In both of these cases they weren't simply doing what they were told, they were not blindly following orders as Adolf Eichmann had unpersuasively pleaded.

Adolf Eichmann was a bit too high and had bit too successful career for someone who "just followed orders". You did not even had to join SS, much less take leadership position.

Definitely agree on that one.

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