Obedience to Authority: The Experiments by Stanley Milgram
age-of-the-sage.org
age-of-the-sage.org
The think I took from it was that I am always responsible for anything that results from my actions. So in my career I always tried to consider what work I do, what customers I work for, and what might come from the things I do. In a business environment that is often not easy, most people work from a mindset that anything profitable is good as long as it's not illegal.
This is the harm done by badly designed popularized experiments.
So why isn't the learner calling an end to the experiment - why should this be on the teacher to call it quits? Either the learner is making a fuss, but that's just how they react to a bit of pain (think about how people can squeal getting into a cold bath voluntarily) but they are happy to continue. Alternatively they are being actively coerced into continuing - in which case the correct response for the teacher is what exactly?
Maybe try and jump the supervisor and make a bolt for the door? You are clearly trapped by some kind of sadistic serial killer and you are unlikely to make it out alive.
The learner does repeatedly call for an end to the experiment. For example, here is the script for the learner when the shock supposedly reaches 150 volts: "Ugh! Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out."
See the start of Chapter 7 of Obedience to Authority for more details.
> Maybe try and jump the supervisor and make a bolt for the door?
In the baseline "voice feedback" condition, the learner is strapped into a chair. He can't bolt. I think that the same is true for all other conditions, too.
If the learner is strapped to a chair and being totally ignored then why should the "teacher" assume they themselves have the power to end this experiment?
Milgram was at pains to construct a situation in which there wasn't even an implied threat from the experimenter. When teachers protest that they don't want to continue, the harshest thing that the experimenter says is "You have no choice; you must go on." Milgram wanted to see how obedient people might be when there wasn't even an implied threat of force. (And he found that 65% of subjects were willing to deliver the maximum shock under these conditions.)
The claim made above, by others, seems to be that the experiment involved an implicit threat against the "teacher" that might explain why he followed instructions to deliver electric shocks to the "learner." How is being removed from the experiment an "implied threat" against the "teacher" that would get him to follow instructions? And if it isn't a threat of that sort, how is it relevant to understanding why "teachers" followed instructions?
> the assumption [that is, an implicit premise of the experiment] is that your actions cannot stop the experimenter from inflicting harm without yourself harming the experimenter
That doesn't sound right. The teacher can put a temporary stop to the experiment by refusing to obey -- that is, by refusing to shock the learner. He can put a permanent stop to it by, say, calling the police.
The experiments were performed in a proud university town. What Milgram actually demonstrated is that those people trust scientists and believe in the value of science. In other words, they obeyed commands when those commands seemed to align with their preexisting worldview and ideology.
The inspiration of these experiments was Adolf Eichmann's plea that he was merely following orders. Milgram obstensibly set out to disprove that, but is said to have inadvertently proved Eichmann's plea plausible; if Milgram showed that people do follow orders, then maybe Eichmann's innocence plea was plausible. But we know Eichmann was not simply following orders. There is ample evidence that he was enthusiastic about the Holocaust and went above and beyond what was required of him. Eichmann may have been following orders, but they were orders he was ideologically aligned with. Just like the Milgram subjects were ideologically aligned with the value of science.
Many variations on the Milgram experiment were conducted. When the Experimenter didn't dress like a scientist, compliance was lower. I didn't hear this until years after I was told about the experiments in my undergrad psychology class. When I learned this, I felt deceived. It turns the mainstream conclusion on it's head.
If we were to run a modern experiment more applicable to Eichmann's 'following orders' plea, the Experimenter would be dressed like a cop and the Learner would be a black man. How many people (except the overtly racist) would follow orders in this scenario, when the orders were so flagrantly in violation of their personal values? Virtually none I assert. That's the obvious water is wet answer, while Milgram's answer is the shockingly unintuitive headline grabbing conclusion. Milgram's conclusion asks us to believe there is an Adolf Eichmann lurking inside all of us, waiting for heinous orders to execute. That just doesn't jive with what we actually know about Nazis.
This is maybe the most important detail to me which seems to be overlooked.
Often people fail to recognize that there is such a thing as legitimacy of authority, and that's a real thing. No one of us is an expert in any field, it's hard to make heads or tail of the nuanced issues in all of these arenas. We often have to trust the legitimate authority. Which makes it all that much harder when a) maybe doing some action appeals to a darker aspect of human nature or b) the authorities are corrupt or c) the authority is maligned by some other failures, such as bad information.
No, if we were to do the experiment in modern terms, you would place an actor in the chair and have a professor instruct their student that they are experimenting with correcting racist behavior out of the subject in a humane way. Would a liberal student reject this sort of experiment in 2020?
The Nazis were simply Germans. They were just like you and me. Many of their grandkids and great grandkids are still around. They're not any different.
Humans are dangerous when we start thinking in groups instead of as individuals. When we see ourselves as part of one group but see another group as particularly heinous, we become quite tribal and primitive.
> No, if we were to do the experiment in modern terms, you would place an actor in the chair and have a professor instruct their student that they are experimenting with correcting racist behavior out of the subject in a humane way. Would a liberal student reject this sort of experiment in 2020?
If you think a liberal student of 2020 would follow orders instructing them to torture a racist, but would reject an order that wasn't accompanied by a justification tailored to their ideology, then it sounds like you agree with my take. Given a free choice (e.g. no threat to kill their family if they refuse) people will follow orders if you convince them of the necessity of those orders by appealing to their ideologies and biases, but will refuse orders if the explanations for those orders are incompatible with their ideologies. But this is the 'water is wet' conclusion, not the attention grabbing conclusion Milgram sold to the public.
Yes, humans do follow their biases and those tendencies are exploitable by sociopaths in positions of authority. That's the scary bit, to me, and that's what the experiment shows.
It is not that few people were motivated by fear in Germany. The nazi oppression apparatus was large and violent long before the war. People feared a lot, many of them, pretty much including those who also somewhat agreed with ideology.
Once Hitler got power, the first concentration camps were opened - for political opposition. And they were horrible places. The whole point was to destroy people and intimidate them. There was also large internal security apparatus in place to catch people who said something anti-nazi in random social setting. People reporting what others said and structures to investigate those repots. If someone was bullying a Jew in the street and you would try to help him/her, you would be targeted by literal violence too.
The level of control and pressure was large on non Jewish Germans. You could not have social or sports clubs unaffiliated with party, there was little safe space where you could say what you think. The nazi project took a lot of internal violence and intimidation to happen.
Also, they did their best to indoctrinate kids in schools to their ideology. Growing up generation of soldiers was focus of school system. Nazi ideology also taught empathy as feminine weakness, ruthlessness as virtue. All of that combines into values system where even if you are not watched, you still don't want to show empathy.
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Afaik, keeping up slavery takes considerable level of violence too. It did not happened outside of culture where you teach kids that what is happening to slaves is actually ok. Roman thinkers spend effort to explain why slavery is necessary and good thing, why slaves are naturally slaves.
Massive violent events don't just happen out of nowhere from nothing where originally pure unideological people are suddenly confronted with innocent choice.
I don't recall any experimental variations like this in Milgram's Obedience to Authority. That is, I don't recall an "appeal to the necessity of science" variation or a "direct command" variation. Do you have a page number or some other citation?
Regardless of the scientific value of the experiment, the original documentary might be interesting, because of the experiment's influence apparent in textbooks and pop culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrKCilEhC0
Edit: found paper link: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1972-24881-001
"Nobody else seems to have a problem with it, it must be just you. Help is available for people struggling with mental health issues and change is sometimes uncomfortable, especially for people accustomed to privilege, maybe it's time for some self-care, citizen..."
If his methods are discredited, you can't really conclude anything from it. The fact that he didn't prove one thing doesn't by default prove the opposite, it just means he didn't prove the original thing.
No. Milgram's experiment being discredited means that we should revert back to the "we don't know what average person does".
If you want to conclude that "the average person will revolt against an unjust authority" you will need to make multiple valid experiments to confirm that first. And you should not forget that peoples behavior is strongly influenced by cultures they are in, so you will also need to account for that.
> therefore we should interpret a lack of pervasive popular revolt as a sign of justness and legitimacy of the authorities
Slavery used to be considered just and legitimate. Slavery is not considered just and legitimate. "justness and legitimacy" are not scientific terms.
We see what people do every day. We don’t need experiments to show us. Just pay attention.
"Shock that person, please."
"What? No."
"I forgot to mention, he said he wants to steal your job and sell drugs to your kids"
"Thank you for giving me a chance to shock that person. I'm glad you were here to keep me safe."
Hey loved followers: "Those evil legislators are trying to steal the election. We need to defend our liberty."
History has repeatedly shown that a significant number of people will actively play along and almost nobody will revolt. Otherwise the Nazi war crimes and Holocaust, My Lai, the purges and gulags under Stalin or the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t have happened. All these needed significant participation from a lot of average people. History also shows that no culture (as in religion or a certain part of the world) is immune from that.
Yes, but in all those cases, average people were someone who already went though a lot of indoctrination/propaganda. And average person was also under considerable danger he she/he defects. Average person both believed a lot of ideology and also feared for himself/herself/family. The general leaders of those were powerful players who actively believed their ideologies.
The purges and gulags under Stalin were very from-top organized. They did not just impulsively went into it without planning. Instead, they made sure you have no realistic way to stop anything and that you do believe victims are the bad ones in the first place.
That being said, Holocaust itself happened mostly in occupied territories when the German army had pretty much perfect control over the place. The average person was not much of a player, the military organized and backed it basically.
I'd like to ask you though, who exactly sent in all those millions of complaints about "enemies of the people"?
1.) Purges specifically had quotas for areas. If you refused to cooperate, you and your familly was purged. Specifically purges gave little good choice to participants. You literally had to participate or die.
Wish to stay alive was frequent motivating factor. I will quote myself: average people were someone who already went though a lot of indoctrination/propaganda. And average person was also under considerable danger he she/he defects. Average person both believed a lot of ideology and also feared for himself/herself/family. The general leaders of those were powerful players who actively believed their ideologies.
3.) Your mythical average person outside of system and culture does not exists. "The average person" is living inside totalitarian system where opposing the system meant severe retaliation for years. It also means that if you oppose system, you are isolated and can't organize opposition.
Nazi spend years trying to teach people, average Germans, that empathy toward emnemy is weakness. That manly men fight, are ruthless and kill enemies without empathy. The cruelty you see in WWII is also felt of pre exiasting belief in those Germans that what they do is right.
The people of that time did not shared your values.
p-hacking way back in the day.
there isn't much left to learn from the milgram saga, other than that the consumer public absolutely loves pop-culture science.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170314081558.h...
(And some might have thought that the whole thing was then a waste of their time anyway?)
Those rules are of course another example of obeying authorities :)
If you're referring to the fact that the experimenters had to lie to the subjects and deceive them, not just in one individual statement but over the whole experimental scenario, the reason why that's not a good idea is actual practical, not ethical: constructing a false scenario and properly controlling what the subjects believe in a false scenario is very hard.
For example, consider this post by The Last Psychiatrist:
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/05/first_person_account...
The key point is here:
"He didn't stop because of moral courage; he stopped because he thought he was being played."
In other words, he figured out that it was a false scenario and his refusal was based on that, not on any moral objection to shocking people. But he got counted as a "refusal". How many other people who didn't refuse had some intuitive sense that the whole thing was a setup, thereby dampening whatever moral impulses they had? There's no way of knowing. The fact that it was a setup changes the whole experiment, as compared to one where all of the information being given to the subjects is truthful.