You must log in or register to comment.
The Milligram experiment is almost as big a humbug as the Stanford prison experiment.
When the study was run without a “scientist”, but instead a policeman or military officer, the participants who went full voltage dropped from 90+% compliance to 90+% refusal. This completely contradicts the supposed “findings” that people uncritically obey authority.
After the war, a whole cottage industry of psychologists and philosophers tried to answer why it was that ordinary Germans could participate in horror. Simple, but wrong explanations like “humans obey authority uncritically” were in high demand.
Not relevant to the study, more relevant to your point: humans begrudgingly obey authority when threatened.
“Nervous? You only have 75 more to go.”
…no idea of what the ell this meme is about…am I in danger (of severe shock)?
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
But to actually answer, Stanley Milgram was a psychologist who wanted to know about obedience to authority. He was interested in this after the Nuremberg trials where a common justification for the crimes committed was “I was just following orders.”
He set up an experiment where participants had to administer electric shocks to another participant if they made an incorrect answer in a learning task. Each time they gave a shock the next one would be increased up until the final level of “Danger: Severe Shock”. A majority of people complied in giving this essentially lethal shock to a stranger.
In reality the shocks weren’t real, the participant receiving them was in another room and was an actor hired for the experiment. Still many believed they had actually hurt someone.
Edit: forgot the take home message. A lot of the participants didn’t want to proceed with harming the other participant. When they expressed concern and wanted to stop, the experimenter, seated in the room with them, would tell them things such as “the experiment requires that you continue.” This was the main point, that having someone in a position of authority (here the experimenter) telling someone to do harm to another was “enough” for many to continue.
Wikipedia has a solid write up on it.
Fun fact, there’s limited replication studies because it was unethical and caused participants a lot of distress. Some IRBs will permit a replication up to a much less severe supposed voltage (150 instead of 450) and the actor pretending to be shocked doesn’t have a full on breakdown into collapse (read the actor transcript, around 330 iirc, they bang on the wall begging to have the experiment stop).
Other fun fact, obedience isn’t universal. The least obedient group as far as I remember were female Australians at only 16% participation rate. There is a much higher rate for folks living in authoritarian states, though.
Much higher rate in authoritarian states
I guess US marks high in obedience, then? Considering current administration >.>
Depends on who ya sample, haha. Obedience has a lot of factors, and yes, the Trump voters share a lot of those traits, like authortarian thinking and black and white morality; but also not in some regards (agreeableness, for instance, is likely to confirm but that can easily define neolibs too).
Social intelligence, though, less likely as well as self-monitoring and a few other things that I’ll need to check my notes on that I don’t remember off hand. It’s pretty intuitive, you don’t shock people if you have a traits that make you question your actions and would ultimately regret it.
Third fun fact for you, obedience research came out of WW2, and Milgrim in particular was trying to understand why people would follow Nazi orders. Weird how history repeats itself, huh?
Sounds like the Milgram experiment. The gist is that participants were willing to administer ever-increasing shocks to another person up to lethal levels because an authority figure told them to.
I remember, Sammy Jankis!
Which is the opposite of what they should have been doing. The shock would actually re-enforce a memory. So, they should have been shocking correct answers. Because, when we do something and then get hurt, we remember the thing that hurt us.
You know it wasn’t actually a study on memory?
