> 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?
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.
My guess is that it is the pressure to conform working in multiple ways.
The reading of questions while the subject was screaming is acting in a way that seems like that it is a performative action of conforming to the pattern and that the failure of the pattern is caused by the answerer failing to conform to the pattern. That makes the shocks a punishment for failing to conform. The questioner has a facade of doing the right thing by going through the motions, even though they are breaking the rules by doing so, because if the other party were compliant that rule wouldn't have been broken. That the shocks were painful would feel appropriate to those who had a strong sense that nonconformity should be punished. It is less them following the rules and more them assuming the intent of the rules and permitting abuse because the intent was not their decision. It might make them less willing participants to the abuse and more 'not my problem' active participants.
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.
I don't think the distinction is sadists vs non-sadists. I don't think you can get that many sadists even if your test subjects are drawn from a pool of psych students. (note, for those unfamiliar with the dynamics of the experiment: "test subjects" are the ones delivering the shocks; the people being shocked were plants)
What I think might have happened is the knowledge that they (thought they) were shocking people and causing pain, caused stress, which caused them to stop adhering to the protocol as carefully. I thought I saw somewhere in commentary about the experiment, or maybe it was in the book about it, that many of the test subjects who went through to the end expressed resentment/anger at the faux learners. It makes sense that stress and projected anger would result in a breakdown of the protocol except in cases of very conscientious subjects.
There's also a good chance some of them suspected the setup was fake. They were recruited as part of a psych experiment after all. I think that objection has been raised plenty of times, in those experiments and many others, but there's no easy way to control for it. From the test subject's perspective, why take more time to strictly adhere to the protocol if the fake learner is hamming it up, screaming and yelling and interfering?
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.
> 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?
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.
It really calls into questions the conclusions drawn from the last 50 years. Here's the ones disproven I remember:
* kids grow to be rich because they accept delayed gratification
* alpha males are the leader of the pack and all other males are useless
* people accept violence if there is a higher authority which justifies it with a reason
How many people suffered or delivered suffering because of their beliefs in the above?
On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse
My guess is that it is the pressure to conform working in multiple ways.
The reading of questions while the subject was screaming is acting in a way that seems like that it is a performative action of conforming to the pattern and that the failure of the pattern is caused by the answerer failing to conform to the pattern. That makes the shocks a punishment for failing to conform. The questioner has a facade of doing the right thing by going through the motions, even though they are breaking the rules by doing so, because if the other party were compliant that rule wouldn't have been broken. That the shocks were painful would feel appropriate to those who had a strong sense that nonconformity should be punished. It is less them following the rules and more them assuming the intent of the rules and permitting abuse because the intent was not their decision. It might make them less willing participants to the abuse and more 'not my problem' active participants.
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.
In what way were they trapped?
I don't think the distinction is sadists vs non-sadists. I don't think you can get that many sadists even if your test subjects are drawn from a pool of psych students. (note, for those unfamiliar with the dynamics of the experiment: "test subjects" are the ones delivering the shocks; the people being shocked were plants)
What I think might have happened is the knowledge that they (thought they) were shocking people and causing pain, caused stress, which caused them to stop adhering to the protocol as carefully. I thought I saw somewhere in commentary about the experiment, or maybe it was in the book about it, that many of the test subjects who went through to the end expressed resentment/anger at the faux learners. It makes sense that stress and projected anger would result in a breakdown of the protocol except in cases of very conscientious subjects.
There's also a good chance some of them suspected the setup was fake. They were recruited as part of a psych experiment after all. I think that objection has been raised plenty of times, in those experiments and many others, but there's no easy way to control for it. From the test subject's perspective, why take more time to strictly adhere to the protocol if the fake learner is hamming it up, screaming and yelling and interfering?
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.