I'm not sure if this is the correct forum for this. Earlier today I was reading about the Milgram experiments in the early 1960's. I was surprised at the results, though I believe the experiments have been repeated with very similar results. I also realise there were questions about the ethics of these experiments.
Is there any reason to think the results of similar researches would be any different today, over 40 years on, or was it something to do with the times - after the Eichmann trial?
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psych...xperiment.html
I don't think there would be any difference at all but, as you point out the ethics are a bit questionable and so I doubt if the same study could be repeated these days.
The emphasis always seems to be on those who followed the instructions - the obedient majority. What interests me are those few who refused, what made them different, I wonder?
It's still pretty much the same results now as it was then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w
It's amazing how readily we just believe, and even obey people, in authority. Politicians use this trick all the time. Everyone 'knows' that they are 'economical with the truth' and yet we still generally choose to believe them, particularly when they play on our prejudices.
This is where skeptics are better equiped than others. There is a popular notion that people in authority are better informed than others, but (a) this is by no means always true and (b) there is no reason to assume they have any better judgment to interpret what information they have, than the rest of us. Indeed, the dogged way that political parties pursue some policies, in the face of contradictory evidence, shows they may be seriously lacking in sound judgment. It is up to skeptics to query what is said by them, even if it sounds reasonable, because there is no reason to think that people in authority are any wiser than the rest of us.
The big problem with these experiments is that they may not actually mean anything at all. The trouble is, people aren't as stupid as they are assumed to be in the experiments. For example, one of them involved people being told to electrocute another person, without knowing that they were just an actor and not being electrocuted at all. The surprise is supposed to be that the majority of people happily turn the dial up to a level that they are told will cause permanent damage or death. However, this is very obviously not the case. No experiment would ever actually do this for real. Therefore, the results are completely meaningless since the participants obviously knew that it was not for real.
Other experiments have similar problems. The prison one is one of the more worrying ones, but it still doesn't have a solid link to reality. Yes, it's worrying that apparently normal people went so far into the prisoner/abusive warden roles that the experiment had to be cancelled, but the fact is that everyone involved knew it wasn't actually real. Would they have gone as far if they didn't know they were part of a tightly controlled experiment? It's an interesting question, but one we have no way of knowing the answer to.
The big problem is that the exeriments that were done are ethically questionable enough that they are unlikely to be repeated. However, the experiments that would actually need to be done go much futher again. In order to come to any real conclusion you would need some kind of Truman Show setup where the people involved don't know that they are involved in an experiment. Obviously this will never be done, so we are unlikely to ever really know the answers here.
It is interesting to observe how, in management role playing games, even for a few hours, people will exhibit the behaviour and personality traits they believe their pretend 'job' entails. They can get every bit as involved as if it were their real job.
If you tell someone to play a salesman or a manager or a teacher, they will quickly behave differently to their normal personalty, despite having no previous experience. Maybe it comes from observing others at work, or watching TV, but people seem to 'become' a role quite easily, once it is expected of them in a social situation.
Cuddles - you make some very interesting arguments and I have to say I had not thought of them before. It goes to show - come to the skeptics forum and learn something every day!
Now a question. How could the experiment be designed so that it was better but still ethical? Could it be done? ??? It is not uncommon for experiments of this type to be set up so participants think they are doing one experiment but in fact are doing another. This is not my area but it is intriguing.
CuddlesThe surprise is supposed to be that the majority of people happily turn the dial up to a level that they are told will cause permanent damage or death. However, this is very obviously not the case. No experiment would ever actually do this for real. Therefore, the results are completely meaningless since the participants obviously knew that it was not for real.
Could you explain exactly why?
Regards
Median
Answering for Cuddles....Originally Posted by median
It would be hard to get any funding or ethical support, and rightly so, for an experiment that involved (for real) "and if you press this button the person over there dies"
True, but the experiment needs to be seen in a historical context.It would be hard to get any funding or ethical support, and rightly so, for an experiment that involved (for real) "and if you press this button the person over there dies"
I agree there may be difficulty in repeating an experiment such as Milgram's (in terms of ethics and perhaps participant incredulity) but, at the time, it is questionable that subjects would have suspected any deception.
Yes, they would know that they were in an experiment but one ostensibly about learning. The punishment regime would have been largely peripheral to this.
As for the Zimabardo experiment, well yes, I see Cuddles' point.....
http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/pagepub/milgram.htm
I have often posted this but not here I think. I find it quite a clear discussion of the problems. I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this kind of thing, I confess. The design of a lot of "social science" research is questionable and this is freely recognised in the field: it is intrinsically difficult to do this kind of experiment because we do not know how many and which variables are relevant and we cannot always control for them even if we do. That in itself is not fatal, though research in the field does suffer rather more from simplistic reporting even than hard science (which also has a problem with that)
More importantly the social scientist is often no better equipped to interpret his results than anybody else, and that is a real problem. I sometimes find that discussions in papers, which are quite clearly based on assumptions and premises which are common to people as people, are presented as valid: it is argued that people in the field are the only people who can say what the results mean and the rest of us should butt out. That is ridiculous. If they have evidence from a series of findings which support the conclusions, then they can easily answer any criticism by pointing to it: but they do not. Or rather, some of their supporters do not. They say, rather, that the lay person has no right to an opinion. This does this kind of thing more damage than they realise, and it bothers me. It is mere argument from authority, and is fallacious here as elsewhere. That is not to say that there are not findings which are genuine and are also counter intuitive: but such findings are extraordinary and they need extraordinary evidence. It is not possible to remove culture and politics and all sorts of other things from decisions about what is researched and what is made of results such as these. The conclusions should be very robustly challenged for this reason
As Orwell said " There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them"
Last edited by Fiona; 22nd June 2008 at 12:16 PM.
Yes, ethics back then were seen a bit differently. However, we're not talking about some small electric shocks here, we're talking about torturing people to death. Even in the '50s and '60s, that's really not the sort of thing people would experiment with, and certainly not the sort of thing they'd get ordinary members of the public involved with. Possibly "never" was a bit strong, but even if participants considered such experiments possible, there must have been at least the suspicion that it was not real.
In any case, this is really just highlighting the more general point that there was no blinding or controls, and I'm not even sure how they would be possible. Even if the case is not as clear cut as I said before, the lack of adequate controls raises serious questions about the validity of any experiment.
Edit: Comic sans? Isn't that against the Geneva convention or something?
I do agree with Cuddles. We might debate the extent to which the participants may or may not have suspected that the experiment was not real, but I don't think anyone could deny that the study must have had a bias just based upon the possibility. As I said before on this post, I had not thought of this before but now it has been pointed out, it is a question that begs an answer.
The problem of ecological validity (i.e. whether the results represent real-life) is an issue of the "scientific method" as a whole. The "quantification" of data arguablly removes the "fuller-picture" in order to perform a statistical analysis of the data, for example in Milgram's experiment, I believe that the inferences as to why participants would readily shock the confederate were made afterwards - participants. I think the interesting thing that is often ignored about the Milgram experiment is that many people wished to stop, but the experimenter would respond with statements such as "The experiment requires that you continue", effectively removing the option of stopping.
I think that the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) has a little more ecological validity than Milgram's experiment. From reading Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect, I got the impression that at every possible avenue, routes were taken to ensure that the experiment was "as real" as possible - even as far as getting the local police department to arrest the "inmates". This perhaps explains why participants were so willing to accept their roles. It would be difficult to dispute the creativity of the "guards" to psychologically abuse the "inmates".
It was interesting that in an experiment designed to recreate the experiment, filmed for BBC as The Experiment, the "inmates" revolted and the "guards" did not conform to their roles so readily. However, unlike the SPE, The Experiment was very clearly just that - routine monitering by clinical psychologists and video diaries did not just permeate the wall between experiment and "accepted-reality", it destroyed it - and this is exactly the same criticism that Zimbardo levelled at it.
Obedience or deviance is not a pathological or dispositional charateristic per se, it is very much influenced by situational elements. For example, would the participants in the Milgram experiment still have shocked the confederate if they could choose that as a punishment, rather than have it as the required response to an incorrect answer? Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on which way one will look at it) research ethics greatly limits what can be researched these days.
True. I Dont like my native language much, but the other day, a respected local writer said our language is the most beautiful in the world, and I had to fight hard with my mind not to be brainwashed.
Still, i always heard the Brits distrust authority, thats why they never had dictators.
Or am I wrong, in view of the earlier posts?
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks