Reply With QuoteI'm sure that Michael Lush thought much the same thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8571929.stm
This got me thinking a little.
Knowing that a TV show wouldn't risk deliberately killing a contestant, and knowing how hard it would be for safety consultants to be sure of the safety of a decent electric shock, if I was on a game show and there was a worthwhile reward offered for pressing a button that was claimed to be wired to shock someone, wouldn't it be a rational choice to press the button whether or not I was aware of the Milgram experiment?
Even at a subconscious level, many people might quite rightly assume that a TV company would be limited in what it could do, possibly rather more limited than scientists were perceived as being in the 60s.
In a way, greater compliance from the subjects could be interpreted not as them being browbeaten into doing something, or abdicating moral responsibility to an authority figure on the show, but more to assuming that there would be some limit to how far things could go that would come from an external source - that the show didn't have the ability to get away with doing anything really bad, and therefore that automatically put a limit on how bad the results of a subject's actions could be.
I'm sure that Michael Lush thought much the same thing.
Well, if people will use twistlocks...Originally Posted by Matt
Personally, I reckon if you can't tie directly into a primary anchor, it's hard to beat a good old steel Maillon Rapide, (especially if nipped up a little with a spanner), or at least reversed parallel screwgate krabs.
Sometimes it is scary when TV shows get climbers to do their ropework, as if every climber (or even the average climber automatically knows what to do.
I remember one of the Extreme Archeology programmes that made me wince and laugh in equal measure., but even then, the laughing was made easier by the knowledge that if someone had actually died, I'd have already found out about it and the programme probably wouldn't have been aired.
We had the Milgram experiment on this forum before and one of our esteemed members was very skeptical about its validity. I can't remember who it was, perhaps I'll have a search back, or someone may remember.
So instead of the BBC getting an expert psychologist to comment, they get Christine Hamilton. No comment.
Was it me?
This is one of the main criticisms of the original experiment as well. The problem is that the original conclusions rely on the assumption that the subjects really believed they were harming the actors. However, it seems likely that a chain of thought similar to that you outline above would have been present, at least to some extent.
That's not to say the experiment is not valid at all. There have been plenty of more recent studies that confirm ordinary people really can end up doing (or at least thinking they're doing, which amounts to the same thing morally) some pretty horrible things. But it also seems that the conclusions drawn at the time from the original experiment were probably rather stronger than justified.
The TV show faces the same problems, only far more so. No-one could seriously believe that a show would deliberately risk killing someone. Sure accidents happen, but that's very different from deliberately setting up something like this. There's also the problem that experiments like this can easily invalidate their own replications - if people have heard of the original experiment, their actions in a later one will be influenced by that.
The results could be seen as confirming that. Where the Milgram experiment had 60% or so taking the shock to the highest level, the TV show had 80%. But where the person in charge is quoted as saying this shows TV makes things even worse, I think it seems more likely that people simply aren't inclined to believe everything that happens on TV.
I do recognise the criticism of the experiment.
Yet if the subjects are simply choosing to believe that they're not really doing the harm that it appears they're doing isn't that just another way of abdicating responsibility for their actions.
There are differences between these two possibilities.
In one case the subject may be thinking that their actions are harming a person but denying their own responsibility for those actions in favour of placing that burden on an authority figure.
In the other scenario the subject may see their actions harming a person but is denying that this is the reality of the situation. Once more the authority figure is presumed to be responsible for ensuring the apparent victims' safety.
The differences between these both are very important but the similarities don't entirely disappear.
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