Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

psypost.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 142 posts

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#101

Post by joe_the_user »

seanw444 wrote: post #98
sarchertech wrote: post #91

If you read Gina Perry’s critique, her conclusions is that fewer than half of the participants thought it was real. These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average, and the study didn’t do a very convincing job make it seem believable from what I’ve read. When I took psychology in college I had to submit to random experiments to as part of my grade (there were alternatives but the experiments were easier).…

That's pretty fun that your teachers did that. I wish teachers attempted to immerse students in the things they're teaching about more often, rather than just reading about it in abstract through a textbook or whatever.

I had a Junior High School teacher who did a variety of immersion lessons. The problem was even a small deviation from the real world structure turns the exercise into a pretty simple game. Essentially, the results are too complex and muddy to extract overall lesson.

And social science/history/economics is about learning the standard lessons of the field (even if those lessons are themselves simplistic compared to the real world, they are a baseline of common knowledge).

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#102

Post by joe_the_user »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #3

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…

The reason you have psychology experiments with controls and parameters is that extracting definite conclusions from the simple observation of human behavior is extremely difficult given the wide variety of individuals, groups and cultures.

Once you have an experiment that degenerates into just an event, a situation where the controls have failed, you come up with many potential conclusions but you've lost any science-specific-conclusion to the observations and you may as well look any series of events.

That said, I think experimental psychology just generally fails to establish enough controls to merit the scientific quality it aspires to.

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#103

Post by joe_the_user »

user2722 wrote: post #4
Mordisquitos wrote: post #3

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…

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 th…

I don't think experimental psychology ever validated those extremely simplistic conclusions. I'd rather these simplistic conclusions are a "folk summary"/mythical-version of a few experiments and they come from already existing cultural tropes, cultural tropes that were simplified and made more cruel and ruthless by various self-marketing consultants.

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#105

Post by mikkupikku »

What they teach undergrads about the experiment: People blindly follow orders. If the Nazis ordered you to commit atrocities, you probably would!

What the experiment actually showed: People follow orders when the orders are justified within a persuasive ideological context, e.g. you value science and the scientific researcher is telling you to proceed for the sake of science.

In the first, people who follow the orders of Nazis are not necessarily ideologically aligned with the Nazis, they might just be in a brainless order-following trance. But this isn't real, and in reality the people who were "just following orders" were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly.

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#106

Post by r-w »

wredcoll wrote: post #77
d-us-vb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A direct conclusion. The insight I'll draw from that is that academia gives voice to the results the current zeitgeist finds interesting and believable without properly verifying the evidence. See also the replication crisis.

I don't think academia runs fox news and cnn but I'll withhold judgement

s/voice/authority/

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#107

Post by r-w »

watwut wrote: post #66
d-us-vb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A direct conclusion. The insight I'll draw from that is that academia gives voice to the results the current zeitgeist finds interesting and believable without properly verifying the evidence. See also the replication crisis.

Famous experiments are not chosen by academia. They are chosen by non academics. What you usually find is academics being much more reserved and more critical of these then journalists, bloggers or random commenters on HN.

I don't know about "much more reserved"... Citation needed. In the absence of evidence otherwise I assume academics are just people.

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#108

Post by 05 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #105

What they teach undergrads about the experiment: People blindly follow orders. If the Nazis ordered you to commit atrocities, you probably would! What the experiment actually showed: People follow orders when the orders are justified within a persuasive ideological context, e.g. you value science and the scientific researcher is telling you to proceed for the sake of science. In the first, people who follow the order…

> were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly.

With good enough propaganda machine, any percentage of people would end up 'ideologically committed to the cause' but I don't think they should necessarily 'be judged accordingly' regardless of the larger context..

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#109

Post by mikkupikku »

05 wrote: post #108
mikkupikku wrote: post #105

What they teach undergrads about the experiment: People blindly follow orders. If the Nazis ordered you to commit atrocities, you probably would! What the experiment actually showed: People follow orders when the orders are justified within a persuasive ideological context, e.g. you value science and the scientific researcher is telling you to proceed for the sake of science. In the first, people who follow the order…

> were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly. With good enough propaganda machine, any percentage of people would end up 'ideologically committed to the cause' but I don't think they should necessarily 'be judged accordingly' regardless of the larger context..

The experiment was done in the context of Adolf Eichmann arguing at his trial that he was not a Nazi, never was, and was merely following orders. This was of course not even remotely true. If the argument was instead "I only became a Nazi because of their propaganda", that might be plausible but falling for propaganda doesn't make you less culpable for atrocities which you committed willingly.

The version of the Milgram experiment taught to undergrads asks people to believe that you'll follow orders you would ordinarily consider abhorrent simply because you were commanded. But there's basically no evidence for that. People follow orders if those orders are justified in a way that seems persuasive. Nobody ever doubted that Nazis persuaded people to join them. That's not a surprising or even remotely novel finding.

Re: Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

#110

Post by r-w »

skrebbel wrote: post #18

I wonder what percentage of "obedient" teachers saw through the facade, realized that the learner wasn't a very good actor, and was just having a good time playing along with what must've seemed like some psychology professor's weird pain kink.

I guess evil is even more banal than we thought!
Post reply on HN