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

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

#111

Post by naravara »

laserbeam wrote: post #59
crazygringo wrote: post #38

To be clear, this doesn't seem like it invalidates anything in the original experiment. The "rule-breaking" isn't referring to anything the researchers were doing. It's referring to what the participants were doing. It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow ins…

> It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow instructions 100% perfectly all the time The article quantifies the amount of rulebreaking. The article actually compares rule breaking across participants and notes that those who were better at obeying the instructi…

Yeah one of the take-away interpretations I’ve always heard of it is the implication that the deferral to an authority figure led people to conscientiously proceed with administering fatal shocks. But this additional detail suggests that conscientiousness is actually negatively correlated with following through to the point of ethical compromise and it is, in fact, the less conscientious people who were rushing to just do what was asked of them.

This does suggest that subjects who are bought into and understand the purpose behind what they’re doing, and are attentive to how the specific tasks they’re doing tie into the bigger picture, are more likely to be actively engaging their judgement as they go. And subjects who are just trying to follow the tasks as given to them are sort of washing their hands of the outcomes as long as they’re following the directions (which is, ironically, causing them to fail at following the directions too).

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

#112

Post by anigbrowl »

newsclues wrote: post #12
bambax wrote: post #9

> 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…

People that have been abused are more likely to abuse others. If we remove this cycle of abuse, what is the natural rate of humans that will hurt others? An uncomfortable idea, as victims become perpetrators, it may be best to segregate victims to prevent future abuse and victimization.

I like how you went from a probabilistic assertion in the first sentence to a categorical one in the last. Perhaps you grew up in a fallacious environment.

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

#113

Post by janalsncm »

This seems like something that people would very quickly discover if the data were freely available to listen to. As of now we need to take this study’s authors at their word that the metadata is accurate, and before that we had to take Milgram at his word that his interpretation was accurate.

Apparently if you want to get access to the raw audio, you need to ask Yale. Why?

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

#114

Post by watwut »

r-w wrote: post #107
watwut wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes they are just people - people who are much close to the topic then random commenters on HN.

Frankly, you made up accusation of academics from nothing and without bothering to check what they generally say. You just made it up

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

#115

Post by palata »

embedding-shape wrote: post #14
palata wrote: post #13

I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results". Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think…

> Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field? In order for someone to answer this, I think you need to come up with some sort of definition what "actual", "useful" and "valid" actually means here in this context. Lots of stuff from psychology been successfully applied to treat people in therapy with various issues, but is that "valid" enough for you? Something tells me you alrea…

That's an interesting point, and I think I can explain a bit more how I see it:

I am not entirely convinced that one needs to study psychology at university in order to be a therapist. Actually what I seem to see around me is that different people need different kinds of therapies. Maybe some need to talk to someone with a university degree in "psychology", others just need to talk to someone with empathy. Or someone neutral. Or they need faith. Or sport. Even homeopathy, if it helps (and knowing that the whole concept is bullshit). Whatever helps, helps.

Still anecdotal, but the people I know who studied psychology were not great at "maths". Like it's not the first choice of people who are good with science. And again in my experience, those people have a tendency to not be extremely good at understanding whether or not they can conclude anything from their numbers. Added to the fact that it's very far from "hard science", it doesn't inspire confidence in whatever is claimed to be "scientifically proven".

Then there are the psychologists who make you pass tests for some jobs. I have had that a few times in different circumstances, and it always baffled me how after asking me a few "weird" questions they would feel entitled to tell me "who I am", as if they knew better than I did. Again not inspiring confidence.

So I always had a tendency to say "I think when it's trying to say something about an individual, it's probably bullshit. But if you can make statistics on a group of people, I guess there you can learn things". And then you see that even those famous experiments that were supposed to be exactly like that were bullshit.

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

#116

Post by janalsncm »

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).…

> Interviewing the original participants―many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did―and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram.

Just reading the Amazon summary, I feel like there’s a contradiction. If subjects were just trying to get it over with, yes it invalidates the study but the only troubling conclusion is that the study wasn’t scrutinized more closely.

I also don’t see why they would be “haunted” by what effectively amounts to a chore to get their $20 participation check.

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

#117

Post by palata »

tokai wrote: post #16
palata wrote: post #13

I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results". Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think…

Those two experiments are over 50 years old. Its a bit like dismissing physics because Hubble got his constant wrong. Psychology has a lot of issues, but its also an enormous field. If your frame of reference is half a century out of date you should probably start with some encyclopedia articles.

Well I don't need to start with encyclopedia articles to convince myself that physics is a serious field, do I? Or maths, or chemistry.

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

#118

Post by phendrenad2 »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #58
phendrenad2 wrote: post #51

Milgram gets thrown around as proof that everyone is just a few steps away from being an agent of evil. Finding out that it actually shows that there are psychopaths among us, and most people actually refused (left the experiment), somehow "clicks" and fits with reality a lot better. We see this in historical genocides - not everyone is in on it, and in fact it has to be covered-up internally because only the psychop…

I think you are incorrectly guessing the content of the article based on the title. The article doesn't say that more people refused than was previously known. It just concludes that most people weren't following instructions in a way that would have supported the validity of the supposed memory experiment.

No, I read the article. Maybe you didn't read it carefully enough?

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

#119

Post by palata »

Sharlin wrote: post #21
palata wrote: post #13

I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results". Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think…

I'd think the conclusion you should draw is not that "even the famous experiments were not valid, so nothing in psychology is" but rather "the validity of an experiment does not correlate with how famous it is".

I guess my point is that I don't need to think for long before I find an example justifying why physics is a serious field.

What would be the equivalent of Newton's laws in psychology? Does such a thing exist? Or does the whole field just prove how complicated human beings are by being incapable of proving anything else (which in itself would be an interesting result, don't get me wrong)?

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

#120

Post by palata »

IanCal wrote: post #28
palata wrote: post #13

I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results". Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think…

The results absolutely are interesting - in fact they’re far stronger for the willingness of many to inflict violence than the original description suggested. > While every obedient participant reliably pressed the shock lever, they regularly neglected or ruined the other steps required to justify the shock. Procedural violations here include things like asking the question while the person in the other room was stil…

> in fact they’re far stronger for the willingness of many to inflict violence than the original description suggested.

In a situation where they know that they are in a controlled lab experiment.

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