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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

#121

Post by pixl97 »

naravara wrote: post #111
laserbeam wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

>And subjects who are just trying to follow the tasks as given to them are sort of washing their hands of the outcomes

Hence why large organizations commonly compartmentalize things to the point that people don't realize they are working on an orphan crushing machine.

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

#122

Post by superxpro12 »

pixl97 wrote: post #121
naravara wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

>And subjects who are just trying to follow the tasks as given to them are sort of washing their hands of the outcomes Hence why large organizations commonly compartmentalize things to the point that people don't realize they are working on an orphan crushing machine.

See also: Those episodes in Star Wars Andor when they were in the prison colony working on the *SPOILER ALERT* death star components

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

#123

Post by woadwarrior01 »

watwut wrote: post #2

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…

Yeah, this reminiscent of Bandura's moral disengagement work. The differentiating factor isn't "do you follow authority?" but "do you maintain attentiveness to the consequences of your own actions."

The refusers likely weren't necessarily more heroic or principled in some deep character sense. They were just still paying attention.

https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-moral-disengagement...

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

#125

Post by Sharlin »

palata wrote: post #119
Sharlin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Physics is an exact, quantitative, natural science. Psychology is neither exact, quantitative (usually), nor a natural science. They are not comparable. But like many other fields of study that are not hard sciences, psychology can still be useful and valuable. (Note the "can". Given the replication crisis, how much of psychology actually is I cannot say.)

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

#126

Post by palata »

Sharlin wrote: post #125
palata wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Physics is an exact, quantitative, natural science. Psychology is neither exact, quantitative (usually), nor a natural science. They are not comparable. But like many other fields of study that are not hard sciences, psychology can still be useful and valuable. (Note the "can". Given the replication crisis, how much of psychology actually is I cannot say.)

Sure, I agree with that.

But do we have an example of something that is provably valuable? I am genuinely interested: after reading this article, I realised that there is nothing I can attribute to psychology off the top of my head.

I mean, Milgram used to be one, but well...

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

#127

Post by jordwest »

My hypothesis: we are social creatures and have an innate instinct not to hurt others, but we’ve been trained to various degrees (through upbringing/trauma/school/work) to disassociate from the pain of hurting others.

The people who did continue to administer shocks were attempting to focus on what they thought was the most important part of the task (pressing the lever), but internally the unconscious effort to habitually dissociate from their own discomfort led them to make more mistakes.

Combine this dissociation with a desire for power or status and you get the world we live in today.

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

#128

Post by xg15 »

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…

> This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.

I found the idea pretty reasonable: Yes, the "scientific environment" was fake, but the "teachers" (i.e. actual subjects) didn't know that, so it should have appeared real to them.

The study tried to analyze the events strictly from the subjects' POV.

The point was that those mistakes would have broken the (fictional) experimental setup, and in a way that was obvious for the subjects too.

If they were really delivering the shocks only because "they were following procedure", then it's strange that they did so many mistakes that in fact broke the procedure. (and resulted in an even more aggressive shock regime than the procedure would demand)

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

#129

Post by raylad »

One question is whether the participants really believed they were giving shocks to the "learners".

In college I participated in a number of psychological studies that were similarly deceptive, where one of the other participants was obviously (to me) an actor, or, sometimes, a pre-recorded video.

At least one of the studies I participated in was quite like the Milgram study described in the article, where I was supposed to punish another participant. It was very obvious to me that this wasn't really happening, so I randomly punished or didn't punish them, and then afterwards told the researcher that I knew it was all fake.

I think many or most other people who saw through the deception probably wouldn't have let the researcher know, because it seemed somehow disrepectful to tell him.

No idea if he used my results or, as he should have done, discarded them.

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

#130

Post by sarchertech »

janalsncm wrote: post #116
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 inva…

She never said that none of the participants believed it was real.
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