7 ms·

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

227 points by lentoutcry 6mo ago

watwut 6mo ago
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 the learner would fail the test and receive another shock. Basically, being willing to shock other people without stopping was more about violence itself being permitted then about being obedient person. Rule followers followed the protocol until they concluded "nope, this is too much" and stopped mistreating the victim.
- woadwarrior01 6mo ago
  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.html https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-moral-disengagement...
Mordisquitos 6mo ago
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 who went all the way to the maximum voltage. Why was that? Could it be a sign that the disobedient subjects were on average more concentrated on the task at hand (smarter? less stressed? better educated? more conscientious?) than the ultimately obedient ones, and therefore were more likely to realise they were "hurting" the alleged learner and stop? Or could it be that the obedient subjects were more likely to realise there was something fishy going on, suspecting the "learner" wasn't really being shocked, and thus were paying less attention to the learning rules? Or was it, as the article suggests, that the obedient ones may have shut down emotionally under pressure to follow through, and their mistakes are the result of that? Or were the obedient ones more likely to be actual sadists, who were enjoying the shocks so much that they didn't even care if the "learner" didn't hear their question, giving them a greater chance of shocking them again? Unfortunately I think the Milgram experiment has become so entrenched in popular culture that there's absolutely no way it can be properly repeated to explore these questions.
- user2722 6mo ago
  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 the above?
  - arethuza 6mo ago
    On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse
    - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      Wikipedia makes it sound like questionable at best. I'll wait a decade and see if it comes out looking like milk or wine.
  - Spooky23 6mo ago
    Alot of the problem with these “disproven” things is over broad scope or abused in the popular media beyond comprehension. The delayed gratification thing in particular is correlation vs. causation. It was really more about trust. Forcing kids to delay gratification is meaningless or counterproductive.
    - user2722 6mo ago
      Agree. But according to Gemini [for what's worth] the final 1990 Mashmallow's study [since first versions were cautious] did indeed jump to conclusions to point there was a causation to a better later life. The media might have amplified, but the wrong (or misleading) conclusion was already present in the _scientific_ paper.
      - 6mo ago
xeyownt 6mo ago
Without study of the internal motivations, the conclusions of the study are pure conjectures. You are trapped in an experiment and you have the impression that things went too far and you think you can't escape? You rush it. You hear horrible noises? You just pretend you don't hear them. These are all classical mental patterns. There are million ways to explain them.
- carlosjobim 6mo ago
  In what way were they trapped?
  - palata 6mo ago
    I assume they meant "If you feel trapped", and followed by imagining what could happen in such a situation.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
bambax 6mo ago
> 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 this study just a sort filter to triage / order students from most cruel to less cruel?
- newsclues 6mo ago
  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.
  - kakacik 6mo ago
    Nobody can answer that. Abuse can be low intensity, spread across large period of time or intense 1-off event and resulting damage can be similar. Spread across whole lifetimes till the point of experiment. Extremely individual reactions, what makes one tougher breaks another completely and permanently, and everything in between. I'd say everybody experienced some sort and level of abuse, typical school bullies (which were usually also bullied somehow, hence the behavior).
    - card_zero 6mo ago
      Back in the course of human evolution there must at some point have been mammals who were not yet riding on the dysfunctional cycle of violence. That means the natural rate must be non-zero, at least, or else the cycle would have no starting momentum.
  - stavros 6mo ago
    People that have been treated well are more likely to treat other people well. If we remove this cycle of decency, what is the natural rate of humans that will hurt others? The premise is flawed, humans learn from their environment and there's really no way to put a human in a coffin until they're 20 and see what they do then.
palata 6mo ago
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 about how other people think/behave? Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > 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 already know some people are being helped in therapy one way or another, yet it seems to me those might not be "useful" enough, since I don't clearly understand what would be "useful" to you if not those examples.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Psychology "knows" that people don't enter treatment until things are really bad, and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided. Finding treatment that is better than others is the important part and they also know they are not very good at that.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      > and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided I don't know what experience of therapy you've had in the past, but this is typically not how it works. People get better when a treatment is applied that is suitable to them as a person and the context, not sure where you'd get the whole "people get better no matter what treatment is applied", haven't been true in my experience.
skrebbel 6mo ago
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.
- r-w 6mo ago
  I guess evil is even more banal than we thought!
yashasolutions 6mo ago
That's an interesting perspective, and it does expand how we can interpret the Milgram experiment That said the study has been replicated many times since the original, with researchers adjusting different parameters like participant screening, changing the gender balance, or varying the roles (teacher/student, researcher/technician...) Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things. Other experiments have also looked at which factors make this more likely, and for example, diffusing responsibility seems to be one of the most effective ones.
- p-e-w 6mo ago
  > Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things. The pop culture version of what happened in those experiments is “regular people will administer potentially lethal shocks when told to”, and that claim has been refuted experimentally many times over. Contrary to most reports, the original experimenters never told participants that the shocks are supposedly lethal or even dangerous. When participants were actually told that there was a health risk, and that they should ignore it, the vast majority of participants refused to administer the shocks in a later recreation.[1] In other words, the Milgram experiment, as commonly understood, is somewhere between sensationalism and an outright lie. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/3/2/194 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/3/2/194
crazygringo 6mo ago
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 instructions 100% perfectly all the time, and especially not the first time they do something. > Kaposi and Sumeghy interpret these patterns as a complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment. The subjects were not committing violence for the sake of an orderly memory study. With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence. 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.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- Miraltar 6mo ago
  Well, if you're supposed to administrate shocks to teach or test someone's memory, asking the question while they're screaming isn't just about protocol, it does break down the purpose of these shocks. Saying that participants did administrate shocks because they trusted the legitimacy of what they thought they were doing doesn't hold up under these circumstances.
  - crazygringo 6mo ago
    No, because you'd have to show that the participants thought there was a breakdown of the procedure and purpose, and that they continued despite that. If they think the procedure is to read the next question when the previous one has been completed, and they do, even if the other person is screaming, they think they're "following rules". They're not the ones who came up with the procedure. Which is the whole point: the participants were trying to follow rules, even if they made mistakes in following those rules. The idea that there was a total "breakdown" of the rules doesn't seem supported at all.
delis-thumbs-7e 6mo ago
This study is so flawed in so many ways that it doesn’t prove or disprove anything in any way. The most obvious thing is that the assumption that the test subjects did not realise it was fake. It was not controlled in any way and many of the subjects (presumably Yale students and so hardly complete dumb-dumbs) propably thought it was just a lark.
phendrenad2 6mo ago
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 psychopaths are able to stomach it.
- resoluteteeth 6mo ago
  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.
  - watwut 6mo ago
    It says more then that. The "psychopats" were NOT following the rules. The rule followers were not cruel. The act of torturing was not due to the torturer obeying the rules. Instead, torturers broke the rules and created conditions that allowed them more torture.
  - Mordisquitos 6mo ago
    Indeed. Just knowing that the subjects who followed through with the shocks were less likely to obey the rules could be interpreted in many ways, some invalidating the results of the experiment, some just suggesting a mechanistic explanation, and some making the results even more concerning. * Did the subjects who went full voltage stop caring about the "learning" protocol because they realised it was all fake? Then the conclusions of Milgram's experiment are invalid. * Did the subjects who went full voltage make more mistakes because they were more anxious and fearful of the experimenter? Then underlying fear might be a mechanism for blind obedience, and further research would be interesting. * Did the subjects who went full voltage just enjoy electrocuting the dude so much that they stopped caring about asking the questions correctly? Then blind obedience is the least of our worries, widespread sadism is much more concerning.
geon 6mo ago
Is there any information on how many of the participants realized the victim was just acting? Surely it can’t be zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
analog8374 6mo ago
Appearance of rule-following is of primary importance, not actual rule-following. The performance, or signal, or whatever we're calling it. That's the important thing.
animalfarm 6mo ago
This is well-documented in Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It's worth a read, as it also dispels other experiments in human behaviour that have subsequently been difficult to replicate (for a variety of reasons). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind
- lavamantis 6mo ago
  Yep, great book. Also dispels the Lord of the Lies myth that people have taken as gospel.
Intralexical 6mo ago
It should have been rejected from the outset. What Milgram did in his experiments was nothing less than construct an elaborate setup so he could psychologically torture dozens of well-meaning people. The ethical violation was already recognized at the time, and given that, nothing else he claims about method or implications can be trusted.
renewiltord 6mo ago
This isn't an experiment. It's just some idiot running pseudoscience. Predictably the pop science morons have decided this fake 'research' needs more attention than just dismissal.
dlev_pika 6mo ago
> With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence. > The study authors propose that the experimenter played a major, passive role in establishing this dynamic. When the participants broke the rules and skipped steps, the authority figure rarely intervened to correct them or pause the session. By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish. This sounds like looting scenarios to me. ie. When a situation descend into chaos, some people will just surf/leverage that chaos, instead of attempting a return to normalcy, for whatever reason.
sarchertech 6mo ago
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). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately. When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.
- seanw444 6mo ago
  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.
  - joe_the_user 6mo ago
    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).
- janalsncm 6mo ago
  > 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.
jdawg777 6mo ago
It raises the point that if the results are questionable, why not just repeat the experiment? Here is Derren Brown's attempt at repeating the experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq4QtK3j0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq4QtK3j0Y
- sarchertech 6mo ago
  The he actual experiment would never make it through IRB and even if it did it’s impossible to filter out the people who spot a fake.
9864247888754 6mo ago
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jdthedisciple 6mo ago
always thought it seemed flawed
- stasiu 6mo ago
  You should have said something
mikkupikku 6mo ago
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.
- 05 6mo ago
  > 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..
  - mikkupikku 6mo ago
    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.
janalsncm 6mo ago
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?
convexly 6mo ago
So the published narrative survived this long without anyone checking the tapes? Suspect.
jordwest 6mo ago
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.
raylad 6mo ago
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.
- sarchertech 6mo ago
  Gina Perry combed through all the available evidence and interviewed some of the participants and came to the conclusion that fewer than half believed it was real.
- xg15 6mo ago
  Yeah, this is an important point. If the main motivation of the subjects would have been to "play along" correctly, then this could also explain the behavior regarding the shocks and "rule breaking". It could also have diminished their empathy for the "students" even more if they realized those were actors anyway.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

227 points by lentoutcry 6mo ago

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 the learner would fail the test and receive another shock. Basically, being willing to shock other people without stopping was more about violence itself being permitted then about being obedient person. Rule followers followed the protocol until they concluded "nope, this is too much" and stopped mistreating the victim.

woadwarrior01 6mo ago
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.html https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-moral-disengagement...

Mordisquitos 6mo ago

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 who went all the way to the maximum voltage. Why was that? Could it be a sign that the disobedient subjects were on average more concentrated on the task at hand (smarter? less stressed? better educated? more conscientious?) than the ultimately obedient ones, and therefore were more likely to realise they were "hurting" the alleged learner and stop? Or could it be that the obedient subjects were more likely to realise there was something fishy going on, suspecting the "learner" wasn't really being shocked, and thus were paying less attention to the learning rules? Or was it, as the article suggests, that the obedient ones may have shut down emotionally under pressure to follow through, and their mistakes are the result of that? Or were the obedient ones more likely to be actual sadists, who were enjoying the shocks so much that they didn't even care if the "learner" didn't hear their question, giving them a greater chance of shocking them again? Unfortunately I think the Milgram experiment has become so entrenched in popular culture that there's absolutely no way it can be properly repeated to explore these questions.

user2722 6mo ago
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 the above?
- arethuza 6mo ago
  On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse
  - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    Wikipedia makes it sound like questionable at best. I'll wait a decade and see if it comes out looking like milk or wine.
- Spooky23 6mo ago
  Alot of the problem with these “disproven” things is over broad scope or abused in the popular media beyond comprehension. The delayed gratification thing in particular is correlation vs. causation. It was really more about trust. Forcing kids to delay gratification is meaningless or counterproductive.
  - user2722 6mo ago
    Agree. But according to Gemini [for what's worth] the final 1990 Mashmallow's study [since first versions were cautious] did indeed jump to conclusions to point there was a causation to a better later life. The media might have amplified, but the wrong (or misleading) conclusion was already present in the _scientific_ paper.
    - 6mo ago

xeyownt 6mo ago

Without study of the internal motivations, the conclusions of the study are pure conjectures. You are trapped in an experiment and you have the impression that things went too far and you think you can't escape? You rush it. You hear horrible noises? You just pretend you don't hear them. These are all classical mental patterns. There are million ways to explain them.

carlosjobim 6mo ago
In what way were they trapped?
- palata 6mo ago
  I assume they meant "If you feel trapped", and followed by imagining what could happen in such a situation.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

bambax 6mo ago

> 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 this study just a sort filter to triage / order students from most cruel to less cruel?

newsclues 6mo ago
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.
- kakacik 6mo ago
  Nobody can answer that. Abuse can be low intensity, spread across large period of time or intense 1-off event and resulting damage can be similar. Spread across whole lifetimes till the point of experiment. Extremely individual reactions, what makes one tougher breaks another completely and permanently, and everything in between. I'd say everybody experienced some sort and level of abuse, typical school bullies (which were usually also bullied somehow, hence the behavior).
  - card_zero 6mo ago
    Back in the course of human evolution there must at some point have been mammals who were not yet riding on the dysfunctional cycle of violence. That means the natural rate must be non-zero, at least, or else the cycle would have no starting momentum.
- stavros 6mo ago
  People that have been treated well are more likely to treat other people well. If we remove this cycle of decency, what is the natural rate of humans that will hurt others? The premise is flawed, humans learn from their environment and there's really no way to put a human in a coffin until they're 20 and see what they do then.

palata 6mo ago

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 about how other people think/behave? Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?

embedding-shape 6mo ago
> 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 already know some people are being helped in therapy one way or another, yet it seems to me those might not be "useful" enough, since I don't clearly understand what would be "useful" to you if not those examples.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Psychology "knows" that people don't enter treatment until things are really bad, and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided. Finding treatment that is better than others is the important part and they also know they are not very good at that.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided I don't know what experience of therapy you've had in the past, but this is typically not how it works. People get better when a treatment is applied that is suitable to them as a person and the context, not sure where you'd get the whole "people get better no matter what treatment is applied", haven't been true in my experience.

skrebbel 6mo ago

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.

r-w 6mo ago
I guess evil is even more banal than we thought!

yashasolutions 6mo ago

That's an interesting perspective, and it does expand how we can interpret the Milgram experiment That said the study has been replicated many times since the original, with researchers adjusting different parameters like participant screening, changing the gender balance, or varying the roles (teacher/student, researcher/technician...) Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things. Other experiments have also looked at which factors make this more likely, and for example, diffusing responsibility seems to be one of the most effective ones.

p-e-w 6mo ago
> Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things. The pop culture version of what happened in those experiments is “regular people will administer potentially lethal shocks when told to”, and that claim has been refuted experimentally many times over. Contrary to most reports, the original experimenters never told participants that the shocks are supposedly lethal or even dangerous. When participants were actually told that there was a health risk, and that they should ignore it, the vast majority of participants refused to administer the shocks in a later recreation.[1] In other words, the Milgram experiment, as commonly understood, is somewhere between sensationalism and an outright lie. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/3/2/194 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/3/2/194

crazygringo 6mo ago

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 instructions 100% perfectly all the time, and especially not the first time they do something. > Kaposi and Sumeghy interpret these patterns as a complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment. The subjects were not committing violence for the sake of an orderly memory study. With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence. 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.

deleted 6mo ago
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Miraltar 6mo ago
Well, if you're supposed to administrate shocks to teach or test someone's memory, asking the question while they're screaming isn't just about protocol, it does break down the purpose of these shocks. Saying that participants did administrate shocks because they trusted the legitimacy of what they thought they were doing doesn't hold up under these circumstances.
- crazygringo 6mo ago
  No, because you'd have to show that the participants thought there was a breakdown of the procedure and purpose, and that they continued despite that. If they think the procedure is to read the next question when the previous one has been completed, and they do, even if the other person is screaming, they think they're "following rules". They're not the ones who came up with the procedure. Which is the whole point: the participants were trying to follow rules, even if they made mistakes in following those rules. The idea that there was a total "breakdown" of the rules doesn't seem supported at all.

delis-thumbs-7e 6mo ago

This study is so flawed in so many ways that it doesn’t prove or disprove anything in any way. The most obvious thing is that the assumption that the test subjects did not realise it was fake. It was not controlled in any way and many of the subjects (presumably Yale students and so hardly complete dumb-dumbs) propably thought it was just a lark.

phendrenad2 6mo ago

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 psychopaths are able to stomach it.

resoluteteeth 6mo ago
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.
- watwut 6mo ago
  It says more then that. The "psychopats" were NOT following the rules. The rule followers were not cruel. The act of torturing was not due to the torturer obeying the rules. Instead, torturers broke the rules and created conditions that allowed them more torture.
- Mordisquitos 6mo ago
  Indeed. Just knowing that the subjects who followed through with the shocks were less likely to obey the rules could be interpreted in many ways, some invalidating the results of the experiment, some just suggesting a mechanistic explanation, and some making the results even more concerning. * Did the subjects who went full voltage stop caring about the "learning" protocol because they realised it was all fake? Then the conclusions of Milgram's experiment are invalid. * Did the subjects who went full voltage make more mistakes because they were more anxious and fearful of the experimenter? Then underlying fear might be a mechanism for blind obedience, and further research would be interesting. * Did the subjects who went full voltage just enjoy electrocuting the dude so much that they stopped caring about asking the questions correctly? Then blind obedience is the least of our worries, widespread sadism is much more concerning.

geon 6mo ago

Is there any information on how many of the participants realized the victim was just acting? Surely it can’t be zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

analog8374 6mo ago

Appearance of rule-following is of primary importance, not actual rule-following. The performance, or signal, or whatever we're calling it. That's the important thing.

animalfarm 6mo ago

This is well-documented in Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It's worth a read, as it also dispels other experiments in human behaviour that have subsequently been difficult to replicate (for a variety of reasons). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind

lavamantis 6mo ago
Yep, great book. Also dispels the Lord of the Lies myth that people have taken as gospel.

Intralexical 6mo ago

It should have been rejected from the outset. What Milgram did in his experiments was nothing less than construct an elaborate setup so he could psychologically torture dozens of well-meaning people. The ethical violation was already recognized at the time, and given that, nothing else he claims about method or implications can be trusted.

renewiltord 6mo ago

This isn't an experiment. It's just some idiot running pseudoscience. Predictably the pop science morons have decided this fake 'research' needs more attention than just dismissal.

dlev_pika 6mo ago

> With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence. > The study authors propose that the experimenter played a major, passive role in establishing this dynamic. When the participants broke the rules and skipped steps, the authority figure rarely intervened to correct them or pause the session. By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish. This sounds like looting scenarios to me. ie. When a situation descend into chaos, some people will just surf/leverage that chaos, instead of attempting a return to normalcy, for whatever reason.

sarchertech 6mo ago

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). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately. When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.

seanw444 6mo ago
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.
- joe_the_user 6mo ago
  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).
janalsncm 6mo ago
> 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.

jdawg777 6mo ago

It raises the point that if the results are questionable, why not just repeat the experiment? Here is Derren Brown's attempt at repeating the experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq4QtK3j0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq4QtK3j0Y

sarchertech 6mo ago
The he actual experiment would never make it through IRB and even if it did it’s impossible to filter out the people who spot a fake.

9864247888754 6mo ago

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jdthedisciple 6mo ago

always thought it seemed flawed

stasiu 6mo ago
You should have said something

mikkupikku 6mo ago

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.

05 6mo ago
> 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..
- mikkupikku 6mo ago
  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.

janalsncm 6mo ago

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?

convexly 6mo ago

So the published narrative survived this long without anyone checking the tapes? Suspect.

jordwest 6mo ago

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.

raylad 6mo ago

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.

sarchertech 6mo ago
Gina Perry combed through all the available evidence and interviewed some of the participants and came to the conclusion that fewer than half believed it was real.
xg15 6mo ago
Yeah, this is an important point. If the main motivation of the subjects would have been to "play along" correctly, then this could also explain the behavior regarding the shocks and "rule breaking". It could also have diminished their empathy for the "students" even more if they realized those were actors anyway.

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