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In fact, behavior in the circumstances posed in this thread says nothing about someone's orientation or lack of orientation

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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl

This mother's still freaking out about the result of the corrobation between Santa Clara University and Prime Time and the strange hyper-real revival of a sad episode in the history of social science.  Apparantly we haven't learned much about ethics in the 40 odd years since Milgram. 

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ORIGINAL: HollyS

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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl

This mother's still freaking out about the result of the corrobation between Santa Clara University and Prime Time and the strange hyper-real revival of a sad episode in the history of social science.  Apparantly we haven't learned much about ethics in the 40 odd years since Milgram. 

Actually we've learned a hell of a lot about ethics since Milgram.  Many of the changes to informed consent and the limits of subject participation came directly from the Milgram and Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Simulation) experiments.  The Milgram experiments (the obedience series was a group of 20) taught us an enormous amount about the human condition -- especially how far most people deviate from their stated expected behavior when faced with the tiniest bit of encouragement in another direction. 

In order to show that his obedience experiments discovered something we didn't know before, Milgram used to present to many different groups.  During his speech, he'd describe one of his standard experiments and then ask the participants to predict "how other people would perform." Milgram's reports show that all of the groups vastly underestimated the actual percentage of people who were fully obedient.  Interestingly enough, it was psychatrists who would predict that "about one subject in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board." How wrong they were.

Several months after the original experiments, Milgram sent out questionaires to the participants asking them to think back on the experience.  One question asked how "glad" or "sorry" they were to have been in the experiments, using a 5-point scale.  The percentage of test subjects who answered "sorry" or "very sorry" was about 1.5%.  This, even from the people who were extremely distressed during post-experiment debriefings.

Milgram showed us that 2/3 of the general population will shock another person, even to dangerous levels, with little to no coercion.  This happened in direct contradiction to what people said they would do when queried in advance. The problem isn't Milgram's experiment -- it's that culturally we keep forgetting the implications and are routinely surprised when "I was just following orders" is used as a defense against indefensible acts.

~Holly

*edited to appease the typo gremlins*

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ORIGINAL: HollyS

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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl

This mother's still freaking out about the result of the corrobation between Santa Clara University and Prime Time and the strange hyper-real revival of a sad episode in the history of social science.  Apparantly we haven't learned much about ethics in the 40 odd years since Milgram. 

Actually we've learned a hell of a lot about ethics since Milgram.  Many of the changes to informed consent and the limits of subject participation came directly from the Milgram and Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Simulation) experiments.  The Milgram experiments (the obedience series was a group of 20) taught us an enormous amount about the human condition -- especially how far most people deviate from their stated expected behavior when faced with the tiniest bit of encouragement in another direction.

From what I've seen, the Institutional Reviews are often treated as bureacratic inconviences and not as an occasion for ethical reflection.   Researchers comply with the protocols because they have to in order for their work to be considered respectable and keep their job and not because they have necessarily reflected on the origins of those protocols and why they were put into place.  In other words, they are passively complying with an external authority, something I find to be rather ironic.

In the middle of the 20th century, the authority of  "science" and "expertise" was at it's height.  I doubt that today we can appreciate how compelling that authority was.  So, to
label the directives of someone wearing a white lab coat  "the tiniest encouragement in another direction" is to risk falling into the trap of projecting our own  historically specific assumptions onto another era.   I wonder if the results of the experiment would have been the same if, instead of the orders being given by someone in a white lab coat, they were given by a child or someone dressed in a clown suit.   (I don't know what kind of controls were in place during the original experiment.)

In order to show that his obedience experiments discovered something we didn't know before,

Well, given the fact that there are an infintite number of examples where orders are given with the expectation that they will be followed, even before Milgram experiments, I'm sure the idea that alot of people are "obedient" wasn't that novel.  Historically, I think the more novel idea is that people should resist authority.  I'm not saying its a bad idea, I just think its a precarious one.

Interestingly enough, it was psychatrists who would predict that "about one subject in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board." How wrong they were.

All this says to me is that psychiatrists at the time were insensitive to their own power/authority and that they did not quite understand the extent to which the population had internalized that authority.

Milgram showed us that 2/3 of the general population will shock another person, even to dangerous levels, with little to no coercion.  This happened in direct contradiction to what people said they would do when queried in advance.

I think its important not to generalize too much beyond what can actually be learned from the experiment itself.  All Millgrams experiment showed is that people will shock others under specific controlled conditions.  We can speculate about what that means for the general population, and whether they are likely to go around, willy nilly shocking people, but that's not the same as knowing for sure that "2/3ds of the general population will shock another person, even to dangerous levels, with little to no coecion." 

The problem isn't Milgram's experiment -- it's that culturally we keep forgetting the implications and are routinely surprised when "I was just following orders" is used as a defense against indefensible acts.

~Holly

*edited to appease the typo gremlins*

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ORIGINAL: Noah

Thanks Holly. This reminds us of the greatest reporter of Nuremburg, Hannah Arendt, and her observation of "the banality of evil."

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I don't think Milgram's experiments, or any other experiments, can teach us one single iota about ethics, although I think Milgram taught us some important psychology.

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Gypsygirl's question still needs answering though, in a way that your post only highlights, I think. Having been presented with all this by Milgram, just as you say, how much can we as a culture claim to have internalized the insights he provided?

• Question the authority's legitimacy. We often give too wide a berth to people who project a commanding presence, either by their demeanor or by their mode of dress and follow their orders even in contexts irrelevant to their authority. For example, one study found that wearing a fireman's uniform significantly increased a person's persuasive powers to get a passerby to give change to another person so he could feed a parking meter.
  
• When instructed to carry out an act you find abhorrent, even by a legitimate authority, stop and ask yourself: "Is this something I would do on my own initiative?" The answer may well be "No," because, according to Milgram, moral considerations play a role in acts carried out under one's own steam, but not when they emanate from an authority's commands.
• Don't even start to comply with commands you feel even slightly uneasy about. Acquiescence to the commands of an authority that are only mildly objectionable is often, as in Milgram's experiments, the beginning of a step-by-step, escalating process of entrapment. The farther one moves along the continuum of increasingly destructive acts, the harder it is to extract oneself from the commanding authority's grip, because to do so is to confront the fact that the earlier acts of compliance were wrong.
• If you are part of a group that has been commanded to carry out immoral actions, find an ally in the group who shares your perceptions and is willing to join you in opposing the objectionable commands. It is tremendously difficult to be a lone dissenter, not only because of the strong human need to belong, but also because-via the process of pluralistic ignorance-the compliance of others makes the action seem acceptable and leads you to question your own negative judgment. In one of Milgram's conditions the naïve subject was one of a 3-person teaching team. The other two were actually confederates who-one after another-refused to continue shocking the victim. Their defiance had a liberating influence on the subjects, so that only 10% of them ended up giving the maximum shock.

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All that said, what I'm now wondering is what percentage of posters to this thread enjoyed making E1956 squirm, and to what degree they were coerced.