Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to.

For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we have learned in the last 45 years, Americans are still as willing to inflict pain out of blind obedience.

The Milgram experiment was carried out in the shadow of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann had the world wondering how the Nazis were able to persuade so many ordinary Germans to participate in the murder of innocents. Professor Milgram devised a clever way of testing, in a laboratory setting, man’s (and woman’s) willingness to do evil.

The participants — ordinary residents of New Haven — were told they were participating in a study of the effect of punishment on learning. A “learner” was strapped in a chair in an adjacent room, and electrodes were attached to the learner’s arm. The participant was told to read test questions, and to administer a shock when the learner gave the wrong answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29mon3.html?th&emc=th

Thats what I got elsewhere.

Latest figures show an increased amount pain inflicted.....damn...we going backwards...

I think that pretty well sums it up.

Run Far Away///Do Not Appoint/Elevate/to high Positions.....ya be "sorry"

the roots of this study were debates over whether or not the German people were more inclined to go along with the abuses of Nazism. The study demonstrated that Americans were just as willing to go along with a heinous protocol.

First off, they ruled out anybody who knew the relevant bit of history, and could therefore learn from it. That alters the sample a bit, but makes it a comparable pool of subjects, so it's sort of hard to quibble for any purpose other than quibbling. While I usually enjoy a good quibble, not now.

Second, though, is this line: "The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority." No, they did not. They taught some Americans to question authority; they did not teach each American to question authority. Moreover, and more importantly, they taught Americans not so much to question authority, but to question the authorities, or to question some authority. There is a difference.

The former point is a quantitative one. It might just be that not sufficient people in New Haven that have learned to question authority are also unaware of Millgram's experiment to show up in the good researchers' statistics. But I think the latter is more appropriate for discussion. "Question authority" is not to ask questions of authority, but to doubt authority. Most of those saying to question authority do so not because they want information, or want their doubts cleared up: Most have quite clear ideas about what *should* be being done on a topic, and while the current centers of authority on that topic hold, they cannot implement their new and improved ideas.

Take racism. I recently was in the awkward position of being at my parents and deciding after one conversation with my mother that it was time for me to get an earlier flight home. She dissed a wanna-be politican who I firmly believed is not only dissable, but diss-worthy; yea, dissing her is a public service. Nonetheless, saying that she'll get the position because "she sucks up to n****rs" is beyond the pale, even for my dem-voting feminist mother. In 1954 that would have been the morally acceptable thing to say in most of American society. In 2008 it would make my mother a social outcast in most, I think, of American society. In the strata I'm usually in, moral authority is torn between simply saying racism is evil and racial epithets are wrong and saying that positive efforts to instill good will between whites and blacks are required. Questioning--doubting--why racism was wrong led to a mixed state of tolerance for both racists and anti-racists, but that kind of situation isn't stable. Publicly, the anti-racists have moral authority behind them, and like the racists of old, doubting their moral authority gets a bad reaction. We've replaced one authority that must not be doubted with another authority that must not be doubted, and it took about 50 years. But there's still an authority that must not be doubted.

I'm not sure how it can be any other way, and still allow to to talk about a culture and society, to be honest. You just have to have the right definition of "morality", and define it not in strictly religious terms, but in social terms. Many laws have a basis in morality; the question always boils down to whose. Lots of choices are binary; were they trinary, it still wouldn't solve the problem.


So I'm not sure why anybody thought the results would change, just looking at it from a narrow, mainstream-American-centric POV. Unless they thought that the slight change in "parameter settings" from '64 to the present were substantive, when the parameters themselves have barely shifted. Most of us just swapped in one value or issue for another as times and trends demanded, substituted one source of authority for another.

A more interesting question is whether anybody's tried to replicate Millgram's study cross-culturally, a term that can be taken various ways. Are the responses even across various US cultures (because surely American black, Chicano, or Indian cultures are different here from W Africa, Mexico, or even the Zapotec)? Are they across European cultures? Across cultures around the world, whether Europe-derived or indigenous in Latin America, in Africa, across the various Arab cultures, etc., etc.? If the results are fairly uniform, then it certainly says something about humans. If there's a lot of variation and it seems random, that says something else. If the variation isn't random, then there's a different set of conclusions.

It would even have been at least as interesting to see how those who *knew* about Millgram's study would act. But showing stability between one or two generations in a fairly stable society? Eh.

was prompted by the WWII experience in Europe with the Nazis - Germany, in particular. Was there something about the German people that made them prone to such blind obedience to authority? The original study concluded "no."
John Taylor Gatto contends that our public education system was designed to produce compliant, defer to authority people, primarily to facilitate industrial production. I think there is some validity to this.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Note that when Socrates taught young people critical thinking skills, they immediately put them to use in a way that upset the elders.

But your point about cross-culture studies is well taken. Maybe this is a European/western phenomenon, but atrocities similar to the holocaust have happened in many other cultures, just on a smaller scale.

My Mother used to say, nice people live in nice houses or we are conditioned by our experiences in life. If we see abuse or feel abuse this is what we mete out to others.

Here in America we allowed segregation and discrimination for over a century. Very few whites complained or made noise we just accepted without question. We put our hand over our hearts and sang, God bless America with out the slightest thought to the millions that suffered.

We set up internment camps during World War 2 and denied people their rights and property as we put our hands over our hearts and sang God Bless America.

We allowed the indiscriminate bombing of Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Gaza without a care in the world for those civilians on the ground who haven’t wronged us or threatened us in any way.

Testing American’s for violence is like testing a rattlesnake by poking it with a stick, After poking the snake 100 times it was determined that snakes have a strong dislike for sticks while their tolerance for being poked is unclear. American’s are so lied to and manipulated until they have little sense of right or wrong. Greedy autoworker verses noble bank Presidents, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the ongoing drug war right across our own border.

We are the most violent country in the world and led by the dumbest people in the room in the pay of the greediest people in the world who point to God and country and flag. Who then send your children out to die needlessly while they administer the contract to sell bombs and caskets to the government.

So let us all put our hands over our hearts and remember the struggles of our forefathers who pillaged this great land away from its rightful owners as we sing, God Bless America.


Testing? You only need to test when you don't know the answer in the first place

...of bombing while Louis Armstrong sings "What A Wonderful World".....