Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Switchboard >

Authority: Psychological experiments that try to measure Authority and Obediance

07:25 / 14.08.01

I remember someone mentioning this experiment in a post.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

10:51 / 14.08.01

I remember hearing about the one where a lecturer turned half his students into Nazis, wasn't it by saying all the left-handers or blue-eyed were 'special'?
%Of course, we would never fall for something like this...%

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

11:14 / 14.08.01

quote:Originally posted by The Ungodly Lozt and Found Office:
%Of course, we would never fall for something like this...%

Fall for it? Hell...

"Sending painful and possibly dangerous electric shocks to people we don't know? Sign me up!"

[ 14-08-2001: Message edited by: Johnny O'Clock ]

15:37 / 14.08.01

Granta did a great piece on these experiments -- apparently, the dr.'s reputation was never quite the same afterwards.

Here, from the Guardian review:
quote:We leave the uncertain world of the clinic for the certainties, discipline and methodological mania of the laboratory in Ian Parker's impressively researched description of Stanley Milgram's classic studies of "obedience" in the 1960s. True to his training as a social psychologist, he had little theory. But he certainly knew how to measure, though what he was measuring is anybody's guess. Although Milgram and others fantasised that he was recording responses to a set of variables analogous to those resulting in the mass slaughter of Jews by Hitler, it seems less plausible that his subjects believed Yale University would be condoning the torture until death of slow-learning Irish Americans. With genuine respect for a man trapped within the conventions of his discipline, Parker suggests that he was producing a type of performance art. If so, it has proved the most boringly repetitious art-form ever encountered: for all the criticisms since made of Milgram's work, I can testify that experiments copying the same formula and drawing equally fatuous conclusions are followed to this day.

15:40 / 14.08.01

A quote from Parker from a course guide:

In the last piece of reading Ian Parker writes about Stanley
Milgram’s “obedience” studies. Are these experiments of any value to us as students of politics? Are they of value to students of the Holocaust?

Parker goes beyond the experiments to talk about the value of social psychology in general. Do the Obedience Experiments point us to towards a great social psychological truth, perhaps the great truth, which is this: people tend to do things because of where they are, not who they are, and we are slow to see it. We look for character traits to explain a person’s actions - he is clever, shy, generous, arrogant - and we stubbornly underestimate the influence of the situation, the way things happened to be at that moment.

Do you agree that we shouldn’t “assume that people who commit atrocities are atrocious people, or people who do heroic things are heroic”?

Mordant Carnival

17:40 / 14.08.01

Yeah, I saw the Stanley Milgram thing and also the Stamford prison experiment when I tried and failed to do an A-level in Psychology.

Made me a little bit more forgiving, I can tell you.