Comment by Raphael_Amiard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Raphael_Amiard | Hacker News Reader

This whole "experiment" disturbs me profoundly, and for about a dozen of factors, of which i can only cite a few :

- They take the appearance of science, name this an experiment, when this is much more of a sensationalist TV show in the very style of the ones it's supposed to denounce.

- A (very big) flaw that the milgram experiment already had, but that this show suffers from even more, due to the context and to the size of the sample, is the fact that they're working on a sample that isn't representative in any way of the global population, but only of the people susceptible of answering the announcements -- in the case of this tv show, people willing to go on television, and that's probably not a small thing. Also this pretends to be a reproduction of the milgram experiment, while the conditions are very different. Obeying to a show hostess and obeying to a doctor isn't the same thing, and shouldn't be analyzed as being the same.

- Going further in my first point, while this is supposed to be scientific, it obviously is not. But even the motivations of the show are unclear. Supposedly it's there to warn us about the dangerous power of television, while it's actually obvious that the show is using the very mechanisms it's supposed to denounce. People act shocked while they satisfy those very appetites of violence and voyeurism. How clever.

BTW I'm french, and watched a few extracts of the show, but i didn't have the occasion to watch it in full. It looks very fakeish, and very disturbing too. I guess the minimum the show director could do is display some proofs of the veracity of the show.

Sociology, and human sciences in general, ought to be something serious, in the process and in the display. Mocking it while playing on people's indignation (which is almost as easy to exploit as their appetite for violence) is disgusting.

Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an actual TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a TV show.

Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being equal, the latter is much, much worse.

>Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an actual TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a TV show.

"Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly but this was not an actual murder, we did just kill somebody for the needs of the documentary."

It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change the nature of it.

> Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being equal, the latter is much, much worse.

Agreed, but in case you didn't notice, i wasn't judging from a moral standpoint, but from an experimental one.

> It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change the nature of it.

I do not understand your objection. Are you arguing against using a TV game show as a guise for the experiment or against showing the documentary of the experiment disguised as a TV game show* (because it cheapens "serious science" somehow)? Or that people who watch the documentary are not doing it because of the science but because they want to see the fake TV game show and therefore the documentary should not be shown, or that the experiment should not have used a TV game show because people who watch the documentary do not really want to see the documentary but the fake TV game show?

* Anyone else been watching "'Allo, 'allo" reruns?

I think what he is trying to say is that the experiment conducted for the documentary was not a robust peer reviewed phenomenon, but rather a for-pop-consumption "backyard demonstration". Real science takes a lot of effort (avoiding the before mentioned sample bias being one), effort which was most likely skipped in the creation of this "pop sociology" for-mass-consumption show.

Ironically, the fake violence of reality shows they decry is precisely what they are demonstrating - an unreviewed, unpublished study which concludes "4/5 of everyone around you is a potential murderer".

I think what he is trying to say is that the experiment conducted for the documentary was not a robust peer reviewed phenomenon

Was the Holocaust a robust peer reviewed phenomenon?

Sure, selection bias is always going to be a weakness with these types of experiments, but one thing they do prove, no matter how sloppily conducted, is that you can always find people to do this sort of thing if you look for them.

Kids who go outside to stomp worms after it rains, to borrow an image from another poster further down the thread.

I'm sorry, this experiment has been reproduced numerous times and the initial study that produced this WAS rigorously tested AND peer reviewed. Milgram performed 19 variations of his experiment before his peer reviewed journal article was ever published, it studied the distance from authority, the distance from the subject and the authority level to measure what percentage of people performed inhumane acts.

The variables ranged from the authority being virtually over the subjects shoulder to being on a telephone. The proximity to the victim ranged from a one-way mirror to only being able to hear the person over a speaker. The level of authority went from a white coat to blue collar.

The subjects were initially polled to see how many believed they would administer the lethal voltage (1.2%), and also polled his colleagues (who came up with a similar percentage on how many people they expected would go all the way).

A later meta-analysis performed on multiple repeats of the study found the percentages to remain steady at 61-66%.

Zimbardo (who performed the Stanford Prison Experiment) made an excellent point: none of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave.

Despite disobeying authority not to hurt someone, they still required permission of the authority to help someone, which is quite possibly the more worrying aspect that is never highlighted.

That is what i've been saying :

- The milgram experiment and this pseudo-experiment do not test the same thing, they are not the same,and do not at all display the same riguor. Hence you can't talk about them as the same experiment.

- The milgram experiment is a solid experiment, that has got solid criticisms too, but i'm not at all implying it was fake.

> [they] do not test the same thing, they are not the same,and do not at all display the same riguor

Ok, but I'm not sure who you're arguing with here. Is your beef with the word "experiment"? Nobody is submitting these results to a journal. If you prefer, call it a demonstration re-enacting a phenomenon that has been the subject of other experiments.

I don't think they pretend that this is science - it's for a documentary. I also don't believe the point is to "denounce" TV shows. The real point may be clear in this quote from a participant;

"I wanted to stop the whole time, but I just couldn't. I didn't have the will to do it. And that goes against my nature," he said. "I haven't really figured out why I did it."

We think of ourselves as having control over our actions. We're pretty good as justifying most of the things we do within mental models we make of ourselves. However, the reality is that often our actions are driven primarily by external forces. The human brain is full of biases created through evolution that shape our behaviour far more we often like to admit. I think the feeling of disgust that media like this induces is primarily that realisation. We look for reasons why it can't be so.

The good news is that once you start to understand where our biases are we can compensate to a degree, or at least include them in our mental models.

Wikipedia has a nice collection of cognitive biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases and http://lesswrong.com/ is an interesting community trying to educate itself on this topic amongst other things.

The good news is that once you start to understand where our biases are we can compensate to a degree, or at least include them in our mental models.

Isn't it backwards to realize the logical models of our actions are only justifications for unconscious drives, and then try to categorize those drives through the very same logical models we just agreed are only good at hindsight justification? What is the point? To justify your self-image of being part of some "rational elite"?

The resason is that we have a priority on what we value and that some of those drives temporarily promote values that conflict with our more stable ones.

By including a list of those types of events in our mental models, we can compensate and maintain a stable priority list that won't cause us regret later.

Cognitive biases don't mean that the brain as a whole is irrational. While we can't always stop the cognitive biases from occurring, we can avoid situations where they occur. For example when choosing a candidate for a job you want to make a decision before comparing with other people's opinions to avoid the bandwagon effect.

However some you can actually mitigate, just by knowing they happen. For example everyone has loss aversion - where we overvalue the loss of something in compared to how much we value gaining from it first place. By knowing that you have loss aversion you can focus on thinking about how much you actually gained when thinking about how much something will cost when you lose it to get a more "real" estimation. For example I'm giving up a business I've been running for years - it's painful to do and something I've been putting off, but I can mitigate the pain but genuinely examining what benefit I've gained, not just making the decision based on the vague "I don't want to give this up" feeling. It works for lots of things; relationships, jobs, etc...

Personally I do it mostly because I like control. I don't like not understanding my decisions. Understanding why I did something makes me "feel" better. That in itself is reason enough :)

It's sensationalist for the simple reason that they are able to convince people to go as far as almost killing a man or at least causing some major damage. I'm not sure why sample bias or anything else trumps the fact that when you put people in groups their propensity for committing horrific acts goes up.

For all we know, these are the kinds of people who, when approached on the street, said "sure, I'll go on The Death Show". They're the same kids who stomp on worms after it rains - a small minority of the complete population.

The main point of the original Milgram experiment was that you don't need much to get ordinary people to act unethically if you provide them with the proper context. Saying it's only a small part of the population that acts this way misses the point.

Showing that there are those among us who will gas women and children, and many more who will not do anything about it as long as it doesn't affect them personally is a repeated lesson of history, not some psychology study.

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