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Ironically, the fake violence of reality shows they decry is precisely what they are demonstrating - an unreviewed, unpublished study which concludes "4/5 of everyone around you is a potential murderer".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