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Comment by pikma | Hacker News Reader

Not a psychology researcher, but I think that the Milgram experiment has been fairly well replicated. Please anyone let me know if not.

I personally found it to be non-obvious.

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Milgram's results are also not as cut and dry as they are usually presented. Obedience rates varied wildly in subsequent variations he ran of the experiment and his initial experiment that got all the attention was a pretty low sample size.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...

“Many of Milgram’s participants believed it to be impossible that the prestigious Yale University experimenter would allow real harm to be inflicted on an experimental subject. Although Milgram claimed that 75% of his participants thought they were administering painful shocks, Perry’s re-analysis of the data showed that “It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those, two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter” (p. 163). Furthermore, she argues that many of those who did administer the maximum amount of shock did so because they were confident the shock wasn’t real or that the experiment was an elaborate ruse.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/...

That's still a shocking (no pun intended) percentage of people willing to inflict what they think is pain on another human based merely on the orders of an authority which they are not truly obliged to follow. I imagine the percentage of willing participants would be even higher if they had a real reason to follow the orders, e.g. it was actually their job and/or they would be punished in some way for failing to follow orders, as was the case in Nazi Germany.

Remember his initial experiment was only 40 people, so we’re talking 6 individuals who could very easily been outliers.

And I have my doubts that any of those 6 actually completey believed that a Yale psychology experiment was allowed to dangerously shock students, or that the student actors were all that believable.

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