Why do we keep repeating the Milgram experiments?
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This critique seems to be missing the point. Of course if all the subjects knew that they were being tested on their obedience to sadistic authority, none of them would have gone as far as they did. (or maybe they would have knowing that the pain was not truly inflicted.) The point was that when they thought they were inflicting pain for some greater knowledge/good, they had no problem. The above quote is portrayed in the story as "disobedience". Its not, its regret, maybe shame.
Give a person that shelter and they can become the most horrific monster imaginable, with no moral compunction whatsoever. They abdicate all moral responsibility for themselves. That is why "just following orders" or "just doing my job" should be seen as a guarantee of moral bankruptcy and deserving of the most extreme punishment. If you take advantage of those shelters and abdicate your own moral sense, you are a dangerous uncivilized animal and should be locked in a cage for the protection of the rest of society.
I remember a friend describing hearing a woman attacked on her college campus. She said the screams the woman made were like nothing she has heard before or since, they were incredibly disturbing and unmistakably the sound of someone in terror and pain. I have also never listened to the audio recording of the "grizzly man" and his girlfriend being attacked by a bear, but have heard it is so horrible, you can never "un-hear" it.
Isn't it possible the faked pain just doesn't trigger a genuine response in the person administering the fake torture?
And, of course, the Holocaust was supported by this exact argument as well. We'd developed enough that we knew how to improve the human race - eugenics. We knew how to improve 'mental hygeine'. All that was required was hard men making the hard choices, overcoming the weaknesses of empathy and compassion for the greater good. And the people lapped it up. That is a dangerous area to tread upon. We should always be humble in our knowledge, and parsimonious in its application.
Colonialists didn't care about helping natives, they wanted their resources. Whether or not eugenics could work was never in question. It was whether it was moral. The holocaust was motivated primarily by hatred, not merely misguided attempts at improving the world.
The Milgram experiment should be the experiment that opens our eyes and welcomes all ways of questioning authorities, and the missing link that connects all bad things in the world with obedience to authority, but alas, if people want to follow then they will follow regardless of the evidence.
"an eighth of one per cent (.125%)"
"an eighth of one per cent (.00125)"
"an eighth of one (.125) per cent"
An 'authority' doesn't need to be a person. It can be a culture. The point of the experiment is not the literal situation or situations resembling it: it is how easily otherwise non-cruel humans can be persuaded to engage in cruelty. It's the hundreds of variations of the experiment that you could employ to get your underlings to behave in this way that is the lesson that bears repeating again and again.
Although the electric shock is the better known one, Milgram has suggested I believe three of the most impressive experiments in social psychology that I can think off:
- measuring the diameter the small world using postcards (for a fashion magazine; that experiment could only be replicated by Facebook)
- he inspired the Stanford prison by Zimbardo.
But doing “bad experiments but good plays” was something he was aware, hence his and the rest of the field insistence to do more, to know better. Reproducing it, be it with flawed game-show observation, getting back to experiments notes with a different perspective (Milgram was understandably concerned if a subject would, under thread of a handful of dollars, still proceed; an experimenter who wants to find excuses has a different point of view) is part of the same effort to understand not just how it happened, but how to avoid it, too.
> Milgram became more interested in the control than the test.
That is a staple of cognitive psychology, and that instinct has led to measure spectacular impact from increasingly negligible factors: the one I like to quote (it is not very well known, made at my alma mater in Nanterre near Paris) has an Ultimatum game played after subjects are told to say whether they prefer a Klimt painting to a Delaunay, against players that agree or not.
Certainly, you can see those explanations and disagree with them, but the author makes no mention of them, nor does he even link to the papers. Heck, he doesn't even link to popular press writeups of them, which is usually maddening enough!
I was scammed by criminals posing as cops. I did what they told me to, even though I realized I shouldn't have.
Yes, you can probably poke some holes in his quantitative interpretation of obedience (it's hard to condense human dialogue/action into a single metric), but it was good fundamental psychology that warranted repetition/variation.
Published science often contains a limited narrative because even scientists have trouble reading through many pages of technical detail without proper motivation. To suggest that narrative makes Milgram's work art rather than science is an unjustified insult.
Why the downvote? Tl;dr, or had no better argument than that? :)
"Critique is more or less pointless. Find an experiment that produces a different result based on your theory or keep quiet the adults are talking."
Which ends up looking like your doing the same thing repeatedly to the laymen.
Pointing out flaws in the setup (or interpreration) of an experiment does not require staging a counter-experiment.
Also note that the broader question is the value of psychological experiments at large (how do artificial settings relate to real life), and it by itself cannot be proven by an experiment :)
It's turtles all the way down. "Experiments above anything else" is a dogma in its own right.
As to psychological experiments there reproduceable even if they don't generalize. So, clearly your measuring something.
If the design of an experiment is faulty or doubtful, I don't know what the correct result would be, and you're right that I can't prove the result was actually incorrect (until I run a counter-experiment), BUT I am entitled to say that the result is doubtful.
Having only a broken watch, we can never be 100% sure that it shows wrong time at any given moment, as long as we have no data to compare it against. And sometimes it will be showing right time indeed. It's just not reliable.
This is especially true in the field of "soft" science such as psychology rather than physics etc.
"As to psychological experiments there reproduceable even if they don't generalize. So, clearly your measuring something."
Something, yes, but it is often open to debate just what that SOMETHING actually is :)
Dismissing these doubts by namecalling ("pop psychology", "keep quiet the adults are talking", and so on) does not strike me as very scientific. It is a disguised ideological stance.
It's only by finding actual evidence in support of a theory that you can make any sort of progress.
Edit: As to pointing out flaws in an experement. Again there is no progress as removing evidence in support of a theory does not get you any where you need new evidence in support of a different theory for there to be progress.
I disagree. Discrediting a bogus theory is progress.
Poking holes in existing theories is a legitimate part of scientific inquiry and progress. The whole point of science is to gain knowledge by questioning the way things work. Ideally you do that by proposing new hypotheses, and constantly testing them out. But you can also do it by challenging or critiquing existing theories. This is sometimes a necessary first step before anyone even thinks to propose new theories to replace the old ones.
"It's only by finding actual evidence in support of a theory that you can make any sort of progress."
By that logic, a great deal of theoretical physics right now is worthless. Fields like that often start with peculiar observations, around which theories are proposed, then computationally analyzed or simulated. No "actual evidence" has been found to support a lot of these theories, though that hasn't stopped people from trying. (Nor should it). In many of these cases, the technology necessary to find the actual evidence does not yet exist, or is prohibitively expensive, or is in world-limited supply.
Still, coming up with a new theory and suggesting an experiment is IMO far more useful than simply another theory. The point is to avoid doing this: The real name of god is A, no it's AA, no it's AAA...
I might not be explaning this all that well. There is a somewhat recent theory that a lot of exising dinosaur species where not distinct. Rather there bone structures change as they age. In many ways you could argue this is just evaluating evidence differently. However, rather than simply standing alone it suggested examining a range of existing fossils in ways that also supported this theory. Which was then done. The important bit IMO was not stopping at the theory stage.
Are you saying that failure to replicate an experiment has no impact on the original experiment?
Are you getting this from people like http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm ?
I never said Milgram's work was beyond reproach, just that I found the unjustified spin of the original article annoying. Fromm is also making more of a philosophical argument against experimental psychology as a whole. He references Milgram's experiment as "one of the most highly regarded experiments in the field of aggression". I'm not sure why you think it's a biting criticism.
And it's not about the downvote as such, it's about the fact that some people are too lazy to write a meaningful reply so they resort to clicking -1 instead whenever they disagree with something, but this degrades the overall quality of a discussion.
And I participate in these discussions to confront myself with other points of view and hopefully learn something interesting, not to collect points. Downvoting takes this away from me and noone benefits from it. If that's an obnoxious approach - well, sorry :)
Maybe you misinterpreted my comment because of my little sarcasm ("Fromm (acclaimed pop psychologist)")? My comment wasn't meant to invalidate your comment though, just to broaden the spectrum - "but here's a critique of Milgram's experiment that comes from another angle, and one that can't be dismissed as pop psychology", that was the intended message. It seems that you took it too personally.
I encouraged whoever opposed to my comment to take time to put their stance in words.
I do NOT mind being downvoted at all, as long as it is supported by some argument that helps me to improve my comments.
If someone didn't downvote me, but replied with two words: "Not true", my answer would be exactly the same, so it's not about a downvote.
If I failed to make it clear, I am sorry (English is not my first language).
And looks to be a stage play based on Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#In_p...
http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/ABSOLUT-Fringe-2012-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experiment_%282010_film%29
Very interesting detail: The German movie escalates the violence far beyond what happend in the real experiment (to the point that the "guards" capture some of the scientists and several people are killed), and Philip Zimbardo got a court order prohibiting the advertising of the film as "based on a true story".
... what? The point of equation is to be able to manipulate and compute symbols and quantities. How is this equation remotely useful? How do I compute f? Can I decompose P or E in other terms? What are the properties of the sets to which they belong? etc
This "equation" has no value whatsoever- is this a thing really taught to psychology students?
It's so silly when soft sciences try to gain an air of legitimacy by using bogus math notation. I guess you can cargo cult math as well...
All crap.
Amazing at the time, changed the way we think, and contributed amazing stuff.
But all are 'just so' (Hipsters: Gladwellian) stories.
They break from convention and make us think but critically flawed.
Without them we may never have passed to the next level, but they are wrong.
Critically flawed and wrong? Doesn't the main insight of this book -- that adding manpower to a late project only makes it later -- ring as true as ever? Fred Brooks isn't a phoney like Gladwell, either.
The heart of the story is this: Adding developers to a delayed project will only delay it further. It's not about parallel vs serial. It's about project management and how to handle delayed projects. I have yet to meet a PM in my career who really understands this, and almost all of them have referenced the saying, "Nine women can't have a baby in a month."
To claim that it's "crap," "critically flawed," and "wrong" strikes me as naive, overly general, and dismissive because you can throw it into a "Gladwellian" bucket and be done with it. Fred Brooks learned his lessons from years of project management. This wasn't a guy who conjured up an idea for a book or a TED talk and just slapped some crap together.
So you think that in half a century the human race has evolved, has gotten better? That these experiments were right for a certain brain, which no longer applies to modern brains?