Randy sent me this email after class on Wednesday. He said it would be okay for me to post it.
Hey Adrienne,
I asked my brother about the experiment that I told you about in class and he said it was the Milgram Authority Experiments. They were conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s. It was interesting because the professor polled several psychology students to see what they thought the outcome would be, and almost all of them said only a sadistic few (1-2%) would actually go to the highest level of shocks. As I mentioned in class, a majority of subjects went to the highest level. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation on the experiments and some of their results (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment). All in all, the experiment gives a lot of credibility to Stone's comment of 'So what? This will always happen due to human nature' as well as a good piece of evidence toward the Anarchist creed of nobody holding more power over others.
I don't want to get too long winded about it tonight since I still have the Norma Field reading to get through [Adrienne's note: Randy is in both of my classes this semester], so I'll talk to you in class tomorrow,
Randy
[Another note from Adrienne: in a follow-up email, Randy also wrote, "The Milgram Experiments show how difficult it is to break away from obediance to figures who are perceived as authority. It presents a good argument that individuals in power must always be kept in check."]
posted by adrienne @ 7:52 PM
13 comments
13 Comments:
Yes, I remember watching this experiment on a video in Elementary Psychology last semester.
But Randy is right that many people continued to press the electric shock button because the doctor told them to. Although the individuals felt regret by pressing it because of the screams, the doctor kept reassuring the individuals and to continue the project.
I think this definately relates to last class's topic. Although, there was no consequence if you didn't press the button, but there was a consequence in the Japanese military if you didn't torture.....
For some reason the Milgram experiment always reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Stanford Prison Experiment always reminds me of the Panopticon prison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon), all three of which freak me out.
In the military, like in a panopticon prison, all of your actions are observed, and there is pressure to conform and not misbehave. Authority feels omniscient and all-powerful, and you don't think you can get away with anything. If authority is telling you, and everyone else, to torture people, and you have preexisting ideas that make those people seem sub-human, you're probably not going to risk the punishment you'll get if you "misbehave" by being humane. That's not to erase all personal responsibility, but we have to consider contributing factors like this, too.
Talking about how people conform with authority, I thought it was interesting how when we were given free reign to make our own midterm exams, almost everyone followed the same format of Adrienne's exam. Being a Communication Studies major (along with Japanese Major) and know about those experiements was really interesting for me. For the most part people will follow the authority figure, no matter what because they are "in charge". While people may stop to question if the authoriy figure tells them to do it they will.
Now on to a more darker side of this......This shows what humanity could do if told by a higher authority to keep going and "it's ok to do this".
The comments on this are really interesting, and so I thought up some responses. Like Angela, I had the same thought on the Milford Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiments always me consider them similar. They can be easily linked in that the Stanford Prison Experiment shows how authority can quickly lead to corruption, and the Milford Experiments showing the horrible consequences if the corrupt authority is used for corrupt goals.
Jericho is right about the often heavy consequences for soldiers who disobey orders, but I don't agree about there being "no consequence" for the Milford Experiment. Social consequences are often considered much worse than physical consequences. I'm sure many people have heard the often quoted, "More people fear public speaking than dying". People fear public speaking because of a perceived social consequence if mistakes are made. In the Milford Experiment, there was no physical danger to the subject, but if they refused, the "Doctor" in the room would tell them to go onward. Nobody wants to look stupid in comparison to someone else, and who knows more about this subject than a doctor? Additionally, the subject in these experiments might have assumed that they were the only one to hold out compared to other subjects who had partaken in the experiment. Even for the soldiers in the film, didn't many of them say something similar to, "All the other's in my group were doing it, and if you didn't do it then the others wouldn't let you in their group anymore"? Many of these soldiers perpetrated their actions not only because of the threat of physical punishment, but also social punishment.
For schuldich, the midterm really did feel like an experiment. Another "experiment" that Adrienne incorporated was the Meiji Era thing at the beginning of the semester. In this too, people conformed to their roles (the samurai killed, the bureaucrats argued, and the peasants tried their best to be heard and left alone). Maybe the midterm experiment happened the way it did because everyone was trying to conform to what they thought a "test maker" would do rather than fear of authority? I think I believe more along the lines of conforming to Adrienne's rule in the form of her first exam format, but there's also something to be said about the perception of one's role in society.
Whew, that's all for me. I felt that I should reply to everyone since I sent the email that got this started (read, social obligation). But that's not exactly true, since I love playing Devil's Advocate to ideas, especially when they pertain to psychology.
i was interested most how you mentioned stone's comment of so what in relation to this experiment and how it gives credibility to the statement. i also see where that comment was coming from, and how this article supports that statement..it is sad but it is human nature to take advantage of power and push the limits according to the surrounding. its hard for me to say so what, or it didnt really effect me, but i also see how it is a reoccuring problem and it is also an inevitable problem(maybe not always to the extent) that happens when there is war.
oh oh oh! this is what i'm thinking: this ties in great to the Mad Maps workshop my friend and i are doing. why? because! one of my beefs with mental illness is the tendency to classify folks who experience extreme emotional states as freaks who need to be heavily drugged and/or incarcerated, so i would use this Milgram Experiment to also argue that anyone can be capable of mental freak out/break down/shut down under the right conditions. and THEN, the MAD MAPS becomes important because i feel this might point to a "So What?" answer: so what we do is handle the knowledge of the capacity we have to be destructive or dangerous and find ways of helping each other to manage these extremes. does this make sense? so, the potential for being an authoritative jerk is always there, but we watch each other and help each other not get to that point. like...what kind of emotions might be underlying someone's participation in harmful activities? how do we break through those armors and reach the feeling person inside?
i think it's important to differentiate between my desire to help each other manage extreme emotional states and the state's violent regulation of feelings...i'm not sure if this distinction came across, so help me out if you see how to articulate this huge difference!
oh, and i also wanted to say i think sometimes people follow authority figures also because we're not used to using our IMAGINATIONS to come up with different ideas of how to organize and solve our problems. the powers-that-be are very big on co-opting and/or killing our imaginative capabilities.
Every time I get online and I want to post something; everything that I can think of has already been explained or touched so well by someone else. I wish I hadn't missed class last week because I've had some experience with having to conform to military standards. Not necessarily having tortured people but having to have to act a certain way and say things a certain way.
I can understand why the men in the film did the things that they did in Chine (rape, murder, etc.) and from the comments everyone else knows how powerful an omnipresent authority figure can be.
MEET AND POTATOES
But even if this absolute power can be abused and people can so easily be manipulated into doing things that they wouldn't normally do I wonder what would happen if we didn't have these structures in place. In a perfect world it's easy to say no armies or military because it's all peace but what about governments, and organizations that are initially made to help people. All of these things wield some sort of dangerous power over people and make them do things (sometimes good or more often bad) that they would never think possible. It's a sad necessary evil.
Masa, I was relating it to Stone's comment in so far as there may be a psychological structure which makes these actions into human tendencies. That is, Stone's comment, that these things happen because we're human, may not be far off the mark. But I do agree with you that ingrained psychological behavior can be countered. A counterpoint to Stone's comment is that perhaps it is not human nature, but something in society or culture that causes this tendency to follow authority. I'm sure that anarchists would point to the second point, since they do not wish one person to have authority over another. If following authority is a part of human nature, then the anarchist view would be fundamentally flawed. But if it's a part of society or culture, then these can be changed for the betterment of others.
I also think that I understand what mmartah is saying, although I haven't heard of MAD MAPS. I did want to say that the imaginations thing sounds interesting, but I think the experiment shows an opposite trend. I saw that in his findings, Milgram (I messed his name up in my last post, so I'm getting it right this time) said that college students were more likely than non-college students to follow authority. I like to think that it's the job of students to be imaginative, but this could also be due to the fact that students have to follow the rules of University authorities (staff, faculty, etc).
wow, this is a good discussion, i agree with a lot that's been said, i just want to add my two cents.
i think it's pretty fruitless to think of human beings as just animals who are acting according to the laws of nature. we have the ability to be aware of ourselves and what we are doing to the world around us. we have a lot of freedom, but that's a lot of responsibility to bear.
I was just reading something about Erich Fromm, a philosopher/humanist/social psychologist. He describes humans having the ability to embrace human freedom, or to escape it through three means: automaton conformity, authoritarianism, and destructiveness.
I kind of interpreted what mmartah was saying as related to this. That it's important to help others cultivate awareness and accepting freedom, which isn't the same thing as telling them what to think/act/feel.
ok, one more thing, I just thought this was a fitting quote by Fromm:
"There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual . . . . However, if the economic, social and political conditions . . . do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom." (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom)
i can understand the point where it is the society and culture that surround the people that causes them to follow authority..but i wonder if it can be both the combination of human nature and the people's surroundings that causes the events we have discussed in class. i dont know if its possible to narrow on one thing, but rather a combination of all the different aspects of psychological effects and society
Now that I read this, yep, this is the experiment I was talking about on my previous blog post...and jericho you're right; I watched this in elementary psych as well. But I thought I remembered them saying that a very high percent of participants caved under the pressure not 1 or 2%. But I could be wrong...it was freshman year :-)
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