The people who thought they were administering electric shocks. One of the criticisms of the experiment was that the participants were unable to give informed consent and that they very well might have learned some very unpleasant truths about themselves that they perhaps did not want to know.
There was a whole separate sub-text that prevented the experiments being repeated earlier. In the light of which, the replication in Poland was particularly interesting.
I agree. I think those things can be fixed. But first I’d like to know a good reason for running this test again. What does anyone expect to learn from it. What hypothesis is being tested here? Does anyone expect a significant difference in the results?
Wait. What? See, this is why I said earlier I have trouble with ethics. Because I never would have guessed giving someone the truth would be considered unethical. I would argue the exact opposite here in fact. Seems like it would be a boon to everyone if we knew just how easily a good person can slip into a passive evil role. Now I’m inclined to promote incorporating this ‘experiment’ into mandatory 3rd grade education. Only mostly joking.
From the Wikipedia article:
Inflicted insight. Imma weaponize that.
That would beJane Elliott. Can someone with a psychology/sociology background tell me what the current thinking is about doing that to eight-year old kids without their parents’ knowledge or consent?
There was also The Third Wave experiment.The Third Wave (experiment) - Wikipedia
I don’t intend to threadshit, but replicating the exact experiment is of questionable utility. The generation of Americans informed by the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment, witness to the My Lai massacre, happily/blindly perpetuated black sites, Guantanamo, and rubberstamped the second Iraq war.
These experiments were fait accompli to people who were taught realpolitik or experienced firsthand military conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century. Only the naive wondered how those good Christian white people could tolerate and then participate in the Nazi regime.
Humans are animals, and brittle ideas like empirical insight and brotherly love, are easily forgotten. I would continue, but I am depressing myself. Humans are of nature, red in tooth and claw, and proving that empirically every few years won’t change human attitudes about territory, food, and other resources.
Actually, no. And the statement shows an interesting ignorance of mid-20th-century thought. How old are you? What is your background?
A version of the experiment was performed at the University of Georgia circa 1983. Students in Psychology 101 were required to “volunteer” in a certain number of postgraduate experiments and you didn’t know the nature of the experiment until you showed up.
I arrived for one and the grad student researcher was very rude, chastising me for not bringing a pencil, etc. We proceeded with the experiment, which had me choosing how much to shock a person on the other side of a window when he gave incorrect answers to questions. I had not yet learned about the Milgram experiment, so I didn’t realize this was related.
It turned out that many of these experiments involved deception of the student participants, with the researchers studying something other than what it seemed. In this case, they were testing whether a subject would deliver more shocks if he were pissed off or otherwise upset when the experiment began. The researchers were rude and abusive to some subjects, nice and flattering with others.
I wasn’t actually shocking anyone, of course, but I thought I was. I didn’t deliver very much shock.