9 ms·

What it takes to stand up to authority

73 points by robinoh 8y ago

lucideer 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand the grammar of the HN title. What does "goes in length" mean?
- osrec 8y ago
  I think they mean 'in detail'
  - jackstraw14 8y ago
    Could also be 'at length'
- rubbingalcohol 8y ago
  "The BBC goes in length" made me do a smirking double-take, but I have a sophomoric sense of humor.
- sctb 8y ago
  We've reverted the submitted title of “The BBC goes in length about research showing how our brain responds to coercion” to that of the article.
grzm 8y ago
Actual article title: "What it takes to stand up to authority"
kstenerud 8y ago
> Assigning negative term after term to harmless groups of people was intended to be emotionally wearing and to make most participants feel uncomfortable. Plenty dropped out as it got more intense. For those who carried on, it was a belief that they were contributing to something important – a rigorous scientific study – that drove them to push through. It's a pretty sloppy to assume that they believed this because of an authority figure.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Too many factors go into determining what fatigues a person emotionally, and the response in the event of emotional fatigue is just as unpredictable for every person. Even non-conformists conform. It's just a blind spot because you don't know how to actually see that you are continuously behaving in a particular way, that rigorously adheres to some behavior that has yet to be described or defined. I can be a non-conformist by always doing the opposite of what everyone I observe does. I'm still conforming to a pattern, that's capable of being studied, followed, predicted, and eventually, that pattern will have to change too, to remain true to some spirit of non-conformity, if that's my highest value. Thankfully it's not. But authority, conformity, group think, individuality. There's more than one way to see it. Psychology is a sloppy science because people can always change these things. Just have to analyze it enough, detect the pattern of being detected, and override it. People being able to be individuals without an all seeing eye of meticulous study is important to me. That can be mentally fatiguing for plenty of people. I don't know if it matters how important their belief in the study is, if the means contradicts the intention. Life is ridiculous.
- otakucode 8y ago
  I found that study a really strange one as well. They seem to be operating on the tacit assumption that all of the participants are mush-minded simpletons who think "assigning negative terms" in some study somehow had some relevance to anything anywhere in the world. That's absurd. I invite you to find yourself a quiet room and dedicate yourself to writing the most insidious, invective, negative diatribes aimed at me personally that you are capable of manufacturing. You could do it for decades, and absolutely nothing would come of it. Anyone who believes differently is both wrong and probably has some mild form of mental illness which causes them to conflate their own thought processes and imagination with reality. Asking a person to assign negative terms to photos is as consequential as asking them to whistle or drum their fingers on a desk. It is meaningless and utterly amoral in content. We're not talking about even applying the terms to actual people, but to images. And they're not being monitored or published. There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and totally meaningless.
  - deleted 8y ago
tajen 8y ago
Isn’t that a reproduction of the (well-criticized) Stanford experiment, which already didn’t need to be demonstrated because we already demonstrated it with the Nazi horror?
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  But it did need to be demonstrated. "That could never happen here, not in our country" needed to be refuted.
- otakucode 8y ago
  The distinction here is some further evidence of the actual mechanism through which this operates, and, critically, evidence that we can actively work to improve our ability to challenge immoral authority. The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and 'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and denigrate any attempts to change it.
  - mockingbirdy 8y ago
    Then we would need to train everyone to be essentially an ubermensch - they need to be able to operate on meta-levels and use metacognition all the time. This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about oneself and ones' own values. So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high expectations won't help us, anyway. - - - I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can happen pretty fast.
squozzer 8y ago
I'm not sure we can do much to understand the role of authority without understanding the role of conditioning in what makes people act. For instance, why are most schools so regimented and rule-rich? For efficiency, certainly, but not all school rules increased efficiency. I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.
- specialist 8y ago
  Filed under "believe, but cannot prove": Whereas I thought anxiety (or lack of) was first order predictor someone's behavior (eg conservative vs liberal), I now think the root is someone's fear response. Reformulated: fear -> anxiety -> (submission to) authority
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules. If it existed, it seems like there would be evidence of this, in the literatures of educational research, training, and school management. I doubt there is conspiracy of school principals. Schools are bureaucracies, and like every bureaucracy they have rules, often rules that seem nonsensical to people who haven't had to manage one. People feel like companies and other organizations are overly regimented too.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    I don't think that's true. For one, there are many publications about strict education and until relatively recently, it was the leading school of thought; we have movies featuring them, even praising them (Harry Potter for example - that was an example of a school lead as a benevolent dictatorship - that of course turned out bad later in the series). For two, people mostly don't read books about parenting but then they're parenting their kids somehow - how? Well, with whatever they picked up from their parents, TV, fiction books... Isn't it possible that it might be the same with teaching? I have some experience with working in education. Most of my former colleagues almost never think about the way they teach; you ask them why did they punish a student for disobedience (aka "he drank water even though I told him not to") and they say "because that's how it's done", you asked them why are they explaining something in that way and they don't know, they just do.
malmsteen 8y ago
I've never understood how the classic interpretation of milgram that "people can become monster under authority" were remotely relevant. "hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large proportion if not all humans. That's why we've had so many wars in the history, bullys at school and abuse in generally ANY UNREGULATED ENVIRONEMENT (chrisitan schools in the 50s in france for example, prisons and in some way even the weinstein compagny). That's also why a lot of us love watching MMA, boxing, and why many people love, even secretly because society doesn't acknowledge this feeling, going at war [1]. We can argue all day whether it stems from a domination instinct, a fear of our own weakness or how this instincs have to be channeled into a more constructive force / healthy contribution for society but the point is that this instinct exists... probably in most persons. At some point i suspect most participants in milgram experiment switched from the "this is horrible" voice in their head to the "my feelings tells me it's not horrible I feel in power it's cool I almost like it plus there's authority so i wont get punished so it's fine". It's not so much of a big deal. [1] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-lo...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- whytaka 8y ago
  > I've never understood how the classic interpretation of milgram that "people can become monster under authority" were remotely relevant. > "hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large proportion if not all humans. Many societies convince themselves that they are civilized and others are not.
- projektir 8y ago
  Claiming that people love war seems like a pretty dangerous statement to me without some very solid study. There's a lot going on there, most notably, trauma. People who went to war are not necessarily the people who come back.
  - dsego 8y ago
jpfed 8y ago
>Studies on patients with localised brain damage are helping to answer part of this question. When people have lesions in the prefrontal cortex – the outermost layer of the front part the brain – they appear to be much more prone to following orders than the general population. WOW, that's going to come in handy when some government decides to weaponize it.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  How would a government weaponize this? By going around damaging people's brains with brute force?
  - Theodores 8y ago
    The answer is in the article, oddly enough. The BBC is at one level all about free speech, uniquely funded and good for you. At another level it is deeply tied into the military establishment in the UK. Since the beginning job applicants have had to pass the Room 101 test and that is a real thing - any socialist types simply did not get employed. They would not be blacklisted and unable to work in the industry, however, the commercial channels (ITV) did not pay for training, you had to get that from the BBC and then you could work elsewhere thanks to that experience. To quote Napoleon (the old enemy) "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." The BBC has approximately four TV channels that shape the minds of the British public. Consequently people in the UK are highly invested in a set of ideas that cannot be thrown out on a wholesale basis. From time to time there will be high profile events that get reported by the BBC in a way that is not consistent with facts on the ground. Yet people will attend such an event, go home and, despite seeing events with their own eyes, decide that they must have understood the situation incorrectly to believe what 'Auntie BBC' said, to then take that on as the 'correct' interpretation of events. To think otherwise, i.e. to 'believe' one's own eyes requires a subversive mindset or, as is more likely to be the case, a conspiracy minded mindset where everything from moon landings to flouride is up for reinterpretation. We have all met those types of people - 'nutters' - so those that did see something different to the reported story learn not to say what they saw with their own eyes. To do so would cast them out of the herd and in with the 'nutter herd'. We are social animals and being outcast like that is worse than death. If someone who happens to be sane does relate 'what they saw with their own eyes' to the rest of the herd then it is unlikely that members of the wider herd are going to believe them even if they do not come along with 'moon landings/contrails/whatever' baggage. This is because they are highly invested in the BBC world view and the latitude that it allows. The spectrum will range from Hillary to Trump but not as far as Bernie. Bernie is mainstream, but you get the idea. It is a fixed stage, outside this allowed latitude there will be terrorists and the KKK. The voice of protest will be allowed in this Overton Window with people such as Russell Brand or, in times gone past, Tony Benn. These folk don't have to be 'covert CIA operatives acting as gatekeepers', they just operate within the same Overton Window as everyone else, playing their role quite naturally, the sponges for dissenting voices that don't go along with whomever is in Number 10. The implications of going with the BBC world view are generally good. You can go on anti-Trump protests posting your pics onto Instagram so everyone knows you are solidly against racism and whatever else it is easy to object to. There is no danger of being cast outside the herd. The BBC has a veritable 'full spectrum dominance' with radio all around the world, the web as well as their mainstay 'free to air, advert free' television. Britain might not rule the waves any more but the airwaves are doing nicely. I have not given any incident of where reality and BBC reality differ, however, people that suffered at Hillsborough, people that lived through the miner's strike, people that were there at Bloody Sunday, people that were abused by BBC 'disc jockeys' have had this problem to live with. Due to injustice they have had to 'rebel'. Nobody could speak out about the 'disc jockey' whose name we do not speak of until he died and was buried under six foot of concrete (he knew that his grave would not lay undisturbed). Yet everyone in the BBC knew. And in the wider press. And he was only a 'disc jockey' without any nuclear weapons or henchmen. Hence, in the UK at least, the BBC is how the government has weaponised 'mind control' and made questioning authority not something one does. People just do not have the mindset to do so as they have been encultured to be British.
yontherubicon 8y ago
Hmmm, I wonder if there might be some evolutionary reason why we shouldn't do this? I mean it's not like a deferrence to authority allows human beings to coordinate and work together efficiently. Hierarchies are totally inefficient ways to work together and get things done. /s EDIT: A paper that is very much worth reading: https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy
pdimitar 8y ago
> Being able to stand up to authority doesn’t hinge on bravery or courage, confidence or stubbornness. The brain processes and regions essential for rejecting ideas from authority figures are starting to be revealed. Nonsense. Sure everything stems from chemical processes in our bodies, including the brain -- of course. But they breed the bravery, courage, confidence and stubbornness. I don't see why we must contrast these two things. They have a one-directional causation link between them.

73 points by robinoh 8y ago

lucideer 8y ago

I'm not sure I understand the grammar of the HN title. What does "goes in length" mean?

osrec 8y ago
I think they mean 'in detail'
- jackstraw14 8y ago
  Could also be 'at length'
rubbingalcohol 8y ago
"The BBC goes in length" made me do a smirking double-take, but I have a sophomoric sense of humor.
sctb 8y ago
We've reverted the submitted title of “The BBC goes in length about research showing how our brain responds to coercion” to that of the article.

grzm 8y ago

Actual article title: "What it takes to stand up to authority"

kstenerud 8y ago

> Assigning negative term after term to harmless groups of people was intended to be emotionally wearing and to make most participants feel uncomfortable. Plenty dropped out as it got more intense. For those who carried on, it was a belief that they were contributing to something important – a rigorous scientific study – that drove them to push through. It's a pretty sloppy to assume that they believed this because of an authority figure.

s-shellfish 8y ago
Too many factors go into determining what fatigues a person emotionally, and the response in the event of emotional fatigue is just as unpredictable for every person. Even non-conformists conform. It's just a blind spot because you don't know how to actually see that you are continuously behaving in a particular way, that rigorously adheres to some behavior that has yet to be described or defined. I can be a non-conformist by always doing the opposite of what everyone I observe does. I'm still conforming to a pattern, that's capable of being studied, followed, predicted, and eventually, that pattern will have to change too, to remain true to some spirit of non-conformity, if that's my highest value. Thankfully it's not. But authority, conformity, group think, individuality. There's more than one way to see it. Psychology is a sloppy science because people can always change these things. Just have to analyze it enough, detect the pattern of being detected, and override it. People being able to be individuals without an all seeing eye of meticulous study is important to me. That can be mentally fatiguing for plenty of people. I don't know if it matters how important their belief in the study is, if the means contradicts the intention. Life is ridiculous.
otakucode 8y ago
I found that study a really strange one as well. They seem to be operating on the tacit assumption that all of the participants are mush-minded simpletons who think "assigning negative terms" in some study somehow had some relevance to anything anywhere in the world. That's absurd. I invite you to find yourself a quiet room and dedicate yourself to writing the most insidious, invective, negative diatribes aimed at me personally that you are capable of manufacturing. You could do it for decades, and absolutely nothing would come of it. Anyone who believes differently is both wrong and probably has some mild form of mental illness which causes them to conflate their own thought processes and imagination with reality. Asking a person to assign negative terms to photos is as consequential as asking them to whistle or drum their fingers on a desk. It is meaningless and utterly amoral in content. We're not talking about even applying the terms to actual people, but to images. And they're not being monitored or published. There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and totally meaningless.
- deleted 8y ago

tajen 8y ago

Isn’t that a reproduction of the (well-criticized) Stanford experiment, which already didn’t need to be demonstrated because we already demonstrated it with the Nazi horror?

cellularmitosis 8y ago
But it did need to be demonstrated. "That could never happen here, not in our country" needed to be refuted.
otakucode 8y ago
The distinction here is some further evidence of the actual mechanism through which this operates, and, critically, evidence that we can actively work to improve our ability to challenge immoral authority. The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and 'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and denigrate any attempts to change it.
- mockingbirdy 8y ago
  Then we would need to train everyone to be essentially an ubermensch - they need to be able to operate on meta-levels and use metacognition all the time. This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about oneself and ones' own values. So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high expectations won't help us, anyway. - - - I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can happen pretty fast.

squozzer 8y ago

I'm not sure we can do much to understand the role of authority without understanding the role of conditioning in what makes people act. For instance, why are most schools so regimented and rule-rich? For efficiency, certainly, but not all school rules increased efficiency. I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.

specialist 8y ago
Filed under "believe, but cannot prove": Whereas I thought anxiety (or lack of) was first order predictor someone's behavior (eg conservative vs liberal), I now think the root is someone's fear response. Reformulated: fear -> anxiety -> (submission to) authority
forapurpose 8y ago
> I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules. If it existed, it seems like there would be evidence of this, in the literatures of educational research, training, and school management. I doubt there is conspiracy of school principals. Schools are bureaucracies, and like every bureaucracy they have rules, often rules that seem nonsensical to people who haven't had to manage one. People feel like companies and other organizations are overly regimented too.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  I don't think that's true. For one, there are many publications about strict education and until relatively recently, it was the leading school of thought; we have movies featuring them, even praising them (Harry Potter for example - that was an example of a school lead as a benevolent dictatorship - that of course turned out bad later in the series). For two, people mostly don't read books about parenting but then they're parenting their kids somehow - how? Well, with whatever they picked up from their parents, TV, fiction books... Isn't it possible that it might be the same with teaching? I have some experience with working in education. Most of my former colleagues almost never think about the way they teach; you ask them why did they punish a student for disobedience (aka "he drank water even though I told him not to") and they say "because that's how it's done", you asked them why are they explaining something in that way and they don't know, they just do.

malmsteen 8y ago

I've never understood how the classic interpretation of milgram that "people can become monster under authority" were remotely relevant. "hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large proportion if not all humans. That's why we've had so many wars in the history, bullys at school and abuse in generally ANY UNREGULATED ENVIRONEMENT (chrisitan schools in the 50s in france for example, prisons and in some way even the weinstein compagny). That's also why a lot of us love watching MMA, boxing, and why many people love, even secretly because society doesn't acknowledge this feeling, going at war [1]. We can argue all day whether it stems from a domination instinct, a fear of our own weakness or how this instincs have to be channeled into a more constructive force / healthy contribution for society but the point is that this instinct exists... probably in most persons. At some point i suspect most participants in milgram experiment switched from the "this is horrible" voice in their head to the "my feelings tells me it's not horrible I feel in power it's cool I almost like it plus there's authority so i wont get punished so it's fine". It's not so much of a big deal. [1] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-lo...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
whytaka 8y ago
> I've never understood how the classic interpretation of milgram that "people can become monster under authority" were remotely relevant. > "hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large proportion if not all humans. Many societies convince themselves that they are civilized and others are not.
projektir 8y ago
Claiming that people love war seems like a pretty dangerous statement to me without some very solid study. There's a lot going on there, most notably, trauma. People who went to war are not necessarily the people who come back.
- dsego 8y ago

jpfed 8y ago

>Studies on patients with localised brain damage are helping to answer part of this question. When people have lesions in the prefrontal cortex – the outermost layer of the front part the brain – they appear to be much more prone to following orders than the general population. WOW, that's going to come in handy when some government decides to weaponize it.

chrisco255 8y ago
How would a government weaponize this? By going around damaging people's brains with brute force?
- Theodores 8y ago
  The answer is in the article, oddly enough. The BBC is at one level all about free speech, uniquely funded and good for you. At another level it is deeply tied into the military establishment in the UK. Since the beginning job applicants have had to pass the Room 101 test and that is a real thing - any socialist types simply did not get employed. They would not be blacklisted and unable to work in the industry, however, the commercial channels (ITV) did not pay for training, you had to get that from the BBC and then you could work elsewhere thanks to that experience. To quote Napoleon (the old enemy) "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." The BBC has approximately four TV channels that shape the minds of the British public. Consequently people in the UK are highly invested in a set of ideas that cannot be thrown out on a wholesale basis. From time to time there will be high profile events that get reported by the BBC in a way that is not consistent with facts on the ground. Yet people will attend such an event, go home and, despite seeing events with their own eyes, decide that they must have understood the situation incorrectly to believe what 'Auntie BBC' said, to then take that on as the 'correct' interpretation of events. To think otherwise, i.e. to 'believe' one's own eyes requires a subversive mindset or, as is more likely to be the case, a conspiracy minded mindset where everything from moon landings to flouride is up for reinterpretation. We have all met those types of people - 'nutters' - so those that did see something different to the reported story learn not to say what they saw with their own eyes. To do so would cast them out of the herd and in with the 'nutter herd'. We are social animals and being outcast like that is worse than death. If someone who happens to be sane does relate 'what they saw with their own eyes' to the rest of the herd then it is unlikely that members of the wider herd are going to believe them even if they do not come along with 'moon landings/contrails/whatever' baggage. This is because they are highly invested in the BBC world view and the latitude that it allows. The spectrum will range from Hillary to Trump but not as far as Bernie. Bernie is mainstream, but you get the idea. It is a fixed stage, outside this allowed latitude there will be terrorists and the KKK. The voice of protest will be allowed in this Overton Window with people such as Russell Brand or, in times gone past, Tony Benn. These folk don't have to be 'covert CIA operatives acting as gatekeepers', they just operate within the same Overton Window as everyone else, playing their role quite naturally, the sponges for dissenting voices that don't go along with whomever is in Number 10. The implications of going with the BBC world view are generally good. You can go on anti-Trump protests posting your pics onto Instagram so everyone knows you are solidly against racism and whatever else it is easy to object to. There is no danger of being cast outside the herd. The BBC has a veritable 'full spectrum dominance' with radio all around the world, the web as well as their mainstay 'free to air, advert free' television. Britain might not rule the waves any more but the airwaves are doing nicely. I have not given any incident of where reality and BBC reality differ, however, people that suffered at Hillsborough, people that lived through the miner's strike, people that were there at Bloody Sunday, people that were abused by BBC 'disc jockeys' have had this problem to live with. Due to injustice they have had to 'rebel'. Nobody could speak out about the 'disc jockey' whose name we do not speak of until he died and was buried under six foot of concrete (he knew that his grave would not lay undisturbed). Yet everyone in the BBC knew. And in the wider press. And he was only a 'disc jockey' without any nuclear weapons or henchmen. Hence, in the UK at least, the BBC is how the government has weaponised 'mind control' and made questioning authority not something one does. People just do not have the mindset to do so as they have been encultured to be British.

yontherubicon 8y ago

Hmmm, I wonder if there might be some evolutionary reason why we shouldn't do this? I mean it's not like a deferrence to authority allows human beings to coordinate and work together efficiently. Hierarchies are totally inefficient ways to work together and get things done. /s EDIT: A paper that is very much worth reading: https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy

pdimitar 8y ago

> Being able to stand up to authority doesn’t hinge on bravery or courage, confidence or stubbornness. The brain processes and regions essential for rejecting ideas from authority figures are starting to be revealed. Nonsense. Sure everything stems from chemical processes in our bodies, including the brain -- of course. But they breed the bravery, courage, confidence and stubbornness. I don't see why we must contrast these two things. They have a one-directional causation link between them.