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The Milgram Experiment[1] shows that most people do go along with what an authority figure tells them. It’s one of the more depressing experiments in social psy

• DanBC 8y ago
  The Milgram experiment shows people will role-play if you put them in a role play situation. It doesn't tell you anything about what people do in the real world in real situations.
  • spamizbad 8y ago
    That’s just not correct. In the original form of the experiment (and several subsequent replications), the “teacher” was under the impression everything was real and wasn’t aware the “learner” (the person pretending to get shocked) was an actor. Today, you’d never get an ethics board to approve the experiment in this form, as several former “teachers” were distraught, after being told the true nature of the experiment, because they naturally assumed they’d never be capable of such terrible acts. There is no evidence to support the view that the “teachers” who administered dangerous shocks were somehow clued into the fact that it was an actor. That would have made the entire experiment worthless, as “Will people pretend to do evil things while role playing?” isn’t an interesting question because thats well understood to be true. Milgram set out specifically to see if every-day people would commit acts that go against their personal conscience if directed to do so by authority.
    • tptacek 8y ago
      Eh. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/12/interviews-with-milgram-participants-provide-little-support-for-the-contemporary-theory-of-engaged-followership/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/12/interviews-with-milgram...
      • mannykannot 8y ago
        That is an interesting article. There are certainly lots of reasons for thinking that the behavior of the participants was much more complicated than is sometimes presented, but nevertheless, it seems not beyond possibility that, when questioned after the event, participants might have made somewhat self-serving statements about actions of theirs that they may have had qualms about at the time. I find it interesting that the article makes an issue over the point that "the majority do not appear to have continued out of commitment to science," as this particular motivation seems to me to be one of the lesser issues raised by the exercise.
    • DanBC 8y ago
      > That would have made the entire experiment worthless, Welcome to psychology in the 1960s.
  • mannykannot 8y ago
    If the participants thought they were in a real-word situation -- and apparently many did -- then their responses (which were varied) do raise questions about real-world behavior.
• d0mine 8y ago
  As I understand it, it is an optimistic experiment: almost a third of people can think for themselves and won't torture only because they were given an order. Some of us are not automatons :) https://www.xkcd.com/610/ https://www.xkcd.com/610/
  • anigbrowl 8y ago
    I fail to see what's 'optimistic' about that. By those numbers, independent-minded people are outnumbered 2:1 by tools. Those numbers are likely way off the mark given both the tiny number and relative homogeneity of subjects in the original study, and the decades that have since passed with all the social and cultural changes. But the fact that so many populist politicians choose to predicate their campaigns on increasing animus towards some marginalized social group suggests there's quite a lot of people who either don't want to think for themselves or select for authority figures that will permit them to indulge their worst impulses.
    • tomjakubowski 8y ago
      It's not obvious that it's a binary classification of people into buckets labeled "independent thinker" and "drone / tool". Surely every social person participates in groupthink to some contextually-dependent degree.
      • anigbrowl 8y ago
        It becomes binary when people are ordered to harm someone else and must decide whether or not to obey. I picked the word tool not as an insult but as a descriptor of a person who has allowed themselves to be so instrumentalized.