14 ms·

Why do we keep repeating the Milgram experiments?

65 points by mr_golyadkin 12y ago

JonnieCache 12y ago
Many of these same things can be said about the Zimbardo study. They would both work extremely well on stage. Has this ever been done?
- whitingx 12y ago
  Not sure about on stage but there's a few film depictions related to the Milgram experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Media_depictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Media_depict... And looks to be a stage play based on Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#In_popular_culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#In_p... http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/ABSOLUT-Fringe-2012-Broadening-Glass-Doll-Productions/211/3254.htm http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/ABSOLUT-Fringe-2012-...
  - brazzy 12y ago
    There is also a German movie (and an American direct-to-video remake) inspired by the Stanford Prison Experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experiment_%282010_film%29 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".
    - bitJericho 12y ago
      Having been familiar with the Zimbardo experiment I went and saw the American version in the theater. It was really over the top, but an interesting watch. It shared little reality with the real experiment of course.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  The Experiment (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0997152/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0997152/) is a fictional version of the Zimbardo study with Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker.
tofof 12y ago
I know it's a nitpick, but it irks me to no end to see things like "about a tenth of one per cent (.125) of subjects". Particularly so when it's in articles submitted to sites, like Hacker News, whose audience presumably instantly recognizes "an eighth of one per cent" when they see it.
- pcrh 12y ago
  0.125 would be 12.5%...
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    1% / 8 = 0.125%
    - albedoa 12y ago
      Yes, but the article didn't carry the unit, which is important here. There are a couple problems with that line.
      - bitJericho 12y ago
        It didn't need to carry the unit because it specified the unit in the description ("about a tenth of one per cent"). Further, I'm not sure why anybody would confuse 12 percent with about 1/10th of 1 percent. I think we're arguing semantics now!
        albedoa 12y ago
        I don't know what to tell you! I suppose it's semantics in that it's logically wrong. Here are three correct ways to write what they meant (from most to least preferable): "an eighth of one per cent (.125%)" "an eighth of one per cent (.00125)" "an eighth of one (.125) per cent"
bertil 12y ago
> the Milgram experiments 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.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Perhaps we repeat the experiments because we have been influenced by a perceived authority into doing so.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  Haha nice irony there. It's indeed a fundamental principal in science. Not really sure why the author is complaining about that!
- skrebbel 12y ago
  In a related vein, may I humbly suggest you start work on Roko's Basilisk? It would be displeased to find you had been slacking off.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Someday there will be a more powerful being than the Basilisk. I'm helping build that one.
aaron695 12y ago
Milgram, Zimbardo, Freud, Mythical Man-Month, Peopleware, The Capilano Suspension Bridge, Elevator.... 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.
- the_af 12y ago
  > Mythical Man-Month 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.
- endersshadow 12y ago
  I don't know enough about the others to make too much of a sweeping statement on them, but the heart of Mythical Man-Month is absolutely true and valid. It just has a bad title, so people assume it means something it doesn't. 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.
- john_b 12y ago
  If you're going to make sweeping generalizations about a whole class of ideas and people, please provide something to back up your assertions. As is, your comment only offers an opinion.
- chippy 12y ago
  >we may never have passed to the next level 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?
Confusion 12y ago
Abu Ghraib. 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.
HumanG33k 12y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w_nlgekIzw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w_nlgekIzw
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
byerley 12y ago
I find something deeply annoying about journalists using pop-psychology to criticize real psychology. 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.
- V-2 12y ago
  Critique of Milgram's experiment by Erich Fromm (acclaimed pop psychologist): http://www.angelfire.com/or3/tss2/fromilg.html http://www.angelfire.com/or3/tss2/fromilg.html Why the downvote? Tl;dr, or had no better argument than that? :)
  - Retric 12y ago
    To paraphrase a researcher: "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.
    - V-2 12y ago
      Unlike a downvote, this is something to which I can reply. 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.
      - Retric 12y ago
        Suppose you read a paper and think. Ahh but they where used blue towels if they used red towels things would be different! Great, but until you try that you don't actually know what changes that has. So, doing anything else but running the experement is basically a waste of time. (Pointing out say a math error is generally not considered critique.) As to psychological experiments there reproduceable even if they don't generalize. So, clearly your measuring something.
Synaesthesia 12y ago
The Milgram experiments reveal an interesting facet of human behaviour. I was scammed by criminals posing as cops. I did what they told me to, even though I realized I shouldn't have.
protonfish 12y ago
I think the reason we keep seeing this over and over without any great insight is due to cognitive dissonance. Even after the Milgram experiments, not to mention countless wars, cruelty, genocide, domestic abuse, scapegoating, prejudice, persecution, and all other shameful acts of humanity that fill the history books, we can't bring ourselves to believe that authority is bad. We keep looking for a different interpretation or experiment to exonerate unquestioning obedience but it never happens.
- chippy 12y ago
  We think that humans have grown up and developed?
  - protonfish 12y ago
    I don't think that is relevant. The justifications behind the self-delusion of doublethink can be unique to each individual.
    - hderms 12y ago
      I think it absolutely is relevant. Our society is obsessed with the concept of self-actualization, and self-expression in the midst of an electronically connected populace. The average person has more of a 'voice' than they ever had before (at least proportional to population). I don't think that anything has changed in society that would change the results of the experiments, but the narrative of the modern society is definitely about humans "growing up and developing".
  - otakucode 12y ago
    That would be a radically dangerous position to adopt. It is exactly the position which fueled colonialism. They thought they had grown up as well and were in a position to 'help' the rest of humanity grow with them - into being driven primarily by economic motives dedicated to suppressing every counter-productive urge to pleasure that humans experience. 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.
whiddershins 12y ago
One thing I've always wondered about these experiments: why do we assume humans can't (perhaps subconsciously) tell that the person in pain is faking? 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?
- Totient 12y ago
  There was a followup using actual shocks on a puppy. Similar results: http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf
abruzzi 12y ago
"Another obedient subject remonstrates after she’s finished obeying, because she quickly understands what the experiment was really about and is disgusted." 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.
- otakucode 12y ago
  And that shame only comes about because they do not have the shelter of crying "I was only doing my job!" or "I was only following orders!" 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.
GuiA 12y ago
> The Jewish gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin emigrated from Berlin to the US when Hitler came to power in 1933. Three years later, he would publish the founding equation of social psychology: B = f (P, E), meaning that behaviour is a function of a person in their environment ... 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...
briandh 12y ago
There's no need to "psychoanalyse" the field to find out why people repeat (with variations -- which is an important detail) the Milgram experiments; (nearly) all research papers contain clear statements about their motivations. 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!
dang 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20150905234626/http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-do-we-keep-repeating-the-milgram-experiments/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150905234626/http://aeon.co/mag...

65 points by mr_golyadkin 12y ago

Many of these same things can be said about the Zimbardo study. They would both work extremely well on stage. Has this ever been done?

whitingx 12y ago
Not sure about on stage but there's a few film depictions related to the Milgram experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Media_depictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Media_depict... And looks to be a stage play based on Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#In_popular_culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#In_p... http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/ABSOLUT-Fringe-2012-Broadening-Glass-Doll-Productions/211/3254.htm http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/ABSOLUT-Fringe-2012-...
- brazzy 12y ago
  There is also a German movie (and an American direct-to-video remake) inspired by the Stanford Prison Experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experiment_%282010_film%29 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".
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    Having been familiar with the Zimbardo experiment I went and saw the American version in the theater. It was really over the top, but an interesting watch. It shared little reality with the real experiment of course.
seanflyon 12y ago
The Experiment (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0997152/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0997152/) is a fictional version of the Zimbardo study with Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker.

tofof 12y ago

I know it's a nitpick, but it irks me to no end to see things like "about a tenth of one per cent (.125) of subjects". Particularly so when it's in articles submitted to sites, like Hacker News, whose audience presumably instantly recognizes "an eighth of one per cent" when they see it.

pcrh 12y ago
0.125 would be 12.5%...
- bitJericho 12y ago
  1% / 8 = 0.125%
  - albedoa 12y ago
    Yes, but the article didn't carry the unit, which is important here. There are a couple problems with that line.
    - bitJericho 12y ago
      It didn't need to carry the unit because it specified the unit in the description ("about a tenth of one per cent"). Further, I'm not sure why anybody would confuse 12 percent with about 1/10th of 1 percent. I think we're arguing semantics now!
      - albedoa 12y ago
        I don't know what to tell you! I suppose it's semantics in that it's logically wrong. Here are three correct ways to write what they meant (from most to least preferable): "an eighth of one per cent (.125%)" "an eighth of one per cent (.00125)" "an eighth of one (.125) per cent"

bertil 12y ago

> the Milgram experiments 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.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Perhaps we repeat the experiments because we have been influenced by a perceived authority into doing so.

bitJericho 12y ago
Haha nice irony there. It's indeed a fundamental principal in science. Not really sure why the author is complaining about that!
skrebbel 12y ago
In a related vein, may I humbly suggest you start work on Roko's Basilisk? It would be displeased to find you had been slacking off.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Someday there will be a more powerful being than the Basilisk. I'm helping build that one.

aaron695 12y ago

Milgram, Zimbardo, Freud, Mythical Man-Month, Peopleware, The Capilano Suspension Bridge, Elevator.... 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.

the_af 12y ago
> Mythical Man-Month 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.
endersshadow 12y ago
I don't know enough about the others to make too much of a sweeping statement on them, but the heart of Mythical Man-Month is absolutely true and valid. It just has a bad title, so people assume it means something it doesn't. 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.
john_b 12y ago
If you're going to make sweeping generalizations about a whole class of ideas and people, please provide something to back up your assertions. As is, your comment only offers an opinion.
chippy 12y ago
>we may never have passed to the next level 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?

Confusion 12y ago

Abu Ghraib. 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.

HumanG33k 12y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w_nlgekIzw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w_nlgekIzw

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

byerley 12y ago

I find something deeply annoying about journalists using pop-psychology to criticize real psychology. 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.

V-2 12y ago
Critique of Milgram's experiment by Erich Fromm (acclaimed pop psychologist): http://www.angelfire.com/or3/tss2/fromilg.html http://www.angelfire.com/or3/tss2/fromilg.html Why the downvote? Tl;dr, or had no better argument than that? :)
- Retric 12y ago
  To paraphrase a researcher: "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.
  - V-2 12y ago
    Unlike a downvote, this is something to which I can reply. 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.
    - Retric 12y ago
      Suppose you read a paper and think. Ahh but they where used blue towels if they used red towels things would be different! Great, but until you try that you don't actually know what changes that has. So, doing anything else but running the experement is basically a waste of time. (Pointing out say a math error is generally not considered critique.) As to psychological experiments there reproduceable even if they don't generalize. So, clearly your measuring something.

Synaesthesia 12y ago

The Milgram experiments reveal an interesting facet of human behaviour. I was scammed by criminals posing as cops. I did what they told me to, even though I realized I shouldn't have.

protonfish 12y ago

I think the reason we keep seeing this over and over without any great insight is due to cognitive dissonance. Even after the Milgram experiments, not to mention countless wars, cruelty, genocide, domestic abuse, scapegoating, prejudice, persecution, and all other shameful acts of humanity that fill the history books, we can't bring ourselves to believe that authority is bad. We keep looking for a different interpretation or experiment to exonerate unquestioning obedience but it never happens.

chippy 12y ago
We think that humans have grown up and developed?
- protonfish 12y ago
  I don't think that is relevant. The justifications behind the self-delusion of doublethink can be unique to each individual.
  - hderms 12y ago
    I think it absolutely is relevant. Our society is obsessed with the concept of self-actualization, and self-expression in the midst of an electronically connected populace. The average person has more of a 'voice' than they ever had before (at least proportional to population). I don't think that anything has changed in society that would change the results of the experiments, but the narrative of the modern society is definitely about humans "growing up and developing".
- otakucode 12y ago
  That would be a radically dangerous position to adopt. It is exactly the position which fueled colonialism. They thought they had grown up as well and were in a position to 'help' the rest of humanity grow with them - into being driven primarily by economic motives dedicated to suppressing every counter-productive urge to pleasure that humans experience. 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.

whiddershins 12y ago

One thing I've always wondered about these experiments: why do we assume humans can't (perhaps subconsciously) tell that the person in pain is faking? 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?

Totient 12y ago
There was a followup using actual shocks on a puppy. Similar results: http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf

abruzzi 12y ago

"Another obedient subject remonstrates after she’s finished obeying, because she quickly understands what the experiment was really about and is disgusted." 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.

otakucode 12y ago
And that shame only comes about because they do not have the shelter of crying "I was only doing my job!" or "I was only following orders!" 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.

GuiA 12y ago

> The Jewish gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin emigrated from Berlin to the US when Hitler came to power in 1933. Three years later, he would publish the founding equation of social psychology: B = f (P, E), meaning that behaviour is a function of a person in their environment ... 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...

briandh 12y ago

There's no need to "psychoanalyse" the field to find out why people repeat (with variations -- which is an important detail) the Milgram experiments; (nearly) all research papers contain clear statements about their motivations. 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!

dang 4y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20150905234626/http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-do-we-keep-repeating-the-milgram-experiments/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150905234626/http://aeon.co/mag...