Stanley Milgram's shocking experiment, redux

A Santa Clara University professor is the latest person to replicate Stanley Milgram's shocking 1960s psychological experiments around obedience to authority. As regular BB readers know, Yale University social psychologist Milgram's most infamous study involved subjects administering apparently painful and even lethal electric shocks to others just because an authority figure in a lab coat told them to. Times have changed, but people haven't. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Burger found that 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped from escalating shocks over 150 volts, despite hearing cries of protest and pain. Decades earlier, Milgram found that 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks. Of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator's end, at 450 volts.

Burger's experiment did not go that far.

"The conclusion is not: 'Gosh isn't this a horrible commentary on human nature,' or 'these people were so sadistic,'' said Burger.

"It shows the opposite – that there are situational forces that have a much greater impact on our behavior than most people recognize,'' he said.

"Santa Clara University professor mirrors famous torture study" (Thanks, Robert Pescovitz!)

Previously:

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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urshrew

At first I was surprised that they could find enough people who weren’t aware of the original experiment, but then I was surprised to be surprised by that fact.

I have never been able to jive the results of this experiment into my everyday thinking, but I remember it generating a lot of fear in my heart when I first heard about it. Although, the more I examined the results, the better I came to understand why such a thing occurs, and why this experiment is so important. Not everyone took pleasure in the act, but continued doing it anyway, I found that to be oddly comforting, and sad.
Brainspore

…quite a large percentage of the test subjects ought to recognize the situation from somewhere.

And when that happens, they might go OMG, I’m actually IN the Milgram experiment! How cool is that!

They might, in the unlikely event that Burger didn’t control for that in his selection process. But given that he ran the same experiment and got the very same results, it seems far more likely that human nature has just remained the same and the experimental data is valid.
Brainspore

I also recommend reading Chip Kidd’s The Learners, a novel set around Milgram’s experiment that also has a lot of great discussion about graphic design.
Cicada

Actually, the test subjects could have zapped the “victim” to the most painful without the least bit of ethical dilemma– because they could presume that if the “victim” didn’t want to be shocked (i.e, withdrew his consent), he could get up, unstrap himself, say “Screw you, your experiment, and your entire crop of grad students” and walk out.
EeyoreX

Brainspore, you’re kinda missing my main point here. Sure you can screen for and eliminate all test subects who have heard of the Milgram experiment. And maybe prof Burger did.
But today ther results of that experiment is, well, rather common knowlege, so any test group assembled on that premise wouldnt really be representing the common population.
GregLondon

they could presume that if the “victim” didn’t want to be shocked (i.e, withdrew his consent), he could get up

Yeah, that’s an important distinction that gets missed on a lot of the folks who want to jump up and down about how these kinds of tests show how evil all humans are.

If your experiment takes random people off the street and presents them with a person being held against their will and someone asks the person off the street to administer electrical shocks, I think you’d find a slightly different result in the types and number of responses.

If the person being shocked has made it clear they’re doing it voluntarily, that changes the morality significantly. I knew a guy who volunteered for some medical experiment one summer during college. it was some sort of not-yet-FDA-approved drug that they were trying to get results for. He showed me the form he had to sign and basically he had to waive the right to hold the testing company liable even if he died. Was I supposed to stop him? What if I got a job working for the medical company? Should I not administer it to someone who volunteered to test the drug, is getting paid to test the drug, and can withdraw at any time from testing?

I do not for a second doubt that there are individuals out there who are evil, murderers, tortorers, and so on. But I see a lot of these psychological experiments and I see how some want to use them as vindication for their lack of faith in all humanity, and I just have to shrug.
GregLondon

Ah, they boil the frog. First they acclimate the person to giving the shock by having them do it under “harmless” conditions, the person receiving the shock is voluntarily going along with the experiment, the “voltage level” is “low”, and so on. Once they acclimate the person to giving someone else a shock, they ramp up the voltage and take away the voluntary aspect of the person receiving the shocks. He protests, he pounds on the wall, he goes silent.

Had it been established from teh start that the recipient was being held against his will and the shocks were potentially lethal, I believe you would get a fundamentally different response.

All this experiment really demonstrates is that a lot of people base their morality off of specific action-based rules: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, and once you’ve gotten them to accept that the act is OK, their morality meter has a hard time reassessing the morality of the act under different circumstances.

If you start off with a scenario that clearly violated their action-based rules of morality, i.e. some innocent person, held against their will, being electrocuted, and their life put in danger, I’d be willing to wager that most people would refuse.

It isn’t so much that the “authority” tells them to do it, its that the experiment gets beyond the first hurdle of morality, that of simple action-based rules. Once you’ve gotten them to perform the action and integrate it into their mind as an “OK” action, then it becomes harder for them to reasses and reevaluate and realize that it would be wrong to continue.

And yeah, this is true for most poeple. Most people don’t admit they are wrong, even to themselves.

Some might want to extract something about the terribleness of the human condition from this, but the lesson I see is that anyone who has to work with the use of force must have an extreme level of training to make sure they know exactly where the line of right and wrong are in any moment.

The stanford prison experiment does a similar thing. It took untrained people who’ve never had to test their action-based morality and puts them into situations where their morality actually has to be tested at extreme conditions and most likely will fail. People don’t make good prison guards by default. If you want to make that mean something about the terribleness of humanity as a whole, I guess you can do that, but I personally don’t buy it.

Take random people off the street and put them into the cockpits of helicopters and a lot of them will fail to fly straight. Does that say anything about their capacity for flying? Or does it simply say that they need training?

Take random people off the street and put them into life and death situations, combat situations, and a lot of them will probably fail. Does that say anything about their capacity for doing the right thing? Or does it simply say that they need training?

Most people dont’ question or reevalutate their morality until it fails them. And most people off the street haven’t been thrown into a life and death situation to truly test their morality. So if you throw them into a life-and-death decision, a lot of them will probably fail.
Cicada

@#45- I suppose there’s the basic question of why people listen to authority in the first place.
GregLondon

I suppose there’s the basic question of why people listen to authority in the first place.

I think the pop psychology version is that we needed to listen to authority when we were young, i.e. listen to our parents when we were kids, to survive saber tooth tiger attacks.

It still has survival uses today, i.e. don’t talk to strangers, etc, but I think the point where people stop defering to authority when they come of age isn’t quite as strong of a survival requirement to defer to authority when they’re six years old.
Brainspore

#35:

I respectfully disagree with your assumption that so many people are familiar with the original experiment. It may have been a famous study as such things go, but I’d bet that most Americans would probably return a blank stare if you mentioned the name “Stanley Milgram.”

People today still believe that every German who fought for the Nazis was a demon incarnate and that no decent person would have done what our troops ultimately did at Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, systemic abuses of power continue because people refuse to see the value of basic safeguards. This was one lesson about human nature that went largely unlearned.
Brainspore

@Greglondon: I think you’ve made an excellent point with the “boiling the frog” analogy. But taking each incremental step down the path of evil becomes much easier when there is the so-called “voice of authority” sanctioning it.

@Cicada: As Greglondon pointed out, the experiment is structured in a way to make it GRADUALLY apparent that the experiment is run by psychopaths who are willing to subject a person to harm against their will.
Brainspore

I suppose there’s the basic question of why people listen to authority in the first place.

Most of the time people in positions of authority are supposed to know more than ordinary people about their subject of expertise. Children look to their parents for guidance about the world around them, tribes look to their elders for experience, and laypeople trust the guys in lab coats about proper laboratory procedure.

The basic instinct to defer to authority is very easy to understand, the problem is that it can obviously go too far.
Brainspore

Good thing this wasn’t around for the Nuremberg trials.

I’m not so sure. As a society we like to think that monstrous acts are only perpetrated by monsters, and thus we often fail to recognize the signs of a coming atrocity until it’s too late. The Nuremberg trials were designed to find individuals responsible for horrors that were systemic.

Good people can be persuaded to do terrible things. Just look what happened in Rumsfeld’s defense department.
Cowicide

I kinda funny how that was around Bush’s percentage of popularity for a while. All hail the 30 percent!!!
holtt

I wonder if you could flip the actions people are taking – like have them feed hungry people or something. Do they just keep shoveling food to starving kids even if the kids go, “Hey thanks – there’s enough here for a year!”
Takuan

always think of this title when Milgram comes up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_City
GregLondon

But taking each incremental step down the path of evil becomes much easier when there is the so-called “voice of authority” sanctioning it.

Yeah and someone could just as easily see the problem with deferring to authority and over-correct to the point that they believe that no authority can tell anyone to do anything that is against their will and be moral. At which point, you get into the problems associated with stick figure libertarianism and other worldviews that worship individual choice to the point that it does not allow any group authority at all.

At which point you’ve got a different path that is just as evil.

Which is to say that there are a whole lot of different ways to get to hell. None of them are really any better than the others.
Teller

My son told me about this the other day. I told him the experiment failed to account for how much we like using any kind of remote control gadget. I think I missed the point.
Ernunnos

If they can be persuaded to do terrible things, they’re not “good people”. There are people who have the sense and the sense to say “no”. Calling those who don’t “good” is an insult to the ones who actually are good.
Cowicide

crap, when’s there gonna be an edit button for posts… bah…
bardfinn

Gosh, it’s a horrible commentary on human nature /that/ so many people are so readily influenced by situational forces.
Anonymous

“as regular BB readers know…”

Or, you know, anyone with a college education.
Teller

#7 Sekino: “most people do evil when they feel they are relieved of personal responsibility.”

Even if they’re just guilty of bad form, as we see today on the AP wire with this Onionesque offering from one pleased headline writer:

Shoe-thrower blames throat-slitter.
GregLondon

Besides the defer to authority issue, the other issue this thing points out is the “forever promise” issue.

If you ever heard any of the famous speeches given by military leaders to their troops just before a big battle, you’ll notice that some exhibit a pattern of “choose now and forever hold your peace”.

The general might say something like this is going to be a tough battle, things aren’t looking good for us, we’re outnumbered, and if anyone here wants to bail out, let them do it now. I won’t hold it against them. I won’t call them a coward. ANyone? Anyone at all?

Of course, no one steps forward and leaves, because they’re all standing in formation, there is no battle about them, and everything is relatively calm.

But once they accept that point, their acceptance becomes something they use against themselves and the general uses against them. They relate to integrity as a “forever promise” as “I said I would and I can never change my mind”. They relate to breaking a promise as something they can never make up.

This attitude can be seen even today with some people reacting to the notion of withdrawing from Iraq as blasphemous to the original promise. We said we would stay until we made Iraq better (until we conquer it), and we haven’t fulfilled our promise yet. Withdrawal becomes a loss of honor that can never be recovered.

The same thing about promises takes place in some marriages. People get married when they really weren’t ready, and then they stay married not because its the best thing for everyone involved, but because they said they would stay married till death do us part, and they don’t see how to maintain a sense of integrity while breaking a promise.

Speak now or forever hold your peace. Till death do us part. I do.

I’m sure if these researchers looked, they would find that some people continue the experiment even after they think it is the wrong thing to do because they can’t figure out how to choose between the wrong of continuing the experiemtn with the “wrong” of breaking their agreement to do the experiment in the first place.

Just another road to hell, really.

There are plenty.
Sekino

Yeah, I had heard about the original experiment in a documentary about 7 years ago (I wish I could remember the title: it was British and also featured another experiment with two teams of normal people, the reds and blues, in a lodge together and they were competing for privileges. The people in the winning team would gradually become mean and ultimately cruel to the losing team… Anyone else saw this?) and it pretty much redefined my trust and faith in human nature.

I don’t think ‘goodness’ is a totally innate human trait. I believe it is either promoted or discouraged by one’s environment and most take the path of least resistance.

Seems to me this experiment shows that most people do evil when they feel they are relieved of personal responsibility. I think one needs to make a conscious decision to stick with their ethics and accept their own responsibility and accountability at all times.

An awesome TED’s talk approached that idea: You can choose to be a ‘hero in waiting’ by reminding yourself that you might one day be called to either choose to do evil (or nothing to prevent it) or choose to be a hero and take the risk to do the right thing.
zuzu

Paul Atreides: You suggest the son of the Duke is an animal?
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam: Let us say I suggest you may be human.
imajication

@JJASPER, #15 sez “Actually, medical ethics has serious issues with deception as part of an experiment. So there’s a reason beyond a sort of conspiracy in psych studies to avoid looking at icky stuff.”

Really? I skimmed the link you included, and it seems to back you up, but 2 of the 3 psychology I took part in involved deception. They have you do something and then at the end they are like “Oh, this is what we were really testing” Of course it didn’t involve anything like torture, but one had me take a test which was purposefully absurdly difficult to make me feel dumb. Luckily, I was in the control group, so the computer gave me a good score even though I guessed on most of the questions. It was a little weird. After we felt smart or dumb, we had some “how do you fell about yourself” question, and then we were given a “learning guide”, and then were given a much easier test so we could feel we were good learners. Of course, at the end we were told what was going on. I thought that explained a lot.

Interestingly, even though I had guessed on most of the questions I just assumed I had somehow done better than average and was actually pretty smart.
Daemon

I’m surprised they managed to get approval to redo the Millgram experiment… It’s also commonly used as an example of experiments that wouldn’t be allowed today on ethical grounds, due to the psychological impact on the subjects. I wonder how watered down this version is compared to the original.
Frank_in_Virginia

I think Cheney has been using this on Bush for years.
zuzu

It’s also commonly used as an example of experiments that wouldn’t be allowed today on ethical grounds, due to the psychological impact on the subjects.

I’ve always considered this a euphemism for ostrich syndrome: the public didn’t like what they found out about themselves, so let’s just never speak of it again.
GregLondon

but 2 of the 3 psychology I took part in involved deception.

There is deception that hides the intent of the test, and then there is deception that causes you damage.

If you had been in the milgram experiment and had continued giving “shocks” to the person and then the person “died” of a heart attack, and then they asked you to leave as they brought in “paramedics”, and then sent you home, and then asked you to come back a week or so later to have you interviewed by some “counselor”, and then finally tell you, oh, by the way, that guy you thought you killed, he’s in the next room, and the “councelor” is really a psychologist doing an experiment to see how people react to killing other people, do you think that might be a different kind of deception?
Brainspore

Actually, the test subjects could have zapped the “victim” to the most painful without the least bit of ethical dilemma– because they could presume that if the “victim” didn’t want to be shocked (i.e, withdrew his consent), he could get up, unstrap himself, say “Screw you, your experiment, and your entire crop of grad students” and walk out.

Actually, no. In the original experiment (and presumably this re-enactment) the “subject” does ask to end the experiment past a certain level, but is ostensibly strapped down and unable to leave on his own. Many participants will continue to administer shocks even after the guy in the other room has complained of heart pains and feigned unconsciousness.

Read up on the study if you get a chance, it’s actually pretty chilling what ordinary people are capable of.
Sekino

Oops. I put an /i tag instead of an /a tag… Sorry for the gigantic link!
Brainspore

If they can be persuaded to do terrible things, they’re not “good people”. There are people who have the sense and the sense to say “no”.

OK, but in that case any definition of “good people” must leave out the vast majority of the people on earth.

We all have the capacity to commit evil acts under the wrong conditions- that’s why it’s so important that we do our best to safeguard against setting those conditions. Pretending that humanity is comprised of angels and demons is just a form of denial that does nothing to protect us from the next holocaust.
Anonymous

One part of this experiment that doesn’t get mentioned often (it might not actually be true) is the manic laughter that many of the subjects burst into while administering the shocks.

Another interesting ethical experiment involved a group being put into a pretend prison and divided into guards and inmates. The experiment was ended early because of the degree of abuse that happened.
Sekino

@ Daemon

They did say that this time, they stopped the subjects when they were about to go over 150 volts. This was mostly to protect them from the psychological stress of continuing (So they were quite literally protecting the subjects from themselves).

In the original, the subjects were never stopped and went as high as 450 volts.
Anonymous

Proud to say my Dad was part of the Milgram experiment at Yale and he blew out of the place as soon as the “shockee” said Ouch. Experiment wasn’t designed to handle people leaving abruptly — it took days (during which my Dad was trying to figure out how to put a stop to such barbarism) before they contacted him and explained no one was getting zapped.
jjasper

@ Zuzu, # 11-

Actually, medical ethics has serious issues with deception as part of an experiment. So there’s a reason beyond a sort of conspiracy in psych studies to avoid looking at icky stuff.

Here’s a layman’s explanation of why

Ad there’s the potential for psychological stress in committing torture, which is real even if the torture isn’t real.

Why do you assume research psychologists are afraid to look at unpleasant evidence?
Cicada

@Brainspore– The original is indeed a bit different, mainly in the question of whether consenting when conscious includes consenting even after unconscious.
This one’s fairly straightforward– either the experiment is being run by psychopaths who have someone strapped to a chair or whatever, or the guy doing the complaining could end his torment at any time he wished. Saying “I want you to end the experiment” is different than saying “I want this experiment to end, and am willing to do so myself.”
Jerril

@#7 Sekino:

Seems to me this experiment shows that most people do evil when they feel they are relieved of personal responsibility. I think one needs to make a conscious decision to stick with their ethics and accept their own responsibility and accountability at all times.

It suggests to me that it takes two factors. One is, of course, the ability to “pass the buck” up the chain of command, as you noted. The other is the order coming down through the chain of command to do the evil thing in the first place.

Most people at the bottom of a hierarchy don’t sit around and torture folks, no matter how “faceless” they feel. As much as I don’t like standing in line at the post office, the lady behind the counter is not actually hooking me up to electrodes and shocking me.
GregLondon

Ugh.
Shelby Davis

@anonymous 31:

Don’t remember hearing about manic laughter (but I never read the original journal article) but I do remember reading (and seeing) people shake their heads, sweat, remove coats, pace, wring hands, as “tells” of the distress they were undergoing, along with nervous chuckles.

It would be interesting if some of the subjects managed to convince themselves they were enjoying it, and ended up laughing sadistically.

And the second experiment you mentioned is the Princeton Prison Experiment.
pseudonym

Good thing this wasn’t around for the Nuremberg trials.
technogeek

Individually, human society is hedonic. At the pack-versus-pack level, unfortunately, the instinct is to switch to agonic behavior. If we don’t actively and consciously suppress that instinct, the people outside our pack get classified as animals or worse, and murder and torture not only occur but get justified and encouraged as “War” or “Antiterrorism”.

Homo Sap is still riding around in the body of an ape, and still has the ape instincts. It’s up to us to override them, and to help each other override them.

Political comments withheld, but I think BB’s readers can see the implications.
Red Leatherman

I watched the original videos of Stanley Milgram’s experiments. I’m no PHD but I felt that the fascinating part was the way the subjects felt that as long as the testers claimed responsibility for the consequences, then the test subjects would keep on zapping the alleged victim.
Red Leatherman

There is no recorded manic laughter on the Obedience video.
ambiguous

This really isn’t all that surprising, go read The Authoritarians by Professor Bob Altemeyer.
EeyoreX

IÂ´m sceptical to the findings of professor Burger’s study, and not just because he has a silly name.

The big hitch here is that the original “Milgram experiment” has become quite a meme in the past few centuries. When people today are put in the exact same situation, quite a large percentage of the test subjects ought to recognize the situation from somewhere.

And when that happens, they might go OMG, I’m actually IN the Milgram experiment! How cool is that! That guy is an actor! It’s all a scam! Ok, I’m game! LetÂ´s crank this sucker up to eleven!
wich would surely affect the test results somehow.