Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Milgram revisited
Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority still attracts the attention of scholars and the media. Its results provide important hints on the relative contributions of situational and personality factors to explain and predict behavior. Recently, Jerry Burger, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University, conducted a partial replication of the Milgram’s studies that allows for comparisons with the original investigations (while protecting the well-being of participants, because those studies were prohibited until now, given the extreme pressures that the subjects of the experiment had to suffer). Seventy adults participated in the study up to the point where they first heard the learner’s verbal complaints (150 volts). The obedience rates were only slightly lower than those obtained by Milgram 40 years earlier. One important finding of this replication of the study is that – contrary to our reasonable expectations – the presence of a defiant confederate failed to significantly reduce obedience rates. The good news with this research is that it opens the door to behavioral aspects of obedience in the lab that were locked for several decades for ethical reasons. The bad news is that by removing the stressful circumstances of the original experiments, Burger’s replication is not as interesting as the Milgram results in terms of its applicability to obedience in the real world (besides technical problems of comparability). For those interested in this replication, there is a new issue of American Psychologists in which Burger debate with two psychologists the results of the study. This research was featured in January 2007 in ABC News’ Primetime. Here you have a short summary of that broadcast (try with the following link if the video does not work: http://a.abcnews.com/Primetime/story?id=2765416&page=1). Feel free to post your comments on the video and the results of the experiments.
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I find it interesting that this recent replication of the study produced interesting results because, as someone said in class, today's culture can be described as being adverse to authority. One can easily name a few reasons as to why; The Challenger, Viox, Chernobyl, to name a few.
ReplyDeleteIt's also worth noting that Milgram himself, in commenting on his results, suggested that conformism would be the "go-to" response for people who are not certain as to how to morally react to certain situations. Perhaps, as I've offered in class, if some of the participants knew of the Nuremberg Trials and the judgment of the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, then perhaps they may have acted differently. (Assuming, of course, that they did not.)
It's easy, when analyzing the Milgram experiments, to come to the conclusion that high-pressure situations are extremely powerful and can override character traits in a way that seems extremely unintuitive and difficult to predict. However, what we lose sight of is that situations merely have the potential to wield this much power.
ReplyDeleteIn reality, the vast majority of real world situations are not that powerful, and it's easier for personality/character traits to influence behavior.
The really necessary reaction to the Milgram experiments is to stop automatically discounting the power of situations, not concluding that character traits and personal disposition never influence behavior. Running too far in the opposite direction runs the risk of addressing high-intensity situations while contradicting the bulk of real-world experience.
I agree with Jon. I thought that people would rebel against authority more easily than people in the past because we live in a society where people protest when they disagree with something.
ReplyDeleteThe replication of Milgram's experiment and similar results seems to be giving us the idea that the situation has much to do with the behavior of people. But character traits also influence human behavior because they make some people evil like Hitler and some good like Mother Teresa. If human behavior was solely based on situations then everyone would be treated the same and that cannot be since Hitler and Mother Teresa are not similar at all. However, I have to disagree with Mike. The reason is that even if the situation is not powerful, people still make mistakes or make the wrong decision. For instance I often see people follow the crowd in class, ( I even do it myself sometimes) and the situation is not powerful. So it does not matter if the situation is "powerful" or not, people still can make mistakes. Therefore Milgram's experiment should not be discredited because it is not a real world situation because most likely, people will do the same in the real world.
Based upon both the original Milgram experiment and the new Santa Clara studies, it is clear that situations are extremely powerful in guiding a person's behavior. As Professor Alzola stated in his paper, "Situational variables are important determinants of behavior. But character traits exist and make a difference" (353). I believe that a person's behavior is based upon an integration of the situation at hand and the unique character traits that the person possesses. Looking solely at the facts and results of the Milgram experiment, it is easy to conclude that situations are predominant over any kind of character traits. As we know, many situationists even argue that character traits do not exist at all. However, in the video coverage of the new studies, I found the interview with Troy, the "teacher", to be very interesting. He started out by blaming the course of the experiment on the "learner". He said something along the lines of "If the learner had really been in pain, he could have just torn the electrodes off of himself." I believe that this response in the interview is a good example of someone with a prominent character trait that influences their behavior. Other people answering the interview questions may have come right out and said "I don't know why I didn't stop. I just couldn't." But this man was not immediately willing to admit to his blind obedience in the experiment and started out by blaming the "learner". Not all people would have done that. Thus, I think that the post-experiment interviews of the "teachers" ultimately show how character traits do in fact combine with situational pressures in order to guide behavior, not just one or the other.
ReplyDelete-Claire Smith
Daris Mattison
ReplyDeleteIts shocking that people are so willingly able to follow someone blindly, and when they can clearly hear another human being, being tortured. It just shows that their is a characteristic flaw that people are not being taught at a young age. For $50 dollars a human is willing to essential take someone's life, because essentially a person of authority urge you to do so. Personally i think its scary, this experiment can clearly explain gang violence, war, dictatorships, to me it all harps back to humans that crumble under pressure or give into false authority. Pressure is only what you put on yourself, no one can make you do anything without putting your own life in danger, so i think society needs to hear on a large scale about this experiment, and teach the youth the moral aspect of pain, and harm to others.