Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

https://www.psypost.org/audio-tapes-reveal-mass-rule-breaking-in-milgram-s-obedience-experiments-2026-03-26/

by lentoutcry • 4 months ago

227 133 4 months ago

watwut5• 4 months ago

This one is actually interesting: The statistical difference highlights that the people who eventually quit were actually better at following the scientific protocol than those who went to the end.

And also this: The most frequent violation in obedient sessions (those who shocked till the end) involved reading the memory test questions over the simulated screams of the learner. Doing this effectively guaranteed that the learner would fail the test and receive another shock.

Basically, being willing to shock other people without stopping was more about violence itself being permitted then about being obedient person. Rule followers followed the protocol until they concluded "nope, this is too much" and stopped mistreating the victim.

woadwarrior01• 4 months ago

Yeah, this reminiscent of Bandura's moral disengagement work. The differentiating factor isn't "do you follow authority?" but "do you maintain attentiveness to the consequences of your own actions."

The refusers likely weren't necessarily more heroic or principled in some deep character sense. They were just still paying attention.

https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-moral-disengagement...

Mordisquitos3• 4 months ago

Interesting. If we can assume the experimenter's failure to enforce the rules was mere clumsiness or incompetence, rather than an indicator of underlying intentional manipulation of the experimental conditions à la Stanford prison experiment, this can be interpreted in many different ways.

The (eventually) disobedient subjects were better at respecting the experimental process they were given than the "obedient" ones who went all the way to the maximum voltage. Why was that?

Could it be a sign that the disobedient subjects were on average more concentrated on the task at hand (smarter? less stressed? better educated? more conscientious?) than the ultimately obedient ones, and therefore were more likely to realise they were "hurting" the alleged learner and stop?

Or could it be that the obedient subjects were more likely to realise there was something fishy going on, suspecting the "learner" wasn't really being shocked, and thus were paying less attention to the learning rules?

Or was it, as the article suggests, that the obedient ones may have shut down emotionally under pressure to follow through, and their mistakes are the result of that?

Or were the obedient ones more likely to be actual sadists, who were enjoying the shocks so much that they didn't even care if the "learner" didn't hear their question, giving them a greater chance of shocking them again?

Unfortunately I think the Milgram experiment has become so entrenched in popular culture that there's absolutely no way it can be properly repeated to explore these questions.

user27222• 4 months ago

It really calls into questions the conclusions drawn from the last 50 years. Here's the ones disproven I remember:

* kids grow to be rich because they accept delayed gratification

* alpha males are the leader of the pack and all other males are useless

* people accept violence if there is a higher authority which justifies it with a reason

How many people suffered or delivered suffering because of their beliefs in the above?

arethuza• 4 months ago

On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse

Spooky23• 4 months ago

Alot of the problem with these “disproven” things is over broad scope or abused in the popular media beyond comprehension.

The delayed gratification thing in particular is correlation vs. causation. It was really more about trust. Forcing kids to delay gratification is meaningless or counterproductive.

kakacik3• 4 months ago

The first point, and I can see in my own life, is valid. Not properly rich by any means, but vastly surpassed any expectations and most of my peers from earlier life (which is rather easy when coming from poor eastern Europe but somehow most folks from back home didn't, too deep in their little comfort zones or fears of risks that were mostly made up).

It can be reframed as cca discipline too, willingness to suffer a bit for later rewards. Can see this as massive success multiplier in many real world situations.

KSteffensen• 4 months ago

Didn't the Dunedin study also find that childhood self-control and delayed gratification correlated with adult life outcomes?

https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1571970023782.pdf

Intralexical4• 4 months ago

Making someone think they're an accomplice to torture is itself recognized as a form of psychological torture. Telling someone that they're helping to advance science proves nothing, except that people can be deceived, manipulated, and exploited by bad actors.

Milgram decided to repeat his gross ethical violation 30 times(!), with dozens of test subjects each time. Overall, the majority of people actually disobeyed the orders to continue with higher voltages.

I think the only reason it's become so popular is because it makes for a shocking story, with grandiose implications. The specific "agentic state theory" Milgram invented is not backed up by his data, and personally, I find it philosophically dubious and psychologically concerning that he gravitated to it.

See:

https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095935431560539...

joe_the_user3• 4 months ago

I don't think experimental psychology ever validated those extremely simplistic conclusions. I'd rather these simplistic conclusions are a "folk summary"/mythical-version of a few experiments and they come from already existing cultural tropes, cultural tropes that were simplified and made more cruel and ruthless by various self-marketing consultants.

Lerc• 4 months ago

My guess is that it is the pressure to conform working in multiple ways.

The reading of questions while the subject was screaming is acting in a way that seems like that it is a performative action of conforming to the pattern and that the failure of the pattern is caused by the answerer failing to conform to the pattern. That makes the shocks a punishment for failing to conform. The questioner has a facade of doing the right thing by going through the motions, even though they are breaking the rules by doing so, because if the other party were compliant that rule wouldn't have been broken. That the shocks were painful would feel appropriate to those who had a strong sense that nonconformity should be punished. It is less them following the rules and more them assuming the intent of the rules and permitting abuse because the intent was not their decision. It might make them less willing participants to the abuse and more 'not my problem' active participants.

d1sxeyes• 4 months ago

The Milgram experiment also couldn't be repeated today as it was completely unethical. It caused huge psychological distress to participants to the point that some participants had seizures.

Mordisquitos3• 4 months ago

Maybe we can do a meta-Milgram. A group of junior researchers are tasked with implementing what they believe to be a Milgram experiment, and while performing it the subjects (actually actors) start faking psychological distress in response to having to shock the completely fake learner subjects.

One of the researchers feels guilty from the apparent panic attack his subject appears to be going through, so he excuses himself from the experimental room and approaches the lead investigator who's watching on CCTV from outside:

“Professor, this subject is really suffering from their belief that they are electrocuting the learner. I believe this is unethical, can we stop please?”

The professor replies:

“The experiment requires that you continue.”

joe_the_user3• 4 months ago

The reason you have psychology experiments with controls and parameters is that extracting definite conclusions from the simple observation of human behavior is extremely difficult given the wide variety of individuals, groups and cultures.

Once you have an experiment that degenerates into just an event, a situation where the controls have failed, you come up with many potential conclusions but you've lost any science-specific-conclusion to the observations and you may as well look any series of events.

That said, I think experimental psychology just generally fails to establish enough controls to merit the scientific quality it aspires to.

xeyownt• 4 months ago

Without study of the internal motivations, the conclusions of the study are pure conjectures.

You are trapped in an experiment and you have the impression that things went too far and you think you can't escape? You rush it. You hear horrible noises? You just pretend you don't hear them. These are all classical mental patterns. There are million ways to explain them.

carlosjobim• 4 months ago

In what way were they trapped?

palata7• 4 months ago

I assume they meant "If you feel trapped", and followed by imagining what could happen in such a situation.

bambax• 4 months ago

By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish.

Many people are cruel. Not all people, maybe; not most people, also maybe; but some people enjoy hurting others. We see this everywhere. Isn't it possible that this kind of profile jumped on the occasion to inflict pain on people with no fear of repercussions?

In other words, isn't this study just a sort filter to triage / order students from most cruel to less cruel?

newsclues2• 4 months ago

People that have been abused are more likely to abuse others.

If we remove this cycle of abuse, what is the natural rate of humans that will hurt others?

An uncomfortable idea, as victims become perpetrators, it may be best to segregate victims to prevent future abuse and victimization.

kakacik3• 4 months ago

Nobody can answer that. Abuse can be low intensity, spread across large period of time or intense 1-off event and resulting damage can be similar. Spread across whole lifetimes till the point of experiment.

Extremely individual reactions, what makes one tougher breaks another completely and permanently, and everything in between.

I'd say everybody experienced some sort and level of abuse, typical school bullies (which were usually also bullied somehow, hence the behavior).

stavros3• 4 months ago

People that have been treated well are more likely to treat other people well.

If we remove this cycle of decency, what is the natural rate of humans that will hurt others?

The premise is flawed, humans learn from their environment and there's really no way to put a human in a coffin until they're 20 and see what they do then.

applfanboysbgon• 4 months ago

as victims become perpetrators, it may be best to segregate victims to prevent future abuse and victimization

Wonderful idea. Let's not forget to segregate the poors, since they commit violent crimes at higher rates too. We can build a perfect utopia if only we just get rid of all the undesirables!

fishpen0• 4 months ago

In practice this just stops victims from coming forward and deepens the cycle

anigbrowl• 4 months ago

I like how you went from a probabilistic assertion in the first sentence to a categorical one in the last. Perhaps you grew up in a fallacious environment.

sneak• 4 months ago

No. I highly encourage people to read his book. What you are describing is a classic example of Fundamental Attribution Error - the assumption that people’s actions are primarily the result of some innate trait, versus that of circumstance.

His study plainly shows that most people, in the right circumstances, will act in unimaginably cruel ways.

palata7• 4 months ago

I have always been pretty critical about "psychology" as a field, but always kept famous successful experiments (like Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment) as examples that "sometimes it's possible to actually get interesting results".

Turns out those are not valid examples either. So I am genuinely wondering: what remains of the field of psychology, except for a group of people who find it interesting to think about how other people think/behave? Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

Are there examples of actual, useful and valid conclusions coming from that field?

In order for someone to answer this, I think you need to come up with some sort of definition what "actual", "useful" and "valid" actually means here in this context.

Lots of stuff from psychology been successfully applied to treat people in therapy with various issues, but is that "valid" enough for you? Something tells me you already know some people are being helped in therapy one way or another, yet it seems to me those might not be "useful" enough, since I don't clearly understand what would be "useful" to you if not those examples.

bluGill2• 4 months ago

Psychology "knows" that people don't enter treatment until things are really bad, and then they get better - no matter what treatment is provided. Finding treatment that is better than others is the important part and they also know they are not very good at that.

palata7• 4 months ago

That's an interesting point, and I think I can explain a bit more how I see it:

I am not entirely convinced that one needs to study psychology at university in order to be a therapist. Actually what I seem to see around me is that different people need different kinds of therapies. Maybe some need to talk to someone with a university degree in "psychology", others just need to talk to someone with empathy. Or someone neutral. Or they need faith. Or sport. Even homeopathy, if it helps (and knowing that the whole concept is bullshit). Whatever helps, helps.

Still anecdotal, but the people I know who studied psychology were not great at "maths". Like it's not the first choice of people who are good with science. And again in my experience, those people have a tendency to not be extremely good at understanding whether or not they can conclude anything from their numbers. Added to the fact that it's very far from "hard science", it doesn't inspire confidence in whatever is claimed to be "scientifically proven".

Then there are the psychologists who make you pass tests for some jobs. I have had that a few times in different circumstances, and it always baffled me how after asking me a few "weird" questions they would feel entitled to tell me "who I am", as if they knew better than I did. Again not inspiring confidence.

So I always had a tendency to say "I think when it's trying to say something about an individual, it's probably bullshit. But if you can make statistics on a group of people, I guess there you can learn things". And then you see that even those famous experiments that were supposed to be exactly like that were bullshit.

jagged-chisel• 4 months ago

The Hawthorne effect is real. And I don’t think we will ever get a 100% solid grip on what’s happening in others’ minds. Well, until we can actually read, understand, and interpret brain activity at the cellular level.

tokai• 4 months ago

Those two experiments are over 50 years old. Its a bit like dismissing physics because Hubble got his constant wrong. Psychology has a lot of issues, but its also an enormous field. If your frame of reference is half a century out of date you should probably start with some encyclopedia articles.

palata7• 4 months ago

Well I don't need to start with encyclopedia articles to convince myself that physics is a serious field, do I? Or maths, or chemistry.

eadler• 4 months ago

You may enjoy https://forrt.org/ and in particular https://forrt.org/replication-hub/

Sharlin2• 4 months ago

I'd think the conclusion you should draw is not that "even the famous experiments were not valid, so nothing in psychology is" but rather "the validity of an experiment does not correlate with how famous it is".

d-us-vb• 4 months ago

A direct conclusion. The insight I'll draw from that is that academia gives voice to the results the current zeitgeist finds interesting and believable without properly verifying the evidence.

See also the replication crisis.

palata7• 4 months ago

I guess my point is that I don't need to think for long before I find an example justifying why physics is a serious field.

What would be the equivalent of Newton's laws in psychology? Does such a thing exist? Or does the whole field just prove how complicated human beings are by being incapable of proving anything else (which in itself would be an interesting result, don't get me wrong)?

whynotmaybe2• 4 months ago

In Dan Ariely's book, "predictably irrational", there's a chapter about how everyone cheats a little.

And based on everyone I've met, and on Dan Ariely's own actions (1), I've concluded this one is true.

We all cheat a little from time to time.

Ex : for me, driving a few km/h above the speed limit is "cheating a little"

1 : https://www.businessinsider.com/dan-ariely-duke-fraud-invest...

caseyohara• 4 months ago

The ironic part is the recent fabrication controversy with Ariely. He’s recently had to retract fraudulent papers (one of them, most ironically, on the topic of honesty) because of falsified data. It makes one question the validity of all of his work.

His relationship with Jeffrey Epstein isn’t a good look either.

IanCal• 4 months ago

The results absolutely are interesting - in fact they’re far stronger for the willingness of many to inflict violence than the original description suggested.

While every obedient participant reliably pressed the shock lever, they regularly neglected or ruined the other steps required to justify the shock.

Procedural violations here include things like asking the question while the person in the other room was still screaming.

palata7• 4 months ago

in fact they’re far stronger for the willingness of many to inflict violence than the original description suggested.

In a situation where they know that they are in a controlled lab experiment.

skrebbel• 4 months ago

I wonder what percentage of "obedient" teachers saw through the facade, realized that the learner wasn't a very good actor, and was just having a good time playing along with what must've seemed like some psychology professor's weird pain kink.

r-w3• 4 months ago

I guess evil is even more banal than we thought!

yashasolutions• 4 months ago

That's an interesting perspective, and it does expand how we can interpret the Milgram experiment

That said the study has been replicated many times since the original, with researchers adjusting different parameters like participant screening, changing the gender balance, or varying the roles (teacher/student, researcher/technician...) Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things.

Other experiments have also looked at which factors make this more likely, and for example, diffusing responsibility seems to be one of the most effective ones.

p-e-w• 4 months ago

Across these variations, the overall result stays quite consistent: under certain conditions, ordinary people can be led to do harmful things.

The pop culture version of what happened in those experiments is “regular people will administer potentially lethal shocks when told to”, and that claim has been refuted experimentally many times over.

Contrary to most reports, the original experimenters never told participants that the shocks are supposedly lethal or even dangerous. When participants were actually told that there was a health risk, and that they should ignore it, the vast majority of participants refused to administer the shocks in a later recreation.[1]

In other words, the Milgram experiment, as commonly understood, is somewhere between sensationalism and an outright lie.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/3/2/194

crazygringo3• 4 months ago

To be clear, this doesn't seem like it invalidates anything in the original experiment.

The "rule-breaking" isn't referring to anything the researchers were doing.

It's referring to what the participants were doing. It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow instructions 100% perfectly all the time, and especially not the first time they do something.

Kaposi and Sumeghy interpret these patterns as a complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment. The subjects were not committing violence for the sake of an orderly memory study. With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence.

This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.

Miraltar• 4 months ago

Well, if you're supposed to administrate shocks to teach or test someone's memory, asking the question while they're screaming isn't just about protocol, it does break down the purpose of these shocks. Saying that participants did administrate shocks because they trusted the legitimacy of what they thought they were doing doesn't hold up under these circumstances.

crazygringo3• 4 months ago

No, because you'd have to show that the participants thought there was a breakdown of the procedure and purpose, and that they continued despite that.

If they think the procedure is to read the next question when the previous one has been completed, and they do, even if the other person is screaming, they think they're "following rules". They're not the ones who came up with the procedure.

Which is the whole point: the participants were trying to follow rules, even if they made mistakes in following those rules. The idea that there was a total "breakdown" of the rules doesn't seem supported at all.

goatlover• 4 months ago

It wasn't a properly controlled experiment to begin with, nor was it repeated. General conclusions should not be drawn from a single, flawed study. But it makes for good headlines and talking points.

crazygringo3• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replication...

lavamantis2• 4 months ago

And some people really WANT to believe it's true. They've built their entire worldview around it and the idea they've been duped would cause a massive narcissistic injury.

Aeolun• 4 months ago

Are you saying we should repeat it? For science!

noobermin2• 4 months ago

I do feel like the conclusion is a bit of a stretch, but there is a slight discrepancy where disobedient participants followed the rules more than the obedient ones, which is an interesting observation. It just feels a bit weak.

geon2• 4 months ago

The “complete breakdown” does not refer to the experiment, but the fictional setting of the experiment.

The article doesn’t claim that the experiment was invalidated, but that some conclusions drawn from it are not well founded.

laserbeam• 4 months ago

It points out that the compliant subjects who delivered the shocks weren't always following the procedure they were given perfectly. Which is, of course, expected, since people in general don't follow instructions 100% perfectly all the time

The article quantifies the amount of rulebreaking. The article actually compares rule breaking across participants and notes that those who were better at obeying the instructions of the experiment are the ones who refused to continue till the end.

The article doesn't invalidate the milgrim experiments. It claims that the interpretation from traditional literature is possibly wrong.

naravara• 4 months ago

Yeah one of the take-away interpretations I’ve always heard of it is the implication that the deferral to an authority figure led people to conscientiously proceed with administering fatal shocks. But this additional detail suggests that conscientiousness is actually negatively correlated with following through to the point of ethical compromise and it is, in fact, the less conscientious people who were rushing to just do what was asked of them.

This does suggest that subjects who are bought into and understand the purpose behind what they’re doing, and are attentive to how the specific tasks they’re doing tie into the bigger picture, are more likely to be actively engaging their judgement as they go. And subjects who are just trying to follow the tasks as given to them are sort of washing their hands of the outcomes as long as they’re following the directions (which is, ironically, causing them to fail at following the directions too).

antonvs• 4 months ago

a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.

Smooth shiny white walls, beakers and test tubes filled with brightly colored liquids on shiny metal tables… Science!

mikey_p• 4 months ago

The interesting bit is that the group the quit the experiment part way through (presumably over ethical objections) were consistently better at following the rules, which indicates that the rules may have actually been designed to prevent some of the problems that the obedient group experienced, which might prevent them from seeing the ethical or moral issues involved in the experiment.

Now the interesting question is _why_ did those people who followed the rules quit at a greater rate? _Why_ did those people follow the rules more closely in the first place? Was there any variation in how the rules were presented? What is the difference in between folks who follow the rules more closely and folks who don't? What can we learn about the human condition from this?

ilaksh• 4 months ago

Maybe the disobedient were just a bit smarter and therefore more likely to figure out that they should refuse, but also had more inherent instruction following capabilities.

raylad2• 4 months ago

One explanation is that the ones who quit believed it was a real experiment and decided they wanted no part of it.

The ones who were "obedient" figured out it was fake and treated it as a game.

f1shy2• 4 months ago

If anything, this makes the study more revealing and terrifying.

Basically under ill guidance of authority, people can become real monsters. That is the conclusion I got from it, and is now still worse.

pstuart• 4 months ago

people can become real monsters

It's being consistently verified in real time if you track current events.

xg152• 4 months ago

This feels like a huge stretch. Forgetting a step at one point or reading something out loud too early isn't a "complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment" -- a "scientific environment" that is completely fictional to begin with.

I found the idea pretty reasonable: Yes, the "scientific environment" was fake, but the "teachers" (i.e. actual subjects) didn't know that, so it should have appeared real to them.

The study tried to analyze the events strictly from the subjects' POV.

The point was that those mistakes would have broken the (fictional) experimental setup, and in a way that was obvious for the subjects too.

If they were really delivering the shocks only because "they were following procedure", then it's strange that they did so many mistakes that in fact broke the procedure. (and resulted in an even more aggressive shock regime than the procedure would demand)

rdiddly• 4 months ago

Another interpretation exists too: maybe obedience and compassion were orthogonal. They reported an increase in the error rate in parallel with the increase in voltage, right? Maybe those who continued into the more dangerous voltage ranges, committed more errors because they felt flustered. So in direct contradiction to the image of their being driven into some kind of hateful bloodlust, perhaps they felt more compassion and distress as the experiment proceeded. But just didn't act on it.

delis-thumbs-7e• 4 months ago

This study is so flawed in so many ways that it doesn’t prove or disprove anything in any way. The most obvious thing is that the assumption that the test subjects did not realise it was fake. It was not controlled in any way and many of the subjects (presumably Yale students and so hardly complete dumb-dumbs) propably thought it was just a lark.

phendrenad22• 4 months ago

Milgram gets thrown around as proof that everyone is just a few steps away from being an agent of evil. Finding out that it actually shows that there are psychopaths among us, and most people actually refused (left the experiment), somehow "clicks" and fits with reality a lot better. We see this in historical genocides - not everyone is in on it, and in fact it has to be covered-up internally because only the psychopaths are able to stomach it.

resoluteteeth• 4 months ago

I think you are incorrectly guessing the content of the article based on the title.

The article doesn't say that more people refused than was previously known.

It just concludes that most people weren't following instructions in a way that would have supported the validity of the supposed memory experiment.

watwut5• 4 months ago

It says more then that. The "psychopats" were NOT following the rules. The rule followers were not cruel.

The act of torturing was not due to the torturer obeying the rules. Instead, torturers broke the rules and created conditions that allowed them more torture.

Mordisquitos3• 4 months ago

Indeed. Just knowing that the subjects who followed through with the shocks were less likely to obey the rules could be interpreted in many ways, some invalidating the results of the experiment, some just suggesting a mechanistic explanation, and some making the results even more concerning.

* Did the subjects who went full voltage stop caring about the "learning" protocol because they realised it was all fake? Then the conclusions of Milgram's experiment are invalid.

* Did the subjects who went full voltage make more mistakes because they were more anxious and fearful of the experimenter? Then underlying fear might be a mechanism for blind obedience, and further research would be interesting.

* Did the subjects who went full voltage just enjoy electrocuting the dude so much that they stopped caring about asking the questions correctly? Then blind obedience is the least of our worries, widespread sadism is much more concerning.

phendrenad22• 4 months ago

No, I read the article. Maybe you didn't read it carefully enough?

geon2• 4 months ago

Is there any information on how many of the participants realized the victim was just acting? Surely it can’t be zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

analog8374• 4 months ago

Appearance of rule-following is of primary importance, not actual rule-following.

The performance, or signal, or whatever we're calling it. That's the important thing.

animalfarm• 4 months ago

This is well-documented in Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It's worth a read, as it also dispels other experiments in human behaviour that have subsequently been difficult to replicate (for a variety of reasons).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind

lavamantis2• 4 months ago

Yep, great book. Also dispels the Lord of the Lies myth that people have taken as gospel.

Intralexical4• 4 months ago

It should have been rejected from the outset. What Milgram did in his experiments was nothing less than construct an elaborate setup so he could psychologically torture dozens of well-meaning people. The ethical violation was already recognized at the time, and given that, nothing else he claims about method or implications can be trusted.

renewiltord• 4 months ago

This isn't an experiment. It's just some idiot running pseudoscience. Predictably the pop science morons have decided this fake 'research' needs more attention than just dismissal.

dlev_pika• 4 months ago

With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence.
The study authors propose that the experimenter played a major, passive role in establishing this dynamic. When the participants broke the rules and skipped steps, the authority figure rarely intervened to correct them or pause the session. By staying silent and letting the memory study fall apart, the experimenter allowed an atmosphere of illegitimate violence to flourish.

This sounds like looting scenarios to me. ie. When a situation descend into chaos, some people will just surf/leverage that chaos, instead of attempting a return to normalcy, for whatever reason.

sarchertech4• 4 months ago

If you read Gina Perry’s critique, her conclusions is that fewer than half of the participants thought it was real.

These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average, and the study didn’t do a very convincing job make it seem believable from what I’ve read.

When I took psychology in college I had to submit to random experiments to as part of my grade (there were alternatives but the experiments were easier). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately.

When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.

seanw444• 4 months ago

That's pretty fun that your teachers did that. I wish teachers attempted to immerse students in the things they're teaching about more often, rather than just reading about it in abstract through a textbook or whatever.

joe_the_user3• 4 months ago

I had a Junior High School teacher who did a variety of immersion lessons. The problem was even a small deviation from the real world structure turns the exercise into a pretty simple game. Essentially, the results are too complex and muddy to extract overall lesson.

And social science/history/economics is about learning the standard lessons of the field (even if those lessons are themselves simplistic compared to the real world, they are a baseline of common knowledge).

janalsncm2• 4 months ago

Interviewing the original participants―many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did―and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram.

Just reading the Amazon summary, I feel like there’s a contradiction. If subjects were just trying to get it over with, yes it invalidates the study but the only troubling conclusion is that the study wasn’t scrutinized more closely.

I also don’t see why they would be “haunted” by what effectively amounts to a chore to get their $20 participation check.

sarchertech4• 4 months ago

She never said that none of the participants believed it was real.

acjohnson552• 4 months ago

I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.

trc001• 4 months ago

These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average

In my experience, Ivy League students are some of the most profoundly stupid people I've ever met

jdawg777• 4 months ago

It raises the point that if the results are questionable, why not just repeat the experiment?

Here is Derren Brown's attempt at repeating the experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq4QtK3j0Y

sarchertech4• 4 months ago

The he actual experiment would never make it through IRB and even if it did it’s impossible to filter out the people who spot a fake.

jdthedisciple• 4 months ago

always thought it seemed flawed

stasiu• 4 months ago

You should have said something

mikkupikku2• 4 months ago

What they teach undergrads about the experiment: People blindly follow orders. If the Nazis ordered you to commit atrocities, you probably would!

What the experiment actually showed: People follow orders when the orders are justified within a persuasive ideological context, e.g. you value science and the scientific researcher is telling you to proceed for the sake of science.

In the first, people who follow the orders of Nazis are not necessarily ideologically aligned with the Nazis, they might just be in a brainless order-following trance. But this isn't real, and in reality the people who were "just following orders" were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly.

05• 4 months ago

were in fact ideological committed to the cause and should be judged accordingly.

With good enough propaganda machine, any percentage of people would end up 'ideologically committed to the cause' but I don't think they should necessarily 'be judged accordingly' regardless of the larger context..

mikkupikku2• 4 months ago

The experiment was done in the context of Adolf Eichmann arguing at his trial that he was not a Nazi, never was, and was merely following orders. This was of course not even remotely true. If the argument was instead "I only became a Nazi because of their propaganda", that might be plausible but falling for propaganda doesn't make you less culpable for atrocities which you committed willingly.

The version of the Milgram experiment taught to undergrads asks people to believe that you'll follow orders you would ordinarily consider abhorrent simply because you were commanded. But there's basically no evidence for that. People follow orders if those orders are justified in a way that seems persuasive. Nobody ever doubted that Nazis persuaded people to join them. That's not a surprising or even remotely novel finding.

janalsncm2• 4 months ago

This seems like something that people would very quickly discover if the data were freely available to listen to. As of now we need to take this study’s authors at their word that the metadata is accurate, and before that we had to take Milgram at his word that his interpretation was accurate.

Apparently if you want to get access to the raw audio, you need to ask Yale. Why?

convexly• 4 months ago

So the published narrative survived this long without anyone checking the tapes? Suspect.

jordwest• 4 months ago

My hypothesis: we are social creatures and have an innate instinct not to hurt others, but we’ve been trained to various degrees (through upbringing/trauma/school/work) to disassociate from the pain of hurting others.

The people who did continue to administer shocks were attempting to focus on what they thought was the most important part of the task (pressing the lever), but internally the unconscious effort to habitually dissociate from their own discomfort led them to make more mistakes.

Combine this dissociation with a desire for power or status and you get the world we live in today.

raylad2• 4 months ago

One question is whether the participants really believed they were giving shocks to the "learners".

In college I participated in a number of psychological studies that were similarly deceptive, where one of the other participants was obviously (to me) an actor, or, sometimes, a pre-recorded video.

At least one of the studies I participated in was quite like the Milgram study described in the article, where I was supposed to punish another participant. It was very obvious to me that this wasn't really happening, so I randomly punished or didn't punish them, and then afterwards told the researcher that I knew it was all fake.

I think many or most other people who saw through the deception probably wouldn't have let the researcher know, because it seemed somehow disrepectful to tell him.

No idea if he used my results or, as he should have done, discarded them.

sarchertech4• 4 months ago

Gina Perry combed through all the available evidence and interviewed some of the participants and came to the conclusion that fewer than half believed it was real.

xg152• 4 months ago

Yeah, this is an important point. If the main motivation of the subjects would have been to "play along" correctly, then this could also explain the behavior regarding the shocks and "rule breaking". It could also have diminished their empathy for the "students" even more if they realized those were actors anyway.

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

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