[HN Gopher] Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's o...
___________________________________________________________________
Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience
experiments
Author : lentoutcry
Score : 189 points
Date : 2026-03-28 15:08 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.psypost.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.psypost.org)
| watwut wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| 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 _a 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.
| user2722 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book
| _Goliath 's Curse_ by Luke Kemp:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Wikipedia makes it sound like questionable at best. I'll
| wait a decade and see if it comes out looking like milk or
| wine.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| user2722 wrote:
| Agree. But according to Gemini [for what's worth] the final
| 1990 Mashmallow's study [since first versions were
| cautious] did indeed jump to conclusions to point there was
| a causation to a better later life. The media might have
| amplified, but the wrong (or misleading) conclusion was
| already present in the _scientific_ paper.
| watwut wrote:
| The thing about experimental science is that you should
| not make much conclusions from one study or one paper.
| Those should wait till consensus is reached, till there
| are many independent studies confirming the same thing
| under various conditions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If a scientific paper makes a conclusion, that doesn't
| mean its a correct, valid, or properly supported
| conclusion.
|
| You instead look at the claim and the data and the
| experiment methodology. It often says something far far
| less generalizable or significant than the conclusion
| section of the paper.
| kakacik wrote:
| 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.
| wredcoll wrote:
| The great thing is you can just focus on the one person who
| "worked hard" or "self disciplined" or "studied well" and
| got rich while ignoring all the other people who did the
| same thing and didn't.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> willingness to suffer a bit for later rewards.
|
| Almost every person I went to college with had this
| viewpoint. There's also something comforting knowing you
| and your friends are all doing the same thing. We all were
| dirt poor in college trying to support ourselves with
| crappy part-time jobs working delivering pizza, working in
| fast food joints, cleaning offices at night. The idea was
| we all believed we were working _towards_ something better
| than our current situation. The suffering some how made you
| a better person, more resilient, made you understand what
| it was like to really earn something.
|
| All of my close friends I had in college all went on to do
| successful things. Engineers, attorneys, stock brokers,
| software engineers, pharmacists. We all eventually got to
| where we wanted to be, but the suffering is what still
| binds us together to this day. Talking about some of the
| houses we lived in that should've been condemned. Having to
| work 60 hours a week, and still do well on that exam on
| Friday.
|
| The willingness to suffer is eased when you have a shared
| experience with others around you.
| KSteffensen wrote:
| 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
| wredcoll wrote:
| Last I checked, the delayed gratification was also highly
| correlates with having wealthy parents.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Source?
| Intralexical wrote:
| 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_user wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| 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_user wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In what way were they trapped?
| palata wrote:
| I assume they meant "If you feel trapped", and followed by
| imagining what could happen in such a situation.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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?
| newsclues wrote:
| 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.
| kakacik wrote:
| 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).
| card_zero wrote:
| Back in the course of human evolution there must at some
| point have been mammals who were not yet riding on the
| dysfunctional cycle of violence. That means the natural
| rate must be non-zero, at least, or else the cycle would
| have no starting momentum.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yeah, but you can also find that rate if you remove the
| trigger (abuse) from the environment (society) and see how
| the rate changes.
|
| You don't have to lock someone in a coffin, or something
| ridiculous like that (and that would be counterproductive
| anyway). You create a society, or a least a sub-society,
| where there's no abuse, and see how much abuse is
| _invented_ by the people raised in that environment.
| stavros wrote:
| Right but then you don't need to change anything, simply
| measure how many people act the opposite way to what they
| were raised, and then you'll know.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Right but then you don't need to change anything,
| simply measure how many people act the opposite way to
| what they were raised, and then you'll know.
|
| That's presuming the only influence on a child's
| development are the adults who are raising them, which is
| not true.
| stavros wrote:
| In that case, preventing abuse has the same issue (it
| only changes the adults).
| newsclues wrote:
| If a child is sexually abused, perhaps society would
| benefit from segregating the victims of abuse to prevent
| the cycle of abuse from continuing?
|
| Let's put it another way, if a catholic priest touches a
| choirboy, it's not a good idea to let the choirboy become a
| priest and victimize the next generation of choirboys.
|
| Gross but perhaps a benefit to society
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| In practice this just stops victims from coming forward and
| deepens the cycle
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| 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-shape wrote:
| > 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > and then they get better - no matter what treatment is
| provided
|
| I don't know what experience of therapy you've had in the
| past, but this is typically not how it works. People get
| better when a treatment is applied that is suitable to them
| as a person and the context, not sure where you'd get the
| whole "people get better no matter what treatment is
| applied", haven't been true in my experience.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm only reporting what I heard in my intro to psychology
| class years ago... Still, this is more revision to a mean
| applying. There are for sure treatments that are better
| than doing nothing, there are also treatments worse than
| doing nothing. But in general people tend to get better
| after a time. (they often get worse again in a few
| months, but this was not covered in class).
| fgd135 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
| palata wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You may enjoy https://forrt.org/ and in particular
| https://forrt.org/replication-hub/
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| Famous experiments are not chosen by academia. They are
| chosen by non academics. What you usually find is academics
| being much more reserved and more critical of these then
| journalists, bloggers or random commenters on HN.
| r-w wrote:
| I don't know about " _much_ more reserved "... Citation
| needed. In the absence of evidence otherwise I assume
| academics are just people.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes they are just people - people who are much close to
| the topic then random commenters on HN.
|
| Frankly, you made up accusation of academics from nothing
| and without bothering to check what they generally say.
| You just made it up
| wredcoll wrote:
| I don't think academia runs fox news and cnn but I'll
| withhold judgement
| r-w wrote:
| s/voice/authority/
| palata wrote:
| 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)?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Physics is an exact, quantitative, natural science.
| Psychology is neither exact, quantitative (usually), nor a
| natural science. They are not comparable. But like many
| other fields of study that are not hard sciences,
| psychology can still be useful and valuable. (Note the
| "can". Given the replication crisis, how much of psychology
| actually _is_ I cannot say.)
| palata wrote:
| Sure, I agree with that.
|
| But do we have an example of something that is provably
| valuable? I am genuinely interested: after reading this
| article, I realised that there is nothing I can attribute
| to psychology off the top of my head.
|
| I mean, Milgram used to be one, but well...
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| "Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge."
|
| Mason Cooley
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| palata wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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-w wrote:
| I guess evil is even more banal than we thought!
| yashasolutions wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| noobermin wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, they were told the point of the
| experiment was supposed to be about "memory and learning".
| If a teacher was doing a "commission" as they put it, they
| aren't really following the purpose of the experiment any
| longer.
| f1shy wrote:
| Context is important. Maybe that was told in the first 3
| minutes of the briefing, and them came 30 minutes about
| the shocks. I would not assume the briefing was so
| thorough.
| radley wrote:
| This reevaluation postulates that the participants didn't
| deviate by mistake, but deliberately. The participant could
| have waited for the respondent to be in a state in which
| they could answer. (Reminder: the exercise was officially
| about answering questions, not enduring shocks).
|
| Instead, most participants rushed through, most likely to
| end their own negative experience. Which is much more
| nuanced that "gosh, they told me to do it."
| bluegatty wrote:
| Fair point, but there's a logical relationship between
| 'testing someone' and 'following a set of instructions that
| don't achieve that effect'.
|
| Your point is fair, but what is really nuanced is that the
| people who 'stopped' were the best ones at following the
| rules.
|
| This seems interesting to me - they were conscientious
| about 'what was happening' - not just blithly following
| orders.
|
| The 'rule followers' maybe were conscientiously applying
| the 'spirit of the test' and quit when they realized it was
| not reasonable.
|
| The others were 'pressing buttons'.
|
| Even then, it's subject to interpretation. There's a
| perfectly rational reason why people might subject to
| 'following the rules' if that's what they've been asked to
| do and have a sense of 'dutiful civic conduct' and 'trust
| in institutions'.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replication.
| ..
| Intralexical wrote:
| 6 of the 7 "replications" mentioned in that Wikipedia
| section are literally TV shows and performance artists.
|
| ...Which is a good metaphor for the "experiment" as a
| whole.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Actually, all of them are bs. There's no records of the
| experiment in Australia. I would guess it's just a hoax
| by the author of "behind the shock machine" if not, it
| still certainly doesn't count as a replication.
| lavamantis wrote:
| 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.
| Intralexical wrote:
| Small but important nitpick. I think, most commonly their
| worldview was already built, and would have been the same
| regardless. Milgram just provides a veneer of legitimacy,
| losing which would cause problems for them.
| noobermin wrote:
| 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.
| geon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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).
| pixl97 wrote:
| >And subjects who are just trying to follow the tasks as
| given to them are sort of washing their hands of the
| outcomes
|
| Hence why large organizations commonly compartmentalize
| things to the point that people don't realize they are
| working on an orphan crushing machine.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| See also: Those episodes in Star Wars Andor when they
| were in the prison colony working on the *SPOILER ALERT*
| death star components
| antonvs wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > people can become real monsters
|
| It's being consistently verified in real time if you track
| current events.
| delis-thumbs-7e wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| No, I read the article. Maybe you didn't read it carefully
| enough?
| geon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| lavamantis wrote:
| Yep, great book. Also dispels the Lord of the Lies myth that
| people have taken as gospel.
| Intralexical wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_user wrote:
| 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).
| janalsncm wrote:
| > 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.
| jdawg777 wrote:
| 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
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| always thought it seemed flawed
| stasiu wrote:
| You should have said something
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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..
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So the published narrative survived this long without anyone
| checking the tapes? Suspect.
| jordwest wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-31 23:00 UTC)