The Value of Disobedience

Researchers in California recently restaged a classic psychology experiment, with interesting results.

Some things never change. Scientists said on Friday they had replicated an experiment in which people obediently delivered painful shocks to others if encouraged to do so by authority figures.

Seventy percent of volunteers continued to administer electrical shocks -- or at least they believed they were doing so -- even after an actor claimed they were painful, Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University in California found.

"What we found is validation of the same argument -- if you put people into certain situations, they will act in surprising, and maybe often even disturbing, ways," Burger said in a telephone interview. "This research is still relevant."

Burger was replicating an experiment published in 1961 by Yale University professor Stanley Milgram, in which volunteers were asked to deliver electric "shocks" to other people if they answered certain questions incorrectly.

Milgram found that, after hearing an actor cry out in pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks, most to the maximum 450 volts.

. . .

Burger modified the experiment, by stopping at the 150 volt point for the 29 men and 41 women in his experiment. He measured how many of his volunteers began to deliver another shock when prompted by the experiment's leader -- but instead of letting them do so, stopped them.

In Milgram's original experiment, 150 volts seemed to be the turning point.

In Burger's modified experiment, 70 percent of the volunteers were willing to give shocks greater than 150 volts.

At one point, researchers brought in a volunteer who knew what was going on and refused to administer shocks beyond 150 volts. Despite the example, 63 percent of the participants continued administering shocks past 150 volts.

"That was surprising and disappointing," Burger said.

I guess the researchers had been hoping U.S. society had progressed further towards individual thought and increased awareness of how one's actions impact others.

"The idea has been somehow there was this characteristic that people had back in the early 1960s that they were somehow more prone to obedience."

Someone who had followed the rush to war in 2003 or to build the border wall in 2005 would recognize the same groupthink and marginalization of dissent that led to the McCarthyite frenzy and the Vietnam War.  The ‘60s got nothing on us ...

"Although one must be cautious when making the leap from laboratory studies to complex social behaviors such as genocide, understanding the social psychological factors that contribute to people acting in unexpected and unsettling ways is important," [Burger] wrote.

Although respected scholars and researchers must be cautious when making such inductive leaps, we lowly bloggers are not bound by those rules.

If you'll zap some schmoe getting $20 bucks for a couple hours' work the same as you, you'll surely cheer on our proud men and women in uniform as they drop bombs on the hajis on the teevee.

Same as it ever was ...