

Milgram experiment redone: crowd "tortures" man on fake TV show - kungfooey
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124838091

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Raphael_Amiard
This whole "experiment" disturbs me profoundly, and for about a dozen of
factors, of which i can only cite a few :

\- They take the appearance of science, name this an experiment, when this is
much more of a sensationalist TV show in the very style of the ones it's
supposed to denounce.

\- A (very big) flaw that the milgram experiment already had, but that this
show suffers from even more, due to the context and to the size of the sample,
is the fact that they're working on a sample that isn't representative in any
way of the global population, but only of the people susceptible of answering
the announcements -- in the case of this tv show, people willing to go on
television, and that's probably not a small thing. Also this pretends to be a
reproduction of the milgram experiment, while the conditions are very
different. Obeying to a show hostess and obeying to a doctor isn't the same
thing, and shouldn't be analyzed as being the same.

\- Going further in my first point, while this is supposed to be scientific,
it obviously is not. But even the motivations of the show are unclear.
Supposedly it's there to warn us about the dangerous power of television,
while it's actually obvious that the show is using the very mechanisms it's
supposed to denounce. People act shocked while they satisfy those very
appetites of violence and voyeurism. How clever.

BTW I'm french, and watched a few extracts of the show, but i didn't have the
occasion to watch it in full. It looks very fakeish, and very disturbing too.
I guess the minimum the show director could do is display some proofs of the
veracity of the show.

Sociology, and human sciences in general, ought to be something serious, in
the process and in the display. Mocking it while playing on people's
indignation (which is almost as easy to exploit as their appetite for
violence) is disgusting.

~~~
rue
Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an
_actual_ TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a
TV show.

Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being
equal, the latter is much, _much_ worse.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
>Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an
actual TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a
TV show.

"Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly but this was not an
actual murder, we did just kill somebody for the needs of the documentary."

It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The
fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change
the nature of it.

> Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being
> equal, the latter is much, much worse.

Agreed, but in case you didn't notice, i wasn't judging from a moral
standpoint, but from an experimental one.

~~~
rue
_> It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary.
The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't
change the nature of it._

I do not understand your objection. Are you arguing against using a TV game
show as a guise for the experiment or against showing the documentary of the
experiment disguised as a TV game show* (because it cheapens "serious science"
somehow)? Or that people who watch the documentary are not doing it because of
the science but because they want to see the fake TV game show and therefore
the documentary should not be shown, or that the experiment should not have
used a TV game show because people who watch the documentary do not really
want to see the documentary but the fake TV game show?

* Anyone else been watching "'Allo, 'allo" reruns?

~~~
allyt
I think what he is trying to say is that the experiment conducted for the
documentary was not a robust peer reviewed phenomenon, but rather a for-pop-
consumption "backyard demonstration". Real science takes a lot of effort
(avoiding the before mentioned sample bias being one), effort which was most
likely skipped in the creation of this "pop sociology" for-mass-consumption
show.

Ironically, the fake violence of reality shows they decry is precisely what
they are demonstrating - an unreviewed, unpublished study which concludes "4/5
of everyone around you is a potential murderer".

~~~
electromagnetic
I'm sorry, this experiment has been reproduced numerous times and the initial
study that produced this _WAS_ rigorously tested _AND_ peer reviewed. Milgram
performed 19 variations of his experiment before his peer reviewed journal
article was ever published, it studied the distance from authority, the
distance from the subject and the authority level to measure what percentage
of people performed inhumane acts.

The variables ranged from the authority being virtually over the subjects
shoulder to being on a telephone. The proximity to the victim ranged from a
one-way mirror to only being able to hear the person over a speaker. The level
of authority went from a white coat to blue collar.

The subjects were initially polled to see how many believed they would
administer the lethal voltage (1.2%), and also polled his colleagues (who came
up with a similar percentage on how many people they expected would go all the
way).

A later meta-analysis performed on multiple repeats of the study found the
percentages to remain steady at 61-66%.

Zimbardo (who performed the Stanford Prison Experiment) made an excellent
point: none of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks
insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check
the health of the victim _without requesting permission to leave_.

Despite disobeying authority not to hurt someone, they still required
permission of the authority to _help_ someone, which is quite possibly the
more worrying aspect that is never highlighted.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
That is what i've been saying :

\- The milgram experiment and this pseudo-experiment do not test the same
thing, they are not the same,and do not at all display the same riguor. Hence
you can't talk about them as the same experiment.

\- The milgram experiment is a solid experiment, that has got solid criticisms
too, but i'm not at all implying it was fake.

~~~
bmm6o
> [they] do not test the same thing, they are not the same,and do not at all
> display the same riguor

Ok, but I'm not sure who you're arguing with here. Is your beef with the word
"experiment"? Nobody is submitting these results to a journal. If you prefer,
call it a demonstration re-enacting a phenomenon that has been the subject of
other experiments.

------
tdoggette
[http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17/torture/index.html)

Glenn Greenwald compares this linking of television and torture to the swing
of public opinion in America regarding our government's use of torture.

------
timthorn
Aren't most people aware of the Milgram experiment these days? I did
participate in a psychology experiment once at university, and it was
painfully obvious that the "person" in the other room I was playing against
was a computer. I do worry about the validitiy of some of these experiments.

~~~
chadgeidel
I don't think they are. I've mentioned it to my nerdy friends (who would be
more inclined to know about these things) and THEY don't even know.

------
chubbard
Is it really all that strange to find out that we aren't that different from
how we were in 1960 with respect to authority? Back then we thought of
authority as a government and the nation state, but today it's you and me, our
entertainment, tvs, xboxes, corporations, and facebook that exert more control
over us. In this case who is the authority? The game show host or the crowd?
Is this the power of the perception that "everyone's doing" it has
authoritative control over us?

Scary stuff still. Does anyone want to volunteer for the new TV show
"Alcatraz" where we recreate Stanford prison experiment?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment>

~~~
motters
Again I don't think this is about authority as much as it's about alignment
with the perceived norm. People in positions of authority usually claim that
they're merely upholding normal, necessary or desirable values, and others try
to align themselves with that - often even without any explicit coercion, and
especially if the authority is perceived to be of a higher social status.

~~~
dantheman
One of the key things from milgrim's experiment was the notion of giving up
responsibility, the "teachers"in the experiment were absolved of all
responsibility by the experimenters (authority). I would expect the same
dynamic in crowds. Some people seem to feel that they cannot be held
responsible for their behavior when they are in a crowd -- and to a large
extent they are right. Before modern technology it'd be hard to keep track of
who did what and when.

Note: It's hard to take "studies" like this seriously, if you've ever read
milgrim's book it's amazing the length they went to try and verify their
results; whereas nowadays studies seem to be a lot less rigorous.

~~~
motters
Although I havn't seen the show, I doubt that it could be considered a
scientific experiment. At best it highlights the Milgram result to a modern
audience who may not be aware of it. Experiments like Milgram's would be
unlikely to get past any ethics committee these days, due to the potential
psychological trauma caused to participants.

------
anigbrowl
Those interested in further examination of psychology of this subject should
look in Canadian scientist Bob Altermeyer's work on authoritarian personality
traits.

~~~
Perceval
The classic work on the 'authoritarian personality' is Erich Fromm's _Escape
From Freedom_.

------
louislouis
"They say they simply wanted to see if we would go so far as to kill someone
for entertainment."

The ancient greeks built the Colosseum for this kind of entertainment. So it's
not surprising really.

~~~
zbyszek
Romans, surely?

------
danteembermage
Dupe ;) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197224> On some level it's good
to know source does matter (npr vs. yahoo)

------
lsc
I'm a little bit surprised and amused that people continue to be surprised at
what horrible things humans are capable of doing. I mean, nearly all of us
went to high school right?

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Jim72
Is there still any doubt about the power of the television!?

~~~
run4yourlives
While the show is about TV, the dynamics behind it have nothing to do with TV,
as any amount of time in a school yard will show you.

~~~
motters
Yes I agree that is isn't specifically about TV. It's about the power of peer
pressure and the behavior of crowds. It's known that people try to align
themselves with whatever they believe is "the norm" in any situation, even if
this contradicts their prior beliefs.

~~~
Jim72
I was merely referencing the article:

"Sociologist Jean Claude Kaufmann says the French version combines Milgram's
use of authority with the power of live television."

The article clearly demonstrates the amplification of the pressure and stress
because of television environment.

In this experiment, 80% of the participants kept on buzzing. In Milgram's
experiment, 65% of the participants kept on buzzing.

A 15% jump, to me, would show that the variable of the "TV" played a part.

~~~
run4yourlives
That's stretching correlation to causation.

First, the two studies are more than 25 years apart. Society has changed, and
so have we.

Second while participants believed they we "on a tv show" it's a logical leap
to believe that this would somehow be a extenuating factor than if they were
at a gathering of some other sort.

 _A 15% jump, to me, would show that the variable of the "TV" played a part._

There is absolutely no evidence to support that.

~~~
bricestacey
I also think it's a leap to say television caused this. If they really wanted
to prove causation, they could have tested it back to back in different
regions. Instead, they settled on the answer they appeared to be looking for
all along, that it's just TV.

------
techiferous
"To thine own self be true." -- William Shakespeare

------
maeon3
Philip Zimbardo described this principle in depth:

<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/459>

He discusses Milgram, and Guantanamo. How seemingly well adjusted good
citizens can rapidly and without notice turn into little lucifers at the drop
of a hat with the right social engineering.

~~~
electromagnetic
I think Zimbardo's biggest contribution ever has been grossly overlooked. He
made the point after Milgrams experiment that everyone who disobeyed authority
and stopped injuring the victim still required permission (from the authority
that just had them injuring someone) to help their victim.

It's not only that you can create little lucifers, but it's that you wholly
prevent the good Samaritan ever appearing.

