Posted on 01/06/2009 8:06:43 PM PST by neverdem
A new test of Milgram's obedience experiment asks if it can still happen here.
Don't answer too hastily, but have you ever wondered what you would have done if you grew up in Nazi Germany? Of course, we all hope that we would have had the moral strength to stand against that monstrous regime, but can we be so sure? After all, times were tough and both important politicians and leading intellectuals supported Nazi theories and policies. And then there were the ordinary Germans, friendly neighbors like Karl and Lötte down the street. They had joined the Party and were sending little Wolfgang and Gretchen to healthful Party-sponsored summer camps. Being a Nazi was normal for many Germans. Would things have been any different for you or me if we had been unfortunate enough to grow up at that time and in that place?
The most horrific feature of Nazi and Communist regimes, of course, was their industrial-scale savagery. The Nazis managed to murder six million Jews and 22 million other Europeans. The Soviet Communists exterminated 62 million and the Chinese Communists killed 35 million. While these murders were ordered by vicious dictators, they were actually carried out by ordinary people like Karl and Lötte. Which brings us to the famous obedience studies conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.
In 1961, Milgram did research involving ordinary residents of New Haven, Connecticut, who participated in an experiment that ostensibly aimed at determining the effect of punishment on learning. Along with the experimenter, the situation involved two subjects, one a "teacher" and the other a "learner." The learner was a confederate of the experimenters, so the teacher was the only actual participant. In the experiment, the learner was supposed to memorize a list of word associations. The learner was strapped down to a chair with an electrode attached to his wrist. To encourage learning, the teacher was to pull switches that would supposedly increase electric shocks from 15-volts up to 450-volts in 15 volt increments. Before the experiment began, both the teacher and the learner were given 45-volt shocks. In addition, the switchers were labeled with warnings such as Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, and so forth, all the way up to Danger: Severe Shock. The final two switches were marked XXX.
As the experiment proceeded, the learner (experimental confederate) would keep making wrong answers. The teacher (experimental subject) would then be instructed by the expermenter to progressively pull the switch for ever higher levels of shock. The learner would begin to make noises expressing pain at 75-volts increasing in loudness until 150-volts, at which point he would urgently demand to be released, complaining of heart palpitations. His complaints would grow louder until 300-volts were reached. At 330-volts the learner fell silent. If the teacher showed signs of wanting to discontinue, the experimenter offered a series of prompts:
The appalling results of these obedience experiments was that 65 percent of participants eventually pulled all of the switches, ultimately reaching the 450-volt level. But perhaps modern Americans would be less susceptible to the demands of authority. After all, the intervening years have seen the rise of the civil rights, peace, and gay rights movements, right? Not necessarily. Last month, Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger reported the results of replicating Milgram's experiment. He excluded people who had heard of the original experiments and found that the average rate of obedience remained the same at around 65 percent. In addition, there was no difference between men and women.
In 1965, Milgram wrote, "With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts." In 1979, Milgram's judgement was more severe: "If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."
But can it really happen here? It's a giant step from a Yale psychology lab to Auschwitz and the Gulag. What Milgram showed was that ordinary people are deferential to authority figures in laboratory settings. The exact nature of the authority wielded by experimenters is controversial, but it seems based on both perceived legitimacy and expertise. It doesn't take too much imagination to think that even more people would have gone all the way to 450-volts if the experimenter had the power to punish disobedience. Leaders of governments, militaries, religions, corporations, universities, and gangs all arguably exercise these types of authority. Hierarchy is a universal feature of human societies.
As obedience experiments show, Americans are not really any better at resisting the claims of authority than other people, yet there was no Gulag and no Auschwitz here. True, there was the immense moral evil of slavery, the destruction of Native Americans, Woodrow Wilson's imprisonment of thousands of dissidents, Franklin Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans, and more recently, the Abu Ghraib cruelties. Leaders at all levels can persuade some Americans to participate in immoral activities. However, the arc of American history has been toward correcting old evils and the commissioning of fewer atrocities over time. Why? Because our institutions of freedom have maintained and expanded the norms that limit the powers wielded by authorities.
For example, a free press is able to criticize practices like slavery and racial discrimination and help establish new norms. If Bill and Joanne down the street send their kids Joe and Kathy to an ethnically mixed school, in other words, it must be OK. In addition, American governmental powers are fragmented and in competition with one another. As another Milgram experiment showed, if two experimenters disagreed about continuing the experiment, the majority of participants sided with the one who argued for stopping it. In other words, when people could refer to an authority figure who agreed with their moral views, they were much more likely to act on them. Similarly, dividing up governmental power increases the chances that some authorities will act ethically and thus inspire people to act on the dictates of their consciences.
Milgram didn't really explore why it was that Germans created death camps while Americans did not. The answer is liberty. In 1974, Milgram more generously noted, "It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." Americans have not escaped the natural human tendency to defer to authority. Instead, we have had the good fortune to find ourselves in the situation where our social institutions have traditionally limited what authorities can get away with. The institutions of liberty are what enable people to act on what Lincoln called, "the better angels of our nature."
Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent.
/johnny
ping for future reference
For example, a free press is able to criticize practices like ...
Just one arena where rot has set in.
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A lot of Happy HS!
NAZIS & Commies were/are extreme Socialist lefties!
The lefties and media tag Nazis and Commies as “Far Right Wing” ???
mr. balacka Hussein creepy (Jr.) and his thugs are already slipping in the dictatorship and Socialism with Pelosi & Ride already - with “plans” for Health Control (like a new FED) and “volunteers” - in “barracks” and a “civilian federal police force” of uniformed goons and thugs and ACORN and Fruit-Loops of Fairykann
I reject and resent this whole thread. I’ll have you know I lost family in the Holocaust. Poor uncle Fritz fell out of a guard tower.
;)
Nonsense, we've killed 50 million unborn since 1973. We have a man who stands in front of cheering crowds declaring that unwanted children need to be disposed of (even if they've already been born), and a majority of Americans elect him to be our leader. I'm sure a lot of Obama supporters seem just as nice as Wolfgang and Gretchen, and just like the national socialists they don't think of themselves as being evil.
That's definitely true.
My lab partner and I built the “shocking” counters that kept track of which shock button was pushed for one of these university studies in 1972 or 73.
Article One contains the powers reserved to the legislative branch. Permitted executive actions are detailed in Article Two.
Old gastrointestinal drug slows aging, McGill researchers say Comment# 23 has a link to one of the most comprehensive sources on prescription drugs. This link should open on a link to Dorlands Medical Dictionary. Save it.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Actually, I wouldn’t have obeyed. I always was stubborn and pigheaded, which of course got me into a lot of trouble...
The whole premise of this article is a steaming pile of bull, and these experiments have effectively nothing to do with the vicious savagery of the Nazi regime.
It’s been well-documented that there was no pressure to be involved in the killing operations, and indeed any soldier who requested reassignment were readily granted that request, even if it was just because they got queasy at the sight of blood and brains as opposed to any kind of moral principle. The Einsatzgruppen were volunteer squads.
Likewise, a theory of social or authoritarian coercion cannot explain the zeal and vigor with which most of the killers pursued and carried out their duties. Ghetto liquidators were meticulous and thorough, even though they could have simply refrained from applying stethoscopes to walls and ceilings in their search for Jews to murder. A German soldier could simply shoot a Jewish child, rather than grabbing her by the hair, dangling her from his fist for a moment, and then shooting her, but he didn’t. And even as the German army was falling apart at the seams, there was a frenzied effort to continue killing Jews at all costs - even at the cost of military effectiveness.
The Nazi brutality stemmed not from coercion of unwilling participants, but the societal cultivation of willing participants over the course of decades, or centuries, worth of incitement - the same kind of incitement you’re seeing today in leftist cities outside Israeli consulates.
No need for those messy death camps. Just raise the kids to be dependent forever, on parents, on teachers, on government; and liberty will have no appeal for them. Liberty is for people who can stand on their own.
And what percentage was it during the aftermath that incited the driving of Tories out of their homes and confiscation their properties?
Which Lincoln addressed. His presidential decision was taken while Congress was out of session. He acted to deal with what was indisputably the greatest crisis in the history of the US, before or since.
When he called Congress back into a special session, he submitted his decision to Congress and it was approved. He pointed out to it that he had acted on an emergency basis and that if they believed he had sufficiently overstepped his authority they had the right and duty to impeach him and remove him from office.
Thanks for the ping.
and “globe-bullsh-t warming freak shows”
and ADD "how not to be a Nazi monster from hell" to school curriculum...
If kids get out of school not knowing how to read or write it's bad enough, but they don't need to come out ready to be good Nazis.
Well said.
Americans, drunk on wealth, privelege, power, security, hubris, and denial, are no longer afraid of the terrible consequences of all this. Yes--naziism and things every bit as horrible, or worse, as hard as that is to imagine, could occur here.
Back in the mid-20th century, my elderly uncle, a brilliant and successful man, told me that the U.S. could go the way of the Roman Republic.
I understood this intellectually, but the reality of it--i.e. just how it could come about--eluded me. I thought it a theoretical probability but a long way off. I couldn't understand, e.g., how the Roman people could cease to fear the Barbarians; how they could become apathetic about Rome, their security, the welfare of their children. I wondered why they allowed Emperors to become so powerful, fearing monarchy as they had throughout their history, and why they would tolerate such depravity and absolute power as even the earliest of the Emperors displayed (absolute power absolutely corrupted the Roman Emperors from the very beginning). I wondered how Caligula, the third (am I not mistaken?) of their Emporers, could make his horse a Senator, and how he could make the Senate into a whorehouse and force the wives and daughters of the Senators to work there as prostitutes.
Why did the people of Rome tolerate such as this, I wondered? It was unimaginable to me.
I'm beginning to understand.
And make no mistake--there are people salivating right now at the thought of seizing the wealth and power of the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known, and the more that power concentrates itself in Washington, and the more decadent, unstable, and vulnerable the U.S. becomes, the more insane with temptation these monsters become!
“IIRC, during the American Revolution the support of one third of the population was enough to end the tyranny of King George III. “
Yes, and only 17% actively participated in the revolution and changed the world. I just hope there is 17% of us left to save this country.
I'll let you tell me. All's fair in love and war. Tories were de facto traitors. They could have remained neutral. They sided with the tyrant. Are you familiar with the fate of Francis Lewis? Other patriots suffered a similar fate. The Tories backed the British who had a habit of being quite nasty. Ask the Irish. More Americans died in British prison ships in New York Harbor than in all the battles of the Revolutionary War.
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