Someone should ask the Pentagon for their opinion, as they are running Milgrim experiments with the guards in Gitmo and with the drone pilots at Creach AFB.
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But how do I know if youâre that first one standing, or an experimenter leading me down a false path?
The idea is that youâll have to consult your moral compass, which most people canât manage to do in the face of (perceived) authority without (at least notional) leadership. It doesnât matter what the motivation of the role model/leader is, really.
The Milgram experiments are important to nearly any intellectual exploration of human experience; but in the specific realm you and I are talking about, they highlight the value of free thinkers and diversity within a population. If everybody thinks the same way about the same things, charismatic leadership can overwhelm the moral values of everyone through assumption of the trappings of authority. If you encourage diversity of thought and experience, you vastly increase the chances that somebody will independently stand up and say âhey, thatâs not rightâ - and inspire enough other people to prevent an atrocity.
Iâm pretty sure my grammar lost its moorings somewhere in there, but I hope itâs intelligible.
Milgram and the many repetitions of his work proved quite a few things.
Primarily, it was proved that humans respond to the trappings of authority, and that in the presence of these signifiers the majority of humans will do as they are told. It was also proved that the trappings of authority are culturally determined - they arenât hard-wired into the brain - and that susceptibility to this can be mitigated by purposeful encouragement of empathy, increased direct involvement (far fewer shockers will obey if they are required to physically force the shockee to remain in contact with electrodes), or provision of disobedient role models.
I encourage you to study the extensive first-person literature rather than believe me, though.
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Although ethical rules prohibit professional psychologists from replicating the Milgram experiment, it has been recently repeated by Derren Brown (who I think deserves a lot of respect for his efforts debunking âpsychicsâ) - video on youtube - his results were very similar to Milgramâs.
Or that they were honestly enjoying inflicting suffering on others. Itâs more common than you might think.
Iâve always assumed that some of the disobedient people were actually pathologically disobedient - born rebels, so to speak - and some of the obedient people were only obedient because they enjoyed causing pain.
Source?
Well, honestly I donât know what @kongjie thinks about it, so I used the word âmightâ. But anywayâŚ
Some people like to fight. Iâm one of them. I gain great joy from the contest against gravity, physics, my aging body, and my opponents. But I donât like to hurt people; it ruins my enjoyment of a good adrenaline frenzy.
In the martial activities I favor, I sometimes encounter people who viscerally enjoy inflicting suffering. Some of them are quite open about it - I remember one fellow, a very (in)famous SCAdian, who confided to me that âSure, I try to play by the rules, but sometimes you just wanna reach out and hurt someoneâ. The ones who admit their sadism are a problem, but the ones that donât are even worse; many of the rules governing sport combat and kumite are only necessary because of these people.
Citation? Youâve mentioned this several times.
Let me google that for you. Unfortunately the top link is to a NYT article that leads with a false statement, so Iâd also I recommend the list of cites on wikipedia. And thereâs the Stanley Milgram homepage at Holyoke - although I have to warn you it was created by someone interested in spreading information about Milgram, rather than by an expert web designer.
I really do recommend you study this, though, instead of taking my word for it, or finding a citation of some perceived authority figure. Milgramâs obedience experiment, Zimbardoâs Stanford prison experiment, and the Rat Park experiment are all really groundbreaking and thought provoking. I think you will be enriched by seriously spending some hours on them.
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Fair enough. I do find attribution error fairly common, many are quick to ascribe malice to stupidity or indifference, but I think youâre seeing a rather different aspect of humanity.
I guess I operate in a different enough world that sadism, either admitted or latent, is almost entirely absent, or at least a total non-factor in daily dealings. (Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, etc.)
Well, I try to never assume malice when stupidity, ignorance or incompetence will provide sufficient explanation.
But on the other hand, whenever I hear someone claim that moral behavior only happens because of fear of God or fear of the law, it gives me the creeps. Iâm pretty sure that what these people are actually disclosing is that theyâd really like to commit all sorts of horrible misdeeds, but theyâve been convinced theyâd suffer for it. Hooray for cultural conditioning, I guess? Socialization definitely has its up side.
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