A disturbing French TV documentary has tried to demonstrate how well-meaning people can be manipulated into becoming torturers or even executioners. ... The show was inspired by an experiment at Yale University in the 1960s by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. He used similar methods to investigate how people could come to take part in mass murder. Jean-Leon Beauvois, a psychologist who took part in the documentary, says he and other members of the team spent months analysing the results. "When they signed the contract, participants were placed in the position of executioners," he said. "These were people like others, not exceptional, but 80% of them let themselves be drawn into becoming torturers." ... One contestant said afterwards that her grandparents had been Jewish Holocaust victims and she regretted that she'd obeyed orders to keep inflicting shocks. Another, originally from Romania, said her experience of living under Ceausescu's regime had given her the strength to say no. ... psychiatrist Claude Halmos said the experiment showed that it was important to explain rules to children and not just impose them. "We have to teach children to obey," she said, "but we must also teach them to disobey." The producer, Christophe Nick, said the show had changed the lives of many participants. Some, he said, had become bolder about standing up to their bosses. But one woman who had obeyed orders was shown close to tears afterwards. "How will I tell my husband and my children what I've done?" she asked. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8573755.stm
... The show was inspired by an experiment at Yale University in the 1960s by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.
He used similar methods to investigate how people could come to take part in mass murder.
Jean-Leon Beauvois, a psychologist who took part in the documentary, says he and other members of the team spent months analysing the results.
"When they signed the contract, participants were placed in the position of executioners," he said.
"These were people like others, not exceptional, but 80% of them let themselves be drawn into becoming torturers."
... One contestant said afterwards that her grandparents had been Jewish Holocaust victims and she regretted that she'd obeyed orders to keep inflicting shocks.
Another, originally from Romania, said her experience of living under Ceausescu's regime had given her the strength to say no.
... psychiatrist Claude Halmos said the experiment showed that it was important to explain rules to children and not just impose them.
"We have to teach children to obey," she said, "but we must also teach them to disobey."
The producer, Christophe Nick, said the show had changed the lives of many participants. Some, he said, had become bolder about standing up to their bosses.
But one woman who had obeyed orders was shown close to tears afterwards. "How will I tell my husband and my children what I've done?" she asked.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8573755.stm
I'd like to think that especially given my equalities background and knowledge of similar experiments done previously, I wouldn't follow instructions. Ad astra per aspera
my hard work being run to the ground but also the way others are being treated, and it is winding me up.
Press in on the button and unwind.
On my plus side I'm the sort of awkward so-and-so who tends towards following my own star and not giving a monkeys what anyone else thinks. (Pretty much a pre-req for changing gender). I've never been good at gaining approval by doing what other people want, so I mostly gave up about age 14.
On the negative side I can also see I'm the sort of awkward so-and-so who doesn't really care enough to worry if someone complains (or screams) if i do something. That's still a holdover from when I was a male and I developed indifference into something approaching a disorder. I'm changing and becoming more empathetic, but I still can't predict how I'd behave in such a circumstance. keep to the Fen Causeway
So I think there's a very good chance I would have refused to go very far even with the original experiments. I wouldn't have started this time round, as I knew about the Milgram experiments from the early 80s. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
The most dangerous influences are not necessarily overt pressure, but things you're not even aware of. So I gave students the example that as an art student I'd tended to accept the Romantic myth of the artist - art as an individualistic matter of the expression of feelings, etc. Many of my students came to the course wanting to be ART photographers or Art film-makers, at least in my course they became consciously aware of the nature and origins of such culturally powerful ideas as Romanticism. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
I remember being impressed by how easily a high proportion of people ended up torturing a perfect stranger who hadn't done anything to them, just because a "Figure of Authority" was ordering them...
Only difference: back in the 50s, the Authority Figure was a white-coat wearing scientist from a government/university agency. In 2010, it's a female TV host (the ordinarily sweet and innocuous weather forecast anchor Tania Young). Sign of the times? Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
We are social animals, deeply programmed for pack security to follow leadership figures. This simply shows how thin the veneer of civilization can be. keep to the Fen Causeway
Thirty years ago, they were wide-eyed, first-year graduate students, ordered by their iconoclastic professor, Dr. Stanley Milgram, to venture into the New York City subway to conduct an unusual experiment. Their assignment: to board a crowded train and ask someone for a seat. Then do it again. And again. "As a Bronxite, I knew, you don't do this," said Dr. Jacqueline Williams, now an assistant dean at Brooklyn College. Students jokingly asked their professor if he wanted to get them killed. But Dr. Milgram was interested in exploring the web of unwritten rules that govern behavior underground, including the universally understood and seldom challenged first-come-first-served equity of subway seating. As it turned out, an astonishing percentage of riders - 68 percent when they were asked directly - got up willingly. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/nyregion/14subway.html
Their assignment: to board a crowded train and ask someone for a seat. Then do it again. And again.
"As a Bronxite, I knew, you don't do this," said Dr. Jacqueline Williams, now an assistant dean at Brooklyn College. Students jokingly asked their professor if he wanted to get them killed.
But Dr. Milgram was interested in exploring the web of unwritten rules that govern behavior underground, including the universally understood and seldom challenged first-come-first-served equity of subway seating. As it turned out, an astonishing percentage of riders - 68 percent when they were asked directly - got up willingly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/nyregion/14subway.html
So I think Bernard is unnecessarily dismissive of the French woman, behind her is a powerful social grouping, TV and its audience - some felt, I suppose, that they didn't want to ruin what was supposed to be, after all, a TV game.
Any kind of group can exert power over the individual; in other experiments individuals denied what they could clearly see, that one line was longer than another because the rest of the group, collaborators in the experiment, denied that it was. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
He suggested the experiment to one of his graduate student classes, but the students recoiled. Finally, one student, Ira Goodman, volunteered to try it with a partner. But instead of coming back after 20 trials as he had promised, he returned with only 14. When Dr. Milgram asked him what had happened, he said that it was just too difficult. Dismissing his students' fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen. "The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge," he said in the interview. Retreating, he berated himself: 'What kind of craven coward are you?" A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request. "Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request," he said. "My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish." ibid
He suggested the experiment to one of his graduate student classes, but the students recoiled. Finally, one student, Ira Goodman, volunteered to try it with a partner. But instead of coming back after 20 trials as he had promised, he returned with only 14. When Dr. Milgram asked him what had happened, he said that it was just too difficult.
Dismissing his students' fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen.
"The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge," he said in the interview.
Retreating, he berated himself: 'What kind of craven coward are you?"
A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request.
"Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request," he said. "My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish."
ibid
"My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish."
seems like there's a lot of resistance to breaking unwritten rules built in to what we have assigned ourselves to respect.
it's personality driven though, there are some characters who would have got a kick out of it!
it's irrational of him to care that much, but the program not to offend runs deep, and in the close confines of a busy subway car, peoples' cubic centimetres of personal 'private' space is respected by many or most as inviolable, 'swhy small overcrowded islands like giapan and england have such elaborate and formal politeness codes.
in the subway crush, getting a seat is a big lucky win. asking for someone else's unless you're really handicapped is crass, and his cultural self was appalled at his own behaviour.
obviously the rationalisation that he was doing a sci-experiment seemed weak and hollow to his conscience, his agenda was not transparent and he felt he was betraying common trust on some level.
this experiment, in transpersonal psych terminology, was a giant invitation for the 'shadow' side of self to come out and play.
proving amply that we need to understand this concept much better (and learn to harmlessly diffuse/rechannel it) it in order to have any hope of mitigating it, and remember who we really want to be, even under severe (im)moral pressure.
feed the good wolf!
~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Of course, they're people, so there will be personality differences, but what stands out in the article is that so many of them found this very difficult to do. Types who might get a kick out of it, or merely not care, might be the the 1% of psychopaths:
"He suggested the experiment to one of his graduate student classes, but the students recoiled. Finally, one student, Ira Goodman, volunteered to try it with a partner. But instead of coming back after 20 trials as he had promised, he returned with only 14. When Dr. Milgram asked him what had happened, he said that it was just too difficult." ;;;The following semester, he asked 10 members of his class on experimental social psychology to complete the experiment. ... Those tension-filled subway rides in the spring of 1972 are still easily recalled by many of Dr. Milgram's former students scattered across the country. "I really did feel sick to my stomach," said Dr. Krogh ... Two weeks ago, a pair of reporters who set out to replicate the experiment struggled with similar inhibitions."
;;;The following semester, he asked 10 members of his class on experimental social psychology to complete the experiment. ... Those tension-filled subway rides in the spring of 1972 are still easily recalled by many of Dr. Milgram's former students scattered across the country.
"I really did feel sick to my stomach," said Dr. Krogh ... Two weeks ago, a pair of reporters who set out to replicate the experiment struggled with similar inhibitions."
Milgram's point about the shock experiments and to a lesser extent the subway ones is that this had nothing to do with some "darker" side, quite the opposite. He argued that the problem was not that the Germans who ran camps, or the people in the shock experiments were evil or sadistic, but that they were too compliant, too inclined to obey and that Americans can't comfort themselves they are morally superior. The other important fact in the subway experiments, apart from the difficulty for those doing the experiment, was the very unexpected result that in one version, 68% of New Yorkers gave up their seat.
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
He argued that the problem was not that the Germans who ran camps, or the people in the shock experiments were evil or sadistic, but that they were too compliant, too inclined to obey and that Americans can't comfort themselves they are morally superior.
to train a future generations of moral giants would be a good thing, but the fact remains most will do whatever they perceive they need to to ensure survival.
hard to make a value judgment about that...
and as for the Jungian shadow thingy, i think it proves even more that it's a much better approach to confront our own surprisingly aspects seeing it as a (not immutable) part of our nature, rather than projecting it outside on some satan image.
put even simpler, people need to learn that their own sense of responsibility for their actions can never be deflected on to anyone else, no matter how scary they are, without some collective karma.
i remember my dad saying once he was glad the british army had never ordered him to shovel murdered corpses into ovens all day, and my being shocked at that, still so young and naive... so matter of fact he was.
but then i tried to put myself in some german conscript's shoes ordered to do the same, and i realised i could only hope i'd do the right thing under those conditions, but it would be unbelievably arrogant to assume that moral fibre without a similar, diabolically nightmarish test.
romantically noble notions probably look different at gunpoint.
the milgram experiment was an ersatz situation, but it showed only too clearly how impressed and intimidated people found scientists at the time!
this french episode only reveals how nakedly people feel not to be celebrities, the ultimate circle of hell, for pomo man. reality shows...
but not in 'reality' shows.
first time i met my shadow was in a rugby scrum. i loathed the sport heartily, and was so pissed off one day i just kicked into the middle of it hoping to hurt someone's ankle, whoever.
i was very disturbed by this, i really had no clue i could be such an asshole.
teh stupid got to me. i think about that when i read about the milgram experiment.
course in the 70's and later shrewd entrepreneurs made big $ holding workshops that basically taught people how to celebrate assertiveness, at the price of being assholes, so it goes... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Most people went on very unwillingly and were in clear discomfort, this has nothing to do with your angry violence in a game. Yes, we are extremely flexible creatures and we are capable of anger and violence, necessary for survival in some extreme situations. Stressful situations can lead to unprovoked violence, as we know from experience such as yours as well as experiments on rats.
But it's as well to make relevant distinctions between compliance, deference to authority and angry violence and personally I don't find the need to put the latter into a "shadow" category; it's just another human capacity, sometimes necessary and justified - like compliance. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
But it's as well to make relevant distinctions between compliance, deference to authority and angry violence and personally I don't find the need to put the latter into a "shadow" category; it's just another human capacity, sometimes necessary and justified - like compliance.
i get your point. it's a good one, possibly more evolved than my present position of understanding. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
As reality TV has amply demonstrated already, it holds more authority than anything else nowadays. Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
There's no need to exaggerate, it doesn't hold "more authority than anything else" - or, if you really think so, where's the evidence ? Vague assertions like reality TV has demonstrated this are not very convincing. People respect the authority of various institutions to varying degrees. I'm pretty sure that if they were in a court of law they'd be even more deferential to authority. The audience was not influential because it was a TV audience but just the fact that it was a large group and, as social beings, we are very prone to influence by all kinds of social groups, family, friends, neighbours, etc. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
it doesn't hold "more authority than anything else"
I fully agree with you: we're indeed prone to influence by social groups of all stripes -- including reality TV :) -- and deference to authority in general.
Ted Welch:
I'm pretty sure that if they were in a court of law they'd be even more deferential to authority.
