In the name of anything that's holy--I *do* have Holocaust survivor relatives, and wouldn't think of waving them around in something like this.
Thanks. I feel attacked here on so many levels - these are the ethics of my profession that she's casting aside as an inconvenient obstacle! - that it's good to have validation that this, specifically, was offensive.
Incidentally, in case anyone is idly interested, she completely ignored the post of mine quoted above and instead responded to a much milder and less substantive one. In response to an indication in that post that I thought her comments had been "below the belt," she said, "Please forgive me. I was just..." Hmph. Is "I'm sorry, I was just..." on the list of How To Tell Your Apology Is Insincere, along with "I'm sorry if you felt offended"? Because if not, it should be.
I am--in retrospect--startled that your post is the first time it occurred to me that Milgram inflicted deliberate psychological harm on people, without an authority pressuring him, and then presumed to wax authoritative about why his subjects would (they thought) harm people.
To be honest, it hadn't really occurred to me before either. I wonder if it's easier to discount the subjects' distress because, after all, if they hadn't been callous enough to increase the shocks they wouldn't have suffered so. So Milgram wasn't to blame - it was their own bad qualities that brought them such punishment. As you know, Bob, that's not an uncommon rationale for... well... gosh. The very willingness to harm innocent others that so disturbed Milgram in his subjects. Hmm. I think I feel an essay coming on.
I also wonder--and thought of raising this, a day or three ago--how solid Milgram's data are. This because I recently read a paper by someone who undertook to replicate his other famous experiment, the one that lost attribution early on: six degrees of separation. And she went back and looked at his research, and it's careless at best: among other things, he got his low numbers for connectivity by discarding the cases in which the letter was never delivered.
It's a nice thought, but I fear that the obedience to authority studies were widely replicated at the time. Still, Graydon had an excellent point: there's been a radical change in the public view of authority and obedience since then - the Civil Rights movement and Watergate happened in the intervening years, just to pick two examples - and yet many people still assume that Milgram's results reveal the secret depths of the present-day human soul as well. I think the compliance rate today would be dramatically lower. (Not, as should be obvious, that I think it would be okay to re-run the study.)
There was an interesting study around the time of Milgram's experiments, clearly prompted by his findings. They called people on the phone for a hypothetical discussion - what would you do if someone asked you to commit an unethical act? What are the issues you would consider? What if that person had power over you? And so forth. Then, some time later, those people were brought into an apparently unrelated experimental setting and asked to do something unethical. They were much more likely to refuse than were control subjects, who hadn't been prompted to consider the situation in advance.
Funny how that study isn't discussed as much as Milgram's study. You'd almost think that people would prefer to believe the worst about human nature.
Re: suddenly, I'm glad I haven't gotten to that part of the thread
Thanks. I feel attacked here on so many levels - these are the ethics of my profession that she's casting aside as an inconvenient obstacle! - that it's good to have validation that this, specifically, was offensive.
Incidentally, in case anyone is idly interested, she completely ignored the post of mine quoted above and instead responded to a much milder and less substantive one. In response to an indication in that post that I thought her comments had been "below the belt," she said, "Please forgive me. I was just..." Hmph. Is "I'm sorry, I was just..." on the list of How To Tell Your Apology Is Insincere, along with "I'm sorry if you felt offended"? Because if not, it should be.
I am--in retrospect--startled that your post is the first time it occurred to me that Milgram inflicted deliberate psychological harm on people, without an authority pressuring him, and then presumed to wax authoritative about why his subjects would (they thought) harm people.
To be honest, it hadn't really occurred to me before either. I wonder if it's easier to discount the subjects' distress because, after all, if they hadn't been callous enough to increase the shocks they wouldn't have suffered so. So Milgram wasn't to blame - it was their own bad qualities that brought them such punishment. As you know, Bob, that's not an uncommon rationale for... well... gosh. The very willingness to harm innocent others that so disturbed Milgram in his subjects. Hmm. I think I feel an essay coming on.
I also wonder--and thought of raising this, a day or three ago--how solid Milgram's data are. This because I recently read a paper by someone who undertook to replicate his other famous experiment, the one that lost attribution early on: six degrees of separation. And she went back and looked at his research, and it's careless at best: among other things, he got his low numbers for connectivity by discarding the cases in which the letter was never delivered.
It's a nice thought, but I fear that the obedience to authority studies were widely replicated at the time. Still, Graydon had an excellent point: there's been a radical change in the public view of authority and obedience since then - the Civil Rights movement and Watergate happened in the intervening years, just to pick two examples - and yet many people still assume that Milgram's results reveal the secret depths of the present-day human soul as well. I think the compliance rate today would be dramatically lower. (Not, as should be obvious, that I think it would be okay to re-run the study.)
There was an interesting study around the time of Milgram's experiments, clearly prompted by his findings. They called people on the phone for a hypothetical discussion - what would you do if someone asked you to commit an unethical act? What are the issues you would consider? What if that person had power over you? And so forth. Then, some time later, those people were brought into an apparently unrelated experimental setting and asked to do something unethical. They were much more likely to refuse than were control subjects, who hadn't been prompted to consider the situation in advance.
Funny how that study isn't discussed as much as Milgram's study. You'd almost think that people would prefer to believe the worst about human nature.