Fwd: setting the droid bit revisited

[nkn@interpactinc.com]

At 02:07 AM 7/2/01 -0400, Chuck Murcko wrote:

>>Agreed. One thing that surprised me is that these behavioral experiments 
>>would not be allowed today by the American Sociological Association 
>>ethics guidelines. The most interesting point was the possible connection 
>>between Milgram's work and aircraft accidents.

NB: re authority

the hypothesis was *not* that people are inclined to be obedient to
authority. rather, they were interested in discovering the social
conditions under which someone will disobey. their hypotheses were that
disobedience would increase 1] when they could hear the learner's protests
2] when those protests clearly indicated pain, even heart attack, possible
death 3] physical contact with/close proximity to learner 4] when someone
else is present and refuses to go along.

people _did_ indicate objections to the experiement. they fidgited, got 
nervous, complained, etc., but they ultimately did as they were told. 
Milgram also found differences when he switched from Cambridge with its 
educated participants to a working class suburb not far away. Apparently, 
the educated types were less apt to question authority. iirc.

http://www.linguafranca.com/9711/9711.allen.html

Spies like Us: When Sociologists Deceive Their Subjects
<...>
Alarmed by increasing reports of unethical research practices on campuses, 
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) issued a stern 
report on sneaky bio-medical and behavioral research in 1978. The report 
came in the wake of the St. Louis scandal and adverse publicity over the 
filmed experiments that Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out 
between 1960 and 1963. In his most famous work, Milgram told volunteers 
they were participating in a learning experiment in which they would 
"punish" (by means of remote-control electric shocks of ever increasing 
voltage) students in another room who failed to match word pairs correctly. 
The shocks were imaginary; Milgram was actually testing the volunteers' 
willingness to follow orders, which many of them did punctiliously. 
Milgram's film of his experiments, grainy black-and-white footage aptly 
titled Obedience, depicts its unwitting subjects as analogous to Nazi 
concentration-camp guards. It is shown to this day in many undergraduate 
classrooms.
<...>

see also, http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9905/0770.html


nkn