I got a different, less dark, less supportive impression of the point I expect Colin is attempting to make.
I saw an empathetic subject protesting to the authority in the room, but manipulated into continuing because the
authority stressed that he was taking responsibility for any harm inflicted by the subject on the "learner" and this
reinforced the overriding perception of the subject that pursuit of the advancement of scientific knowledge at a laboratory
at prestigious Yale university was taking place and would be interfered with or slowed if the subject ended his participation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/
Cari Romm Jan 28, 2015
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until 2007, when ABC collaborated with Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger to replicate Milgram?s experiment for an episode of the TV show Basic Instincts titled ?The Science of Evil,? pegged to Abu Ghraib.
Burger?s way around an ethical breach: In the most well-known experiment, he found, 80 percent of the participants who reached a 150-volt shock continued all the way to the end. ?So what I said we could do is take people up to the 150-volt point, see how they reacted, and end the study right there,? he said. The rest of the setup was nearly identical to Milgram?s lab of the early 1960s (with one notable exception: ?Milgram had a gray lab coat and I couldn?t find a gray, so I got a light blue.?)
At the end of the experiment, Burger was left with an obedience rate around the same as the one Milgram had recorded?proving, he said, not only that Milgram?s numbers had been accurate, but that his work was as relevant as ever. ?[The results] didn?t surprise me,? he said, ?but for years I had heard from my students and from other people, ?Well, that was back in the 60s, and somehow how we?re more aware of the problems of blind obedience, and people have changed.??
In recent years, though, much of the attention has focused less on supporting or discrediting Milgram?s statistics, and more on rethinking his conclusions.
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He and his colleague Alex Haslam, the third co-editor of The Journal of Social Issues? Milgram edition and a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, have come up with a different answer. ?The notion that we somehow automatically obey authority, that we are somehow programmed, doesn?t account for the variability [in rates of obedience] across conditions,? he said; in some iterations of Milgram?s study, the rate of compliance was close to 100 percent, while in others it was closer to zero. ?We need an account that can explain the variability?when we obey, when we don?t.?
?We argue that the answer to that question is a matter of identification,? he continued. ?Do they identify more with the cause of science, and listen to the experimenter as a legitimate representative of science, or do they identify more with the learner as an ordinary person? ? You?re torn between these different voices. Who do you listen to??
The question, he conceded, applies as much to the study of Milgram today as it does to what went on in his lab. ?Trying to get a consensus among academics is like herding cats,? Reicher said, but ?if there is a consensus, it?s that we need a new explanation. I think nearly everybody accepts the fact that Milgram discovered a remarkable phenomenon, but he didn?t provide a very compelling explanation of that phenomenon.?.....
