Really? Gee, they taught me that in school too, so it must be true, but on the other hand Chairman Gingrich said that folks of low social class lack personal responsibility, so I dunno.
But more seriously - the point I tried to make was not about social restriction of choices, but about the attribution of human agency by class status. In a nutshell, I disliked the fact that the upperclassman are attributed super-agency that allows them to carry our the wildest conspiracies and succeed in them all the time, whereas the lowerclassmen are denied even the most rudimentary forms of agency, such as a choice to beet up his wife or join the service. That agency attribution/denial business is quite rampant on this and other left-files lists, hence i decided to make a point of it. Apparently, I was not clear enough.
>Sorry, Wojtek, but you're wrong. You should read the
>literature that came out of the series. I would
>suggest Milgram's summary work 'Obedience to
>Authority'. It's a classic, and in print still.
>(Actually, you're so egregiously wrong that I find it
>hard to take you seriously, here)
You forgot to specify in which respect I am wrong about Professor Milgram, and that makes my reply somewhat difficult, but i'll nonetheless try. True, I did not read his book you cite, I learned his experimental stuff back in grad school, as at that stage of my intellectual vegetation err... "life" i was heavily into experimental designs (today I think that was a sublimation of my repressed D&S tendencies, you know, the knowledge-as-a-form-of-domination stuff, but that is another issue). But your rendition of his argument in another posting in this thread does not change my mind about that stuff.
To be sure, Professor Milgram is one of my folk heroes, I really liked what he tried to demonstrate, and I often cited him as a flag case to make a point that authoritarianism is universal (i.e. 'it can happen here.'). That, however, does not mean that I should not be critical of how he tried to make the point I like. My criticism of his approach stems from my growing disappointment with experimanetal designs in general (I graduated into real D&S stuff by now :)).
In a nutshell, experimental designs rely on one fundamental assumption they never prove - that the experimental situation is generalizable i.e. transferable to the so-called real life. That assumption is not a big problem when your experimental subjects are bacteria in a petri dish, but I'd hesitate to accept it in case of rats running a maze, let alone people making rat-choices.
Unfortunately, the rat-choice paradigm views human rationality as a continuous and thus generalizable phenomenon, and on that basis assumes that what happens in simulated lab situations would also happen in "similar" situations in the so-called real life.
Well, I question that assumption. Nowadayas, I subscribe to the congitivist -social constructionist school which holds that 1. people ususally do not deal with reality but with the social construction of it; 2. that socially constructed reality is not homogenous and continuous, but discrete and heterogenous, i.e. in plain English, composed of diverse and isolated chunks; and 3. what is true of one discrete chunk of reality may or may not be true in another one.
Stated diffrently, I may see that A=B in one situation (e.g. while taking part in a psychological experiment), but I also may hold that A=/B in another situation, eg. in the street. Thus, a man can be strongly against abortion, but not when his girlfriend gets pregnant (a quite common situation).
So despite what Milgram's (or anyone else's, for that matter) Ss told during the debriefing session, I do not think that any experimental design can prove its own external validity so to speak - i.e. that the behaviour pattern discovered in the experimental situation will be repeated in different contexts. That also pertains to other forms of social science inquiry, such as polls, vignettes, focus groups, etc. The reason is quite simple: the 'knowledge obtaing' situation (experiment, survey) is construed as a dicrete chunk of reality, and quite different form other chunks that form different aspects of the so-called 'real life.' Trust me on that, I am a doctor.
cheers,
wojtek