Intellectual Conservatism and Class Bias against Soldiers

Margaret mairead at mindspring.com
Thu May 13 14:00:47 PDT 1999


Wojtek wrote, responding to Kelley:


>A more general point is that this society is trully infatuated with testing
>- it is an article of faith for many that answering a few multiple choice
>questions or administering an experiment will open the door to the human
>soul. That is probably the most naive, arrogant, and dangerous aspect of
>US intellectualism (see Stephen Jay Gould, _The Mismeasure of Man_ for
>more). All what those tests show is how well people take those tests.
>
>As to the publicity stunt thing - so what exactly was the empirical
>hypothesis those experiments were testing? Or were they more of a high
>brow 60-minutes variety, a journalist posing as someone else to discover
>some dirty secrets?

Psia kosc, Wojtek, don't you feel at least a _bit_ embarrassed criticising the research without having read it?

That series of experiments is widely regarded as one of the most elegant and methodologically sound in the history of social psychology.

In his chapter on methodology, Milgram addresses 3 questions: 1) Were the subjects representative of the general population? 2) Did the subjects believe they were giving real shocks? 3) Can any findings from a lab generalise to the outside world.

His responses were

1) yes, the subjects were at least approximately representative, in that they covered a both sexes, and a broad range of ages, edu backgrounds, and occupations. They were self-selected, but Rosenthal & Rosnow (1966) found that self-selection predisposes to less authoritarianism, so if any bias was introduced, it was to *reduce* the magnitude of the obedience.

2) yes, both live observation by the experimenters and observation of the film record by neutral observers, plus self-report, confirmed that the subjects were entirely involved and convinced that they were administering real shocks. They were so convinced and traumatised by their conviction, that careful 'de-hoaxing', as Milgram put it, was required afterward... including a session with the unharmed and jovial 'victim'.

3) yes, to the extent that the subject can be convinced that it's his/her 'job' to commit the act, and that the person giving the order has the right to do so. We can easily find trivial examples of that in everyday life -- it's almost the definition of 'management'.

Many people objected to his findings because they were such an assault on cherished beliefs about how 'it can't happen here'. But it can happen here. And it is happening here. It's happening here every single day. It's the War On Drugs (tm), it's the War Over Kosovo (tm), it's all the psychopathic behavior that never gets protested.

Margaret



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