>No, I'm dead serious ;).
god, i hope not!
>or is it a strange way of appreciating my sense of
>humor?)
purty much!
>smooches (as you say it)
>wojtek
better than the ubiquitous Cheers
>That is not true - there are techniques (mostly qualitative) to accomplish
>that but even to go further to challenge the R's on a number of points to
>elicit their responses to situations they have not enounter but may
>encounter (Touraine used that in his social movement research and called it
>'sociological intervention"), there are interviewing techniques, there is
>introspection.
oh Wojtek, babe, i'm a sociologist so i do know what you're talking about here. but it wasn't clear from that initial post. and btw, big big smooch for mentioning Touraine, i use his work as a model of how marxists might do critical social research.
>So I do not see it as a cul de sac.
but it looked that way from where i sat! get it?!
>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.
i'm with ya all the way on this critique of positivism and the fetishization of the hypothetical-deductive model.
but, as for the Milgram Studies: granted that you read the milgram research years ago, so what follows is academic though i think important enough because the research is often misused.
firstly, milgram didn't need to prove that people are generally obedient to authority. what would the point be in doing that? this is plainly obvious. aside from that, it's a basic sociological insight that obedience to authority, acceptance of taken-for-granted rules, not questioning much of social life is absolutely imperative if society is to function at all. if folks went about questioning authority every minute, asking everyone to define and given justifications for the taken-for-granted assumptions that regulate the majority of our activities then we'd be in one helluva mess.
and yet, *that* is also the source of our dismay--at least for those of us who believe that those assumptions are systematically produced in such a way as to benefit the few while harming the majority. and contra something you seemed to allude to in another post, there really is no way to eliminate authority. it is a form of social control that we just can't escape unless we achieve utopia and, quite frankly, i dont want that!
so, milgram wasn't setting out to prove that people are obedient to authority. he wanted, as margaret noted, to follow up on, to elaborate on the hypothesis that the German's were a special case and this is what could account for the Halocaust. (the Shirere Thesis to be precise) he initially agreed with this thesis. i also seem to recall that he was interested the frankfurt school's authoritarian personality studies, but the details escape me at the moment.
initially he was going to test USers, then Germans. he never went to German because his experiment failed miserably: he found far more obedience to authority in an ostensibly democratic society than he could ever have imagined.
he then decided to rewrite the exp. in order to find out what made people disobey, to vary the conditions which would encourage disobedience. for example, verbal protests and cries of pain from the confederate 'learner' in the exp generated disobedience. other changes generated more: locating the experiment in bridgeport in a delipadiated, shifty looking office bldg;
he stopped strapping the confederate 'learner's' hand down; they brought in a second confederate 'learner' who refused to go along with the teaching session; and milgram actually had the S hold the 'learner's' hand down to receive the shocks. btw, even when the Ss had to physically struggle to hold the 'learner's' hand down, more than a 1/4 of them zapped the guy with 450 volts even when face-to-face with a person screaming and struggling to be set free. I understand that this research was done for 10 yrs and that it's been replicated often, though differently now because of concern about harm to human subjects.
Milgram's explanation: normally we are in a state of autonomy. but in certain circumstances, we operate under what Milgram calls a state of agency (an agent for, in the place of, an other) which is bascially a frame of mind in which you see yourself as an instrument for executing someone else's wishes/demands. conditions required for agency? recgognize authority (power wielded legitimately) that is meaningful to the S. in this case, as you know, the authority was Yale, academia more generally, science (and all the emblems signifying scientific authority --eg., white lab coats), and indeed simply living in the US 1960-1963.
the point was that ppl are basically obedient to authority, that their ability to do really horrendous things depends on their definition of the situtation (is there some authority one is acting on behalf of?) so that causing harm is seen as something legitimate, that it has a purpose, some higher end that makes it worthwhile. their ability to disobey depends on the degree to which they see the other as human being who suffers. and, of course, disobedience is easier with others.
again, not a big fan of a lot of research based on the h-d model. however, the criticisms that Milgram didn't attend to how the Ss understood the situation and what they were doing are just waaaaay out of the ball park. yeah, we don't know exactly what folks will do in "real life" but we do know that the ways in which people interpret the situation, the ways in which they interpret symbols of authority that suggest they *ought* to act on behalf of that authority are what will encourage or discourage obedience. for all intents and purposes, those folks were acting in "real life" in any event since they were duped into believing everything was real.
kelley
Q: Are you an academic? Q: Who says? Q: And that's enough for you, is it?