Kelley, sweets, you don't give up that easily, do you? So think about that, what was the chance of Miligram's experiments to fail to produce the expected outcome - i.e. was the expectation of Ss going along with the authority's request falsifiable in that design, in Popper's terms?
In plain English, the experimenters created a design in which the Ss were deprieved of every normal human opportunity of resistance - the Ss were isolated from their everyday social environment, locked up in an unfamiliar facility, deprived of any means of communication among each other except that allowed by the authority figure, deprived of any means of intereaction with each other and collective action - which is the usual means of resistance to authority since the beginning of time. So what else coul dthey do in such a situation that sweat and follow the orders.
It is like in that behavioral psychologist story. A behavioral psychologist was conducting research on insect behavior. He put a fly is a glass container and yelled, "fly, move." The fly started to fly. He then pulled one of the fly's wings and yelled again "fly, move." The fly started to move again, perhaps not as swifltly as before, kind of jumping up and down, but moving nonethess. The researcher then pulled its another wing and order its to move. At that time, the fly could only walk, but it nonethess dutifully complied with the orders of scientific authority to the best of its ability. In the subsequent step, the researcher pulled the fly's legs, one at the time, ordering it it move. The fly complied every time, but after its last leg has been removed, it sort sat motionlessly at the bottom of the jar, not responding to the researche'r orders. At that time, the researcher made the following entry in his journal "after its wings and legs have been removed, the fly lost all respect for scientific authority."
(OK, I streteched it a bit, the original journal entry read "after its wings and legs have been romoved, they flu lost its hearing.")
A more general point is that experimental psychology, because of its insistence of studying isolated individuals in artificially created contexts, is what that old pinko-commie Horkheimer dubbed "herrenwisseschaft" literally "master race science" which we can translate as "managerial science." This is the science that shows one and only thing - how pliant human individuals can be when deprived their natural resistance to authority relations - social solidarity, ties and networks. This science is probably the wettest of the wet dreams of all managers in the world.
>furthermore, aside from this info, what would it matter that they
>'bracketed out' in such as way as to make it seem, to them, that they
>weren't really doing harm? isn't that the point? don't we know that
>people often do exactly that when they harm others: the cognitively
>construe the situation in such a way as to bracket that thought out.
>(nurses, surgeons, hunters! come readily to mind here)
Agreed. I think I mentioned that in my previous missive. But don't you thing it would be more worthwhlile to study under what social conditions people would cognitively distance themselves from the harm they produce, and under what conditions they would not - instead of seeing if they comply with authoritarian orders in artificially constructed environement.
To their credit, Milgram & Co. tried to replicate their experiments under different settings, such as nurses administering supposedly deadly dose of medication under the orders of anonymous physicians, or female students gassing puppies in what was supposed to be a "learning experiment." Not surprisingly, most Ss went along with the orders. My question is, what other choice did they have?
>
>an experimental design is thought to be generalizable in a way quite
>different from what you've suggested too. statistical generalization based
>on probability theory is one form of generalization. experimental designs
>are quite another way of making such claims and have *nothing* to do with
>probability and sampling theory. in fact, sampling theory was developed
>*precisely* because social researchers were unable to produce,
>consistently, experimental research models.
Kelley, darling, you seem to be spinning things around here. Did not I say that that the concept of representativeness, which your buddy Margaret evoked, does not apply here because its a way of ascertaing group parameters rather than properties of individual elements?
So if we dump the concept of representativeness, and the concept of linear rationality (see below for expalantion of that term) - then what exactly is the basis for generalisation? Mind that experimental design per se is introduced to ascertain the ceteris paribus requirement, rather than to form the basis for generalizability.
In natural science, the generalizability of experimental results rest on the concept of determinism - that is the absence of free will in the experimental Ss. That assumption becomes moot when exprimental Ss are animals, except perhaps for unreformed Cartesian pigs. But they become patently false when such Ss are humans.
Of course that assumption can be rescued by another neo-cartesian trick, the concept of linear rationality i.e. a belief that people would act according to the ideas they form in their heads, and those ideas are formed according to information their have and its value (basically the rat-choice model). Such concept of decontextualized rationality can form the basis for the claim of experimental generalizability on the grounds that people's actions are guided by their rational "core" (values or "tastes" and utility calculations) regardless of the social context. Dump that assumption, and most claims based on human subject experiments become non sequitur.
>
>i agree with the thrust of your criticisms, though. i've spent my entire
>academic career fighting for the legitimacy of other models of research.
Where at? Stanford?
>so, i'm just taking issue with the small, though i think important, stuff
>because part of the problem is misrepresenting what we are ostensibly
>opposed to
I am opposed to authority in any form, especially the 'discipline and punish" authority of experts. And you?
smooches
Wojtek