Ah, you made my day, sweetheart, your sense of humor saving the honor of our rather nerdy profession. As they say, sociologists are those who are better in studying social life than participating in it.
>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.
--- snip---
I see your point, an impressive argument, even for a sociologist. I
concede to your "Ss uderstanding" part:
>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.
However, I would still argue that the experimental design did not create enough realistic opportunities for refutation (that nasty Popper thing) i.e. acts of resistance to authority (having a confederate refusing to go along is not enough). Just think about, in real life resistance is always collective - that is why they have unions, and that is why bosses hate them so much. If you take social solidarity out of the experimental design, all you have is an individual vesrus authority figure - and the result is easy to predict.
I am wondering how the outcome of milgram's experiments would look like, had the ss been allowed to interact with each other before taking action - i'm thinking of the stories of the entire jury changing their mind by a single voice of reason. It would be an interesting thing to know to test the conditions under which the ss would cooperate and defy authority, cooperate to breakt the resistance to authority, or refuse to cooperate at all. Would the national culture make any difference? Would social class?
>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.
That does not surprise me at all. USers tend to be more alienated than europeans, and alienation tends to break resisstance to authority.
That's it for today. It was such a nice thing to hear so many good things from a fellow sociologist, but i'm out of this place for the weekend to participate in social life a bit.
ciao, babe
wojtek