>Ah, you made my day, sweetheart, your sense of humor saving the honor of
>our rather nerdy profession.
well i knew i had some purpose on this planet. i've found my calling!
>As they say, sociologists are those who are
>better in studying social life than participating in it.
who says this? and frankly, as for nerdy, i like doing sociology of the economy and political sociology precisely because then i can hang around the economists and the poli sci people who make sociologists look good--almost hip!--by comparison.
>I see your point, an impressive argument, even for a sociologist.
i was wondering wojtek if we ought to start a special subsection in the ASA for those who particularly enjoy mocking and parodying members of their own discipline? it's become an integral part of the informal socialization process embedded of the phd granting process.
>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).
well, the hypothesis was *not* that people are inclined to be obedient to authority. rather, they were interested in discovering the social conditions under which someone will disobey. their hypotheses were that disobedience would increase 1] when they could hear the learner's protests 2] when those protests clearly indicated pain, even heart attack, possible death 3] physical contact with/close proximity to learner 4] when someone else is present and refuses to go along.
frankly, i don't particularly care about these experimental designs. and i don't especially care for popper's claims re falsification --i think he mucked everything up with that one.
>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'd go further and say that it's collective (that is, social) in far subtler ways--say, for ex, being part of an historical era in which disobedience is prevalent, publicized. or living in a community where disobedience is a tradition, where it's memorialized, remembered. i'm sure you know what i'm driving at.
>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 -
someone, somewhere did do something like this, but can't recall. maybe margaret knows.
>i'm thinking of the stories of the entire jury changing their mind by a
>single voice of reason.
of course, the single voice might also be completely unreasonable. no doubt that has happened!
>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?
certainly these things would make a difference, though not exactly sure how. the entire exp. was motivated by the thesis that the Germans were a special case because of their national traditions and culture, that it wouldn't happen in the US because of the (supposed) tradition of revolution, democracy, egalitarianism, freedom.
historical era, the wider social, political tenor of 'the times' matters too. i've always suspected were we able to replicate these experiments (and we can't b/c of ethical concerns) then a lot more people would question the authority of science. Milgram did those studies when science was valorized, before the horrors of Tuskegee and other similar exp weren't yet part of public consciousness, as well as the height of the race for space with the rhetoric about the need for science and math skills, more scientists, more research. I imagine that, today, folks would be much more skeptical given all the exposes of faulty scientific claims, fraud, etc.
>That does not surprise me at all. USers tend to be more alienated than
>europeans, and alienation tends to break resisstance to authority.
not sure i agree with this.... how so? what about the velvet glove of bureaucratic despotism which is as pervasive here as anywhere else precisely because of our extreme alienation and individualism.
or did i misread you?
>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.
when you get a chance we must trade war stories as it appears that we both have been involved in research regarding civil society. i'd forgotten this when i started this exchange. doug and i've gone at it elsewhere about 'civil society' and exactly what the phrase is supposed to mean and, more precisely, how it means different things depending on who's using it and what traditions they're speaking from.
later babe, kelley
>ciao, babe
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>wojtek
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