>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.
taken from a letter to the editor, Science News, 23 May 98: -------------------------- 'I have never read an article in a respectable publication that was so full of methodological, logical, and theoretical fallacies as this one. First of all, "games" are just that -- games! People "play" very differently when the stakes are real. Secondly, the games used were apparently zero-sum games, with a definite and finite amount of money or rewards in each one.
A real capitalistic, market economy is not at all like that. A market economy produces wealth and new capital. THe capitalist does not need to depend upon taking away from the other guy in order to make a profit. In fact, he may need to give to the other guy to make a profit (increase his capital). The game players left out the whole matter of productivity, which is at the heart of a capitalistic, market economy.
(Roland Sparks, Lake Forest, California, USA) ----------------------- I won't comment on the similarities :-)
Milgram wasn't interested in looking at the dynamics of raw-power relationships. It's clear that even if 12 people are more rebellious than 1, an authority figure armed with a weapon or with the power of the State can compel obedience from those 12.
Milgram was interested in how diluted an authority relationship would have to be in order for an individual to rebel against an odious task undertaken voluntarily. He was careful to set it up such that anything going on was going on in the subject's head, not in the situation. The guy in the lab coat had no power to compel obedience. There was, in Bridgeport, not even the halo effect of the Yale association -- it could just as well have been run by Psychopaths-R-Us, for all the subjects knew.
Why would someone carry on, often visibly against their own will and judgement, doing something terrible to an innocent victim, for no reward, merely because some colorless dude in a lab coat says 'you have no choice'? Why don't our methods of socialisation give us the tools to resist being so obedient? That's what he was interested in.
Of course, on one level it's clear why they don't: disobedient people wouldn't serve the interests of the powerful. And that's why Milgram got such a hullaballoo and so much political stick, and why for so long it was impossible to get similarly subversive research funded.