Re: Milgram's 37

[dnb@meshugge.media.mit.edu (David N. Blank)]

So as not to be misleading:

From: treadway@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu:
>  Just kidding...Honestly, Milgram was an experimental psychologists
> that persuaded 37 subjects to painfully, even lethally, shock
> strangers - an electric chair type set-up.  He was basically studying
> the obedience of humans

...doesn't really describe do the experiment justice.  To the best of my
recollection, Milgram set up an experiment which consisted of the
following situation:
   A subject is told that he is to teach the person in the adjacent
booth (an actor hired by Milgram) something.  I believe that the test
subject saw the actor through one-way glass. The subject has available
a mechanism to deliver a variable (by the subject) electric shock to
the actor as punishment to provide a reward/punishment incentive for
learning.  The subject is knowledgable of the amount of current
required to do physical damage to the actor.  He/she does *not* know
that a) the person he/she is trying to teach is an actor and b) the
electric shocks supposedly delivered by the shock mechanism are fake
(and acted out by Milgram's actor).

The actors were then told to occasionally be unreceptive.  Milgram
found (disturbingly enough) that subjects were willing to crank the
punishment device up to lethal levels (even when they saw the actors
writhing in pain).  The ethics discussions you mentioned came about
not because of the results of the test, but because the subjects were
not informed of all of the experiment's facets.
          Peace,
            dNb