Begun on this day in 1961, the eponymous battery of social psychological experiments were conducted under the supervisor of Yale professor Stanly Milgram (previously) in order to gauge the willingness of test subjects to compile with instructions that conflicted with conscience and empathy. Made to believe that they were facilitators, administering electric shocks to a student to reenforce desired behaviours, the participants demonstrated a concerning eager inclination to better the performance of their assigned learners (a rote memorisation exercise) and deliver electric shocks with increasing intensity in order to marshal their faculties. In reality the punishing discharge was fictitious, delivered via a device labeled Shock Generator, Type ZLB with output from fifteen to four hundred fifty volts, well above the fatal limit, and the students were confederates of the experimenter, but nonetheless illustrating readiness to conform, despite some misgivings and signs of reservation for the distress caused with none of those refusing to give the highest level shock insisting that the experiment be stopped or bothering to check on their students. A test-case for research ethics, most responded after learning of the set-up that they were happy to have contributed and the experiment with variations has been replicated numerous time. Held in the milieu of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for war crimes in Jerusalem and the draft for Vietnam, Milgram wanted to determine if millions of German accomplices were simply following orders in genocide. The unexpected results of the first iteration, wanting to use American students as the control group and considering obedience to an authority figure to be a distinctly Teutonic trait, stopped Milgram from subjecting a group of German students, whom might well have been much more sympathetic to the plight of the “learners” due to recent history, to the same conditions. Ultimately inconclusive, reevaluation of the tests find some heuristic value but a poor lens for understanding the Holocaust and Nazism.
synchronoptica
one year ago: retroactive statehood for Ohio (with synchronopticรฆ)
twelve years ago: promoting a vegetarian diet plus an exhibition from the Hessen state archives
thirteen years ago: the pictograms of the Mexican Games of 1968