Thanks, interesting pointer. Provides some nice counter weight to all those lamenting the lack of obedience in today’s kids (still I’d say they have a point as well)
The study cited (about the German jugend) is interesting, but also a bit unsatisfying: that is, many, many years after the fact, self-reporting about something where all kinds of feelings of guilt, pride etc., are involved. Also, care should be taken to apply the lessons of a quite different, authoritarian society to today’s much more open, cosmopolitan world.
It’d be great if they did some thorough survey of the people that participate in some of today’s ‘Stanford prison experiment’ re-enactments.
The prison experiment is generally not reenacted. It was hideously poorly designed to start with and the results weren’t even clearly interpretable in a useful fashion. Milgram type fake electric shock experiments can still be done (although some people have argued that they are unethical). I don’t know if this sort of thing has been tested for in those experiments, but I’d predict that you would actually not get a substantial result of this sort. The reasoning behind my prediction is that child rearing has become less obedience driven in the US in the last few years but the breakdown of proportions willing to shock people to (and to what extent) has remained roughly constant since Milgram’s initial experiments. If parenting forms matter we’d expect to see a decline in the fraction of people willing to severely shock in Milgram set-ups.
Edit: Thinking about this slightly more. We’d need to be careful about the exact experimental setup since going through with a Milgram electric shock experiment might make people answer questions about morality and upbringing differently than if they had not. But there’s also the problem that asking people such questions before hand might alter behavior as well. So there really should be three groups tested: A standard Milgram set-up, a set where they are asked the relevant questions before hand, and a set where they are asked afterwords. If we see a lot of difference in how the two groups asked about their moral upbringings respond then that would suggest that the Oliner study isn’t reliable.
Thanks—interesting read. There have in fact been a couple of re-enactments;
for example, see Wikipedia. But, as you suggest, the Milgram experiments could be used as
well. In either case, doing some in-depth analysis of the participants would
be very useful.
Have you read Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority? He does some analyses of the participants in various versions of his experiment (as well as explaining why the experiment isn’t unethical).
Thanks for the link—I’ll put it on my reading list. For some reason I only know Milgram’s work from secondary sources.
Also relevant here are the Asch conformity experiments ; they also show the tendency of most people to conform, without the dramatic effects used in the Milgram experiments.
Thanks—interesting read. There have in fact been a couple of re-enactments;
see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment)[Wikipedia] for
example. But, as you suggest, the Milgram experiments could be used as
well. In either case, doing some in-depth analysis of the participants would
be very useful.
Provides some nice counter weight to all those lamenting the lack of obedience in today’s kids (still I’d say they have a point as well)
I think such lamentations rarely take the form of “my children always want to know why they should do as I say! I wish they’d just blindly obey”. More like “my children blindly dismiss everything I say! I wish they’d just blindly obey” :P.
On the other side, I’d be extremely surprised if one could find evidence of a generation in which parents didn’t complain about their children’s misbehaviour.
Thanks, interesting pointer. Provides some nice counter weight to all those lamenting the lack of obedience in today’s kids (still I’d say they have a point as well)
The study cited (about the German jugend) is interesting, but also a bit unsatisfying: that is, many, many years after the fact, self-reporting about something where all kinds of feelings of guilt, pride etc., are involved. Also, care should be taken to apply the lessons of a quite different, authoritarian society to today’s much more open, cosmopolitan world.
It’d be great if they did some thorough survey of the people that participate in some of today’s ‘Stanford prison experiment’ re-enactments.
The prison experiment is generally not reenacted. It was hideously poorly designed to start with and the results weren’t even clearly interpretable in a useful fashion. Milgram type fake electric shock experiments can still be done (although some people have argued that they are unethical). I don’t know if this sort of thing has been tested for in those experiments, but I’d predict that you would actually not get a substantial result of this sort. The reasoning behind my prediction is that child rearing has become less obedience driven in the US in the last few years but the breakdown of proportions willing to shock people to (and to what extent) has remained roughly constant since Milgram’s initial experiments. If parenting forms matter we’d expect to see a decline in the fraction of people willing to severely shock in Milgram set-ups.
Edit: Thinking about this slightly more. We’d need to be careful about the exact experimental setup since going through with a Milgram electric shock experiment might make people answer questions about morality and upbringing differently than if they had not. But there’s also the problem that asking people such questions before hand might alter behavior as well. So there really should be three groups tested: A standard Milgram set-up, a set where they are asked the relevant questions before hand, and a set where they are asked afterwords. If we see a lot of difference in how the two groups asked about their moral upbringings respond then that would suggest that the Oliner study isn’t reliable.
Thanks—interesting read. There have in fact been a couple of re-enactments; for example, see Wikipedia. But, as you suggest, the Milgram experiments could be used as well. In either case, doing some in-depth analysis of the participants would be very useful.
Have you read Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority? He does some analyses of the participants in various versions of his experiment (as well as explaining why the experiment isn’t unethical).
Thanks for the link—I’ll put it on my reading list. For some reason I only know Milgram’s work from secondary sources.
Also relevant here are the Asch conformity experiments ; they also show the tendency of most people to conform, without the dramatic effects used in the Milgram experiments.
Thanks—interesting read. There have in fact been a couple of re-enactments; see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment)[Wikipedia] for example. But, as you suggest, the Milgram experiments could be used as well. In either case, doing some in-depth analysis of the participants would be very useful.
I think such lamentations rarely take the form of “my children always want to know why they should do as I say! I wish they’d just blindly obey”. More like “my children blindly dismiss everything I say! I wish they’d just blindly obey” :P.
On the other side, I’d be extremely surprised if one could find evidence of a generation in which parents didn’t complain about their children’s misbehaviour.