[Mordisquitos]

Interesting. If we can assume the experimenter's failure to enforce the rules was mere clumsiness or incompetence, rather than an indicator of underlying intentional manipulation of the experimental conditions à la Stanford prison experiment, this can be interpreted in many different ways.

The (eventually) disobedient subjects were better at respecting the experimental process they were given than the "obedient" ones who went all the way to the maximum voltage. Why was that?

Could it be a sign that the disobedient subjects were on average more concentrated on the task at hand (smarter? less stressed? better educated? more conscientious?) than the ultimately obedient ones, and therefore were more likely to realise they were "hurting" the alleged learner and stop?

Or could it be that the obedient subjects were more likely to realise there was something fishy going on, suspecting the "learner" wasn't really being shocked, and thus were paying less attention to the learning rules?

Or was it, as the article suggests, that the obedient ones may have shut down emotionally under pressure to follow through, and their mistakes are the result of that?

Or were the obedient ones more likely to be actual sadists, who were enjoying the shocks so much that they didn't even care if the "learner" didn't hear their question, giving them a greater chance of shocking them again?

Unfortunately I think the Milgram experiment has become so entrenched in popular culture that there's absolutely no way it can be properly repeated to explore these questions.

[user2722]

It really calls into questions the conclusions drawn from the last 50 years. Here's the ones disproven I remember:

* kids grow to be rich because they accept delayed gratification

* alpha males are the leader of the pack and all other males are useless

* people accept violence if there is a higher authority which justifies it with a reason

How many people suffered or delivered suffering because of their beliefs in the above?

[Intralexical]

Making someone think they're an accomplice to torture is itself recognized as a form of psychological torture. Telling someone that they're helping to advance science proves nothing, except that people can be deceived, manipulated, and exploited by bad actors.

Milgram decided to repeat his gross ethical violation 30 times(!), with dozens of test subjects each time. Overall, the majority of people actually disobeyed the orders to continue with higher voltages.

I think the only reason it's become so popular is because it makes for a shocking story, with grandiose implications. The specific "agentic state theory" Milgram invented is not backed up by his data, and personally, I find it philosophically dubious and psychologically concerning that he gravitated to it.

See:

https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095935431560539...

[kakacik]

The first point, and I can see in my own life, is valid. Not properly rich by any means, but vastly surpassed any expectations and most of my peers from earlier life (which is rather easy when coming from poor eastern Europe but somehow most folks from back home didn't, too deep in their little comfort zones or fears of risks that were mostly made up).

It can be reframed as cca discipline too, willingness to suffer a bit for later rewards. Can see this as massive success multiplier in many real world situations.

[burningChrome]

>> willingness to suffer a bit for later rewards.

Almost every person I went to college with had this viewpoint. There's also something comforting knowing you and your friends are all doing the same thing. We all were dirt poor in college trying to support ourselves with crappy part-time jobs working delivering pizza, working in fast food joints, cleaning offices at night. The idea was we all believed we were working towards something better than our current situation. The suffering some how made you a better person, more resilient, made you understand what it was like to really earn something.

All of my close friends I had in college all went on to do successful things. Engineers, attorneys, stock brokers, software engineers, pharmacists. We all eventually got to where we wanted to be, but the suffering is what still binds us together to this day. Talking about some of the houses we lived in that should've been condemned. Having to work 60 hours a week, and still do well on that exam on Friday.

The willingness to suffer is eased when you have a shared experience with others around you.

[wredcoll]

The great thing is you can just focus on the one person who "worked hard" or "self disciplined" or "studied well" and got rich while ignoring all the other people who did the same thing and didn't.

[kakacik]

Working blindly hard is rarely rewarded well. Working smart, much better success story. This can be applied across whole job market but also within white collar jobs - I saw folks around me almost burn out with little to no reward, when it was cca clear it would end up that way. I didn't at that point, and leaned into stuff in other areas of my life and that worked much better.

I only write about myself and my perspective, have nothing to sell here, just sharing experience. No need to be so dismissive. There is always a factor of luck, but much less so if that approach spans across decades and generally works for me.

[KSteffensen]

Didn't the Dunedin study also find that childhood self-control and delayed gratification correlated with adult life outcomes?

https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1571970023782.pdf

[wredcoll]

Last I checked, the delayed gratification was also highly correlates with having wealthy parents.

[nolist_policy]

Source?

[arethuza]

On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath%27s_Curse

[cucumber3732842]

Wikipedia makes it sound like questionable at best. I'll wait a decade and see if it comes out looking like milk or wine.

[joe_the_user]

I don't think experimental psychology ever validated those extremely simplistic conclusions. I'd rather these simplistic conclusions are a "folk summary"/mythical-version of a few experiments and they come from already existing cultural tropes, cultural tropes that were simplified and made more cruel and ruthless by various self-marketing consultants.

[Spooky23]

Alot of the problem with these “disproven” things is over broad scope or abused in the popular media beyond comprehension.

The delayed gratification thing in particular is correlation vs. causation. It was really more about trust. Forcing kids to delay gratification is meaningless or counterproductive.

[user2722]

Agree. But according to Gemini [for what's worth] the final 1990 Mashmallow's study [since first versions were cautious] did indeed jump to conclusions to point there was a causation to a better later life. The media might have amplified, but the wrong (or misleading) conclusion was already present in the _scientific_ paper.

[mrguyorama]

If a scientific paper makes a conclusion, that doesn't mean its a correct, valid, or properly supported conclusion.

You instead look at the claim and the data and the experiment methodology. It often says something far far less generalizable or significant than the conclusion section of the paper.

[watwut]

The thing about experimental science is that you should not make much conclusions from one study or one paper. Those should wait till consensus is reached, till there are many independent studies confirming the same thing under various conditions.

[d1sxeyes]

The Milgram experiment also couldn't be repeated today as it was completely unethical. It caused huge psychological distress to participants to the point that some participants had seizures.

[Mordisquitos]

Maybe we can do a meta-Milgram. A group of junior researchers are tasked with implementing what they believe to be a Milgram experiment, and while performing it the subjects (actually actors) start faking psychological distress in response to having to shock the completely fake learner subjects.

One of the researchers feels guilty from the apparent panic attack his subject appears to be going through, so he excuses himself from the experimental room and approaches the lead investigator who's watching on CCTV from outside:

“Professor, this subject is really suffering from their belief that they are electrocuting the learner. I believe this is unethical, can we stop please?”

The professor replies:

“The experiment requires that you continue.”

[Lerc]

My guess is that it is the pressure to conform working in multiple ways.

The reading of questions while the subject was screaming is acting in a way that seems like that it is a performative action of conforming to the pattern and that the failure of the pattern is caused by the answerer failing to conform to the pattern. That makes the shocks a punishment for failing to conform. The questioner has a facade of doing the right thing by going through the motions, even though they are breaking the rules by doing so, because if the other party were compliant that rule wouldn't have been broken. That the shocks were painful would feel appropriate to those who had a strong sense that nonconformity should be punished. It is less them following the rules and more them assuming the intent of the rules and permitting abuse because the intent was not their decision. It might make them less willing participants to the abuse and more 'not my problem' active participants.

[joe_the_user]

The reason you have psychology experiments with controls and parameters is that extracting definite conclusions from the simple observation of human behavior is extremely difficult given the wide variety of individuals, groups and cultures.

Once you have an experiment that degenerates into just an event, a situation where the controls have failed, you come up with many potential conclusions but you've lost any science-specific-conclusion to the observations and you may as well look any series of events.

That said, I think experimental psychology just generally fails to establish enough controls to merit the scientific quality it aspires to.