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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9861524" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As with the Stanford prison experiment, the stuff people say about the Milgram experiment is often HORRIFICALLY mis-quoted, inaccurate, or even straight-up wrong. So, while I don't mean to pick on you personally for this one, I'm gonna have to tear into that quite a lot because this reflects that false/inaccurate presentation.People were not "willing" collaborators. The vast majority of people complained multiple times along the way and had to be verbally coerced into continuing. Further, unlike what most people say, the experimental subjects were NOT repeatedly told that they could leave at any time. Rather, there was a specific script that every test-giver had to go through, which escalated the responses to higher and higher expectations if a previous prompt stopped working. They were:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Please continue.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The experiment requires you to continue.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">It is absolutely essential that you continue.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You have no other choice but to continue.</li> </ol>If--and only if--the experimental subject (the "Teacher") exhausted all four of these instructions, then the experiment would end. And they had to actually exhaust them--a prompt would be repeated if the subject complained again, until that prompt failed to convince the experimental subject to continue. Almost all of the subjects exhibited clear and obvious signs of distress (e.g. nervous laughter, pained expressions, etc.) Furthermore, there were additional prompts specified for the experimentalist in response to certain kinds of subject comments. If the subject expressed concern for the health or wellbeing of the "Learner", the experimentalist was supposed to say, "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on." If the subject stated that the "Learner" appeared to be in intense distress or wishing to halt the experiment, they were to be told, "Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on."So the claims a lot of people make--how just being in a situation with authority figures telling you what to do suddenly destroys all sense of moral duty or the like in any subordinate person--is completely incorrect. Almost all of the 40 test subjects complained. Almost all of them had to reach at least the third prompt ("It is absolutely essential that you continue"), and most were explicitly and specifically told that the actions they were taking would not cause permanent harm to the "Learner".In other words, far from showing that most people meekly submit to authority even when they know that authority is giving morally wrong orders, it shows that most people question authority to at least some degree; that most people, while they do trust authority figures in some contexts, do not blindly follow orders and clearly show great emotional distress in response; and, finally, that to achieve the levels of deference shown in the experiment, the experimentalists had to extensively deceive and manipulate the test subjects.Yes, it does show that it is possible for a powerful authority to coerce moral people into committing immoral actions against the latter's moral instincts, if said authority operates carefully. But doing so was difficult. Furthermore, the experiment itself was with only a relatively small and not necessarily representative sample, so even the conclusions we can validly draw from it are limited.</blockquote>

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