If you read Gina Perry’s critique, her conclusions is that fewer than half of the participants thought it was real.
These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average, and the study didn’t do a very convincing job make it seem believable from what I’ve read.
When I took psychology in college I had to submit to random experiments to as part of my grade (there were alternatives but the experiments were easier). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately.
When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.
That's pretty fun that your teachers did that. I wish teachers attempted to immerse students in the things they're teaching about more often, rather than just reading about it in abstract through a textbook or whatever.
I had a Junior High School teacher who did a variety of immersion lessons. The problem was even a small deviation from the real world structure turns the exercise into a pretty simple game. Essentially, the results are too complex and muddy to extract overall lesson.
And social science/history/economics is about learning the standard lessons of the field (even if those lessons are themselves simplistic compared to the real world, they are a baseline of common knowledge).
I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.
> Interviewing the original participants―many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did―and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram.
Just reading the Amazon summary, I feel like there’s a contradiction. If subjects were just trying to get it over with, yes it invalidates the study but the only troubling conclusion is that the study wasn’t scrutinized more closely.
I also don’t see why they would be “haunted” by what effectively amounts to a chore to get their $20 participation check.
These were Yale students, so probably smarter than average, and the study didn’t do a very convincing job make it seem believable from what I’ve read.
When I took psychology in college I had to submit to random experiments to as part of my grade (there were alternatives but the experiments were easier). Before I’d ever heard of Milgram, if one of those studies had put me in a similar situation I would have smelled a rat immediately.
When I was in middle school the teachers created a fake “government decree” to convince us that there was a new sin tax on products kids use (as a simulation). I immediately knew it was fake as did many other students, but that didn’t stop us from playing along for fun. I talked to a few of my teachers later and they genuinely believed that we fell for it.