Tue, 07/01/2008 - 3:59pm — lambert
Here.
No time to post just now, but since Bush turned the whole country into a giant Milgram experiment -- for which I expect Obama to hold him and his accountable, haw -- Milgram's ideas are, if anything, more relevant today than they when his experiments were performed.
The key thing to remember -- the expert sociologists on the blog will correct me -- is that evil is real, and anyone is capable of it given correctly engineered circumstances. Good and evil is not a matter of "us" and "them." Would things were so simple.
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Shocking!
Wow. I was just talking about this with a friend the other day, a fellow social scientist, and we were discussing using the movie about the Milgram experiment in our courses (we're both social scientists). I hadn't shown the film for several years, but I really must now. You're absolutely right. It's more relevant than ever.
I always felt that Bush subverted the chain of command...
on torture -- him and Rummy and Limbaugh -- in Iraq (and everywhere else, I suppose) with nods and winks as a Milgram-like experiment. Once the Command-In-Chief gave the OK, anybody could feel free to turn to knobs up to 11, chain of command be damned. All of which makes me very, very suspicious of "leadership" as a desideratum for anything....
[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
The nation as Milgram Experiment
and little chunks of it (Abu Ghraib and Gitmo) as Zimbardo's experiment.
Go Global!
Zimbardo vs. Milgram
I have the two pretty mixed up in my mind.
You should do a post on that, FrenchDoc. I could invent the Department of Essential Analytical Tools for such a post....
[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
i'd love to have that department
it's an essential one for pb2.0, i'd say.
I agree
it's a good idea.
Go Global!
Quotes R Us
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago
Almost
anyone. Crank the settings as high as you want and there are always a very few who resist. They're the interesting ones, to me.