December 20, 2008

In Repeat of Milgram’s Electric Shock Experiment, People Still Pull the Lever.
posted by homunculus 15 years ago
  • I would think that people (who had no prior knowledge of the experiment) would be more ready to pull the lever these days than during Milgram's time. After all, 40 years of pro-authority TV conditioning is under the proverbial belt.
  • Somebody I know was teaching about the Second World War in an American university classroom, this past term. Resistance and collaboration will naturally play a big part in any discussion of this subject and I, being raised in the waning years of the Cold War, expected these young Americans to be completely intolerant of the point of view of the collaborator. In discussions with my friend I stressed how important it was to humanise the experience of a person under occupation, to prevent the class from becoming a jingoistic celebration of the heroic partisan verses the craven quizlings. In fact, my friend had the opposite problem. Growing up in the shadow of the Bush administration, most of the class thought that collaboration was a given and most had trouble seeing how resistance was even ethical.
  • There is tons of controversy over the original experiment, but I'm thinking if this lovely culture of Gitmo and StopTheTerriorizt at any cost continues, we shall soon see worse.