I'm afraid I have only a limited respect for psychology. The field attracts too many quacks and sloppy thinkers. One of the most famous sloppy thinkers was Stanley Milgram whose famous experiment in the 6os was said to have proved that a large number of people are capable of cruelty when authorities sanction it. That's certainly possible, I just don't think Milgram proved it, or even came close to proving it.
Could Milgram's experiment have been as obviously flawed as this BBC re-do of the experiment? Here the victim's screaming voice is obviously fake. It sounds speeded up and is obviously pre-recorded to boot. Most of the students administering the charge must sense, at least unconsciously, that something's up, and the situation isn't to be taken seriously.
The controls in front of the scientist (who's dressed like a doctor, and acts like one) are never explained, and are plausibly misunderstood by the student to be a means of modifying the charge or keeping track of the subject's vital signs. It shouldn't be surprising that that most of the students weren't terribly worried about the health of someone who's under close medical supervision.
Add this to the fact that in the lawyered-up age we live in everybody knows that a university would never allow a casual test subject to be put in serious jeopardy. Further add that the researcher continuously assures the student that no lasting injury will be done to the subject, who can quit at any time. The student administering the charge has to conclude that the screaming man is probably not in real jeopardy. The fact that 30% of the students still refused to hurt an obvious or near-obvious fake could actually be taken as a ringing endorsement for the goodness in man.
A good experiment is one that definitely confirms or excludes an explanation and this experiment does neither. I'm amazed that Milgram didn't realize that, and even more amazed that subsequent academics failed to see it.
Milgram was an odd person. He's also famous for the "Lost Letter Experiment" in which he demonstrated that found mail addressed to unpopular people like famous nazis were less likely to be re-mailed than letters addressed to normal people. I hope my taxes didn't have to pay for that.
Psychology does have a place, but it seems like its misused as often as not. It's very trendy, very faddish. Here's (above) a cover of Psychology Today from 1974. It informs us that psychosurgery (remember the fake Philipino guys that removed chicken entrails from people's stomachs without breaking the skin?) is on the level, and that Yuri Geller (a magician who claimed to be a psychic, exposed by Randi ) is on the up and up. Other issues touted open marriage (how many of these ended in divorce?), kibbutz-style raising of children (since dropped by Israel), and a bunch of other later discredited ideas. This was an influential magazine in its day. What does that tell you about standards in the field of psychology?
As a footnote, here's a link to 5 experiments which the author says prove that humanity is doomed. Milgram's is number one. I liked the article myself, but then again, I don't take things like this too seriously. Most isolate the unsocial or uncaring thing the subjects did when tested, and ignore the social and caring things the subjects did during the rest of the day. A fun read, but not very good science.
15 comments:
I knew professors and teachers at universities we're clueless about psychology.
Those people involved in the experiment didn't live in a hyper-lawyer age like we do, so they could have thought that experiments like Milgram's was normal fare, although I won't strongly defend that; I'm no expert. I do agree with your theory though.
Eddie, you ever read "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," by Michael Chabon? It seems like a book within your tastes
Maybe its interesting to look at the experiment in context of Mc Carthyism; the Rosenberg trials; red scare stuff. More a symptom of the era than anything else.
Max: I thumbed through that book, but couldn't get a sense of it. If you recommend it, I'll take another look.
Thomas: Red scare? Maybe. I think Milgram said he was influenced by what he read about the Nuremberg Trials.
When you speak of trendiness in psychology, I think of Freud. For a very long time, his theories were fashionable to reference and appeared all across pop culture. Even today, his theories are part of the common pop cultural knowledge. Nobody in psychology believes Freud's theories wholesale anymore, but he is STILL hugely influential in the humanities. Perhaps he has been even a bigger influence on art and writing than on psychology.
I swear almost every other college student I talk to these days is psychology major. I'm never sure if that's a good thing or not. Is it a big market right now, or do people just like to think they know how everyone's mind works?
I've always had an interest in the subject. Whenever one of my English classes mentioned "psychological ids" and other such things my ears always perked up. However I've avoided it so far. As interesting as it may be, I read into things a bit more than I'd care to as is! I kind of want to trust people occasionally=P
What do you think of behaviorism Eddie? Reading about it and how sneering it's practitioners were made me incredibly angry for some reason. I can read about ridiculous medieval scientific beliefs and laugh but behaviorism is everything that's dreary about a certain archetypical type of scientist.
It seems that in science you either have cultured humanists with great senses of humor like Stephen Hawkings and Richard Feynmen or you get these dreary pedants. I've always wanted to draw a cartoon called "the scientists family" with a group of bored socks and sandles wearing people looking at you like you're something on the bottom of their shoe but I can't get the faces right.
Yes, I wiki-ed Milgram after posting. His experiments were inspired by the Eichmann trial at Nurenburg, and his first experiments took place in 1961, somewhat after the "Red Scare" period.
Nevertheless, I meant it as more of a motivation he wasn't conscious of, and symptomatic of that sort of paranoia; of being "given up" by your peer.
The wiki entry also said that Milgram had a difficult time getting into the Harvard psychology grad school because he had hardly taken any psych courses as a undergrad. He was only one year out of grad school when he did the xperiment.
For me the problem with psychology is you need to both an absolute genius and supernaturally empathetic and wise to be a good psychiatrist.
I can't think of anyone I went to highschool with I'd want counselling me if I ever needed psychological help. I don't want some jackass flipping through the dsm-IV and lazily prescribing medication.
Anon: I like behaviorism because it attempted to put psychology on a scientific footing, something others gave lip service to, but rarely made a serious attempt at. On the other hand, it's dry, anti-social if taken too seriously, and difficult to impliment in the real world.
I thought its greatest application would be in reversing bad habits, but I may have been wrong. I tried it on myself with mixed results. It worked for a time, but it required keeping elaborate records of my behavior, and I just got tired of doing that. I'm still glad I tried it.
I wish some genius would write a book about modifying habits. At least Skinner, for all his faults, took the subject seriously. The only non-behaviorist (the only one i'm aware of, anyway) to write about this subject in a serious way was, of all people, Timothy Leary. He said LSD could break habits, and there's a chance that he may have been right, but it was pretty useless in replacing the bad old habits with positive new ones.
Fried: In recent years I've become a big fan of Freud, even though he was probably wrong about most things. A theory doesn't have to be correct in order to be interesting.
Ron Corwin: I think every liberal artsy person should take a survey course in psychology, but that's enough.
So far as I can tell, you can learn more about the way the human mind works from good literature and history than by studying psychology.
Thomas: Fascinating! What would we do without Wikipedia?
I agree it was a noble attempt but I think that human psychology and all the soft sciences in general are too complex to be reduced to formulas and the rejection of any internal motivation and emotions as causes for behavior was ridiculous.
If you look back on behaviorists attempts to codify human behavior they are quite ridiculous and open to a level of satire beyond what Voltaire did to Leibniz.
Odd this topic should be here.
I've just been reading about how psychoanalysis developed in light of group evolutionary strategy. The Freudians sound like a cult.
He created an echo-chamber of sycophants so that his vaguest speculation would over time, become orthodoxy of the new "science". To contradict him was to invite being cast out into darkness, An embarrassing psychological diagnosis would be the last word ever heard about you.
He may be the only practising psychoanalyst to have refused ever to be analysed himself. If he had, it might have changed history.
He passed on a tradition of scientific laxity which still keeps it the fuzziest science to dare call itself medicine. Even so, before Einstein, he was the most famous scientist in the world, thanks to his brilliant public relations man, Eddie Bernays.
For all our studies in psychology, you'd think we would be less screwy than in previous eras. Alas, this seems not to be the case.
When I was of college age, I was particularly fascinated by psychology. In retrospect, I realize this was mostly a symptom of self-obsession. I basically wanted to study myself. Fortunately, I had a gut-level sense that this would not lead to a productive career. Subsequent years have taught me the wisdom of maintaining narcissistic pursuits as an avocation rather than a vocation.
Perhaps some refugees from the 70's will find this book of interest.
I'm not sure, but I think BBC's re-do of Milgram's experiment wasn't like re-running the experiment at all, but rather almost like a reenactment as if it were to appear for a movie. That is, the volunteers were not unaware that the experiment was "faking" the electric shocks administered by them on the fake subject, who would pretend to be suffering. If I'm not mistaken, experiments like this and the Zimbardo's prison experiment were strongly ethically questioned and somewhat like "prohibited" by the psychologist community after that. But I may be misremembering* something.
(* according to the spell check, it's actually a word, as it isn't underlined)
The author of this article is a complete idiot, as are most of the people leaving comments about completely irrelevant points. You have done nothing but demonstrate how little you know about the field of modern psychology, its vast fields, its history, it's scientists, and its techniques. If you were to apply to a graduate program in any area of psychology, the overall acceptance rate is like 12-15%! The people in this field are some of the brightest, most clever individuals in any of the behavorial and cognitive sciences.
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