The Lucifer Effect
There’s been a lot written about psychology professor Jerry Burger’s recent replication of the famous “obedience” experiments first carried out by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. Here’s Burger’s paper in which he reports that obedience rates are almost the same today as they were nearly 50 years ago.
Wikipedia’s page on this experiment has an excellent summary of the methodology and results of the original study if you’re not familiar with it.
It’s a testament to the importance of the original obedience experiment that many who know nothing else about psychology have at least heard of it, and it’s common knowledge that Milgram found that a startlingly high proportion of ordinary volunteers were willing to administer very strong “shocks” to an innocent victim, on the orders of the experimenter. But there’s much more to the “Milgram Experiment” than many people realize. So - read on. That’s an order.
You should really read the Neuroskeptic article. It was very interesting, even for someone like me who thought she had heard everything there was to hear about Milgram.
If you’re interested in a more lengthy treatment of the topic, check out The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Phil Zimbardo. (He’s the guy who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, by the way, not to mention being the narrator on every Psych 101 video ever) It’s a long but fascinating look at the ways in which normal people end up doing horrible things.
I wish that every high school in America had a course using The Lucifer Effect as its central text. So frequently we represent those who commit acts of torture or genocide as “inhuman” somehow. We call them monsters, represent them as “other.” What’s so frightening, and so important to remember, is that in most cases, there is no important psychological distinction between them and us.
Your neighbors were willing to shock a friendly, “affable” older man—one they liked—to death. Because a researcher told them to. Well-adjusted, high-achieving, likeable undergraduate students began devising ingenious tortures for the “prisoners” they supervised, despite knowing that they had been assigned randomly to the condition of “prisoner” rather than “guard” and had done absolutely nothing to deserve such treatment.
We must all learn—we must remind ourselves, over and over, that the capacity to be monstrous is in all of us, not just the inhuman few. We must remind ourselves that when the choice faces us, our inclination will be to go along.
