4/7/2007

6 Responses to “Smile! You’re in a Social Psychology Experiment!”

1. Right now their probibly are in the demacratic party

   krazy kagu (6cb3c5) — 4/7/2007 @ 11:50 am

   
   

2. Remember the kid in school who couldn’t spell to save his life? He now surfs the internet all day leaving comments.

   Second Biggest Billygoat (33f3ca) — 4/7/2007 @ 1:03 pm

   
   

3. My kids and their cousins have a follow-up after the first wears off:

   Made-ya not look!

   Amphipolis (fb9e95) — 4/7/2007 @ 4:02 pm

   
   

4. There was a classic experiment, I believe at Harvard, several years ago where the volunteers were told to give an electric shock to some unseen volunteer victim. The “victim” was just another researcher who would moan when he knew the subject would press the button.

   They found that the subject would keep increasing the pain when instructed to do so, no matter how loudly the victim would scream.

   They concluded from the experiment that man was horrible and didn’t care about his fellow man.

   They really needed a control group where someone who wasn’t wearing a lab coat and known to have Harvard credentials was asking the subject to administer this pain to an unknown victim.

   It was actually a very successful experiment in showing how the idiot masses will follow the commands of those who they are conditioned to believe are elite authority figures. The researchers didn’t catch on to this.

   J Curtis (d21251) — 4/7/2007 @ 6:49 pm

   
   

5. I got caught up in one of these as a freshman guinea pig. At our school, all students in Intro Psychology had to earn 20 points by participating in graduate student’s research projects. I signed up for one that explicitly said up to one hour — the grad student held me up for an extra hour, by saying he was almost done. It was only when I confronted him about it, he admitted the test was to see how long he could make someone stay. I pointed out that I was only participating to get my “points” and only stayed late to presumably help him in his grade; that he was exploiting other students’ “good will;” that this was an abuse of “human subjects” research as his consent form was faulty; and he could have trouble with any future requests to the human subject review board should I chose to keep complaining. In the end I got apology letters from his advisor, my professor, and the grad student; and was exempted from having to do any more experiments.

   fresca (f28dac) — 4/8/2007 @ 11:40 am

   
   

6. J Curtis, I must disagree with your summary of the experiment.

   I received my BS in Psychology in ’96 and the Milgram Experiment was quite thoroughly discussed in the curriculum. The Wikipedia article I linked to does a pretty good job of describing it.

   Specifically, your statements “They concluded from the experiment that man was horrible and didn’t care about his fellow man.” and “They really needed a control group where someone who wasn’t wearing a lab coat and known to have Harvard credentials was asking the subject to administer this pain to an unknown victim.” and “It was actually a very successful experiment in showing how the idiot masses will follow the commands of those who they are conditioned to believe are elite authority figures. The researchers didn’t catch on to this.” are all incorrect.

   Especially that last one, as the experiment was designed to study the tendency of people to obey authority figures. The article published depicting the experiments was called Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

   Darkmage (be2d37) — 4/9/2007 @ 8:19 am