![]() Image courtesy of Caspar et al., Current Biology (2016) In this test, the “agent” can shock or take money from the “victim,” either acting on orders or by their own choice. In other cases, the experimenter looked away, while the agent acted on their own volition. In some cases, a third person-an “experimenter”-sat in the room and gave orders on whether to inflict harm. In the first experiment, he said participants-an “agent” and a “victim”-took turns delivering mild shocks or inflicting a financial penalty on each other. Haggard said his team’s study was more transparent. Perry said Milgram’s experiments were far less controlled than originally thought and introduced variables that appeared to goose the numbers. Gina Perry, author of “Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments,” found a litany of methodological problems with the study. When Yale received reams of Milgram’s documents in the 2000s, other psychologists started to criticize the famous electric-shock study when they sifted through the notes more closely. “It’s difficult to ascertain whether participants are really deceived or not in such situations.” “Milgram’s studies rested on a deception: Participants were instructed to administer ‘severe shocks’ to an actor, who in fact merely feigned being shocked,” Haggard said. At no point, however, did someone truly experience an electric shock. Although pleas from the unknown person could be heard, including mentions of a heart condition, Milgram’s study said his volunteers continued to shock the “learner” when ordered to do so. Haggard said they used “moderately painful, but tolerable, shocks.” Milgram feigned shocks up to 450 volts.Īccording to Milgram’s experiments, 65 percent of his volunteers, described as “teachers,” were willing (sometimes reluctantly) to press a button that delivered shocks up to 450 volts to an unseen person, a “learner” in another room. Unlike Milgram’s classic research, Haggard’s team introduced a shocking element that was missing in the original 1960s experiments: actual shocks. “This suggests a reduced sense of agency, as if the participants’ actions under coercion began to feel more passive,” Haggard said. It’s like you flip the switch, but it takes a beat or two for the light to appear. Through two experiments, however, Haggard and the other researchers showed that people experienced a longer lapse in time in between the action and outcome, even if the outcome was unpleasant. The time between the action and its outcome is typically experienced as a simultaneous event. More simply, Haggard described the phenomenon as flipping a switch (action) to turn on a light (external outcome). Researchers at University College London and Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium arrived at this conclusion by investigating how coercion could change someone’s “sense of agency,” a psychological phenomenon that refers to one’s awareness of their actions causing some external outcome. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, described this distance as people experiencing their actions more as “passive movements than fully voluntary actions” when they follow orders. ![]() In other words, people actually feel disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders, even though they’re the ones committing the act. “In particular, acting under orders caused participants to perceive a distance from outcomes that they themselves caused,” said study co-author Patrick Haggard, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, in an email. ![]() Milgram’s research tackled whether a person could be coerced into behaving heinously, but new research released Thursday offers one explanation as to why. Shockingly, the results suggested any human was capable of a heart of darkness. The “just following orders” defense, made famous in the post-WWII Nuremberg trials, featured heavily in Eichmann’s court hearings.īut that same year Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of famous experiments that tested whether “ordinary” folks would inflict harm on another person after following orders from an authoritative figure. ![]() In a 1962 letter, as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were “forced to serve as mere instruments,” shifting the responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews to his superiors. ![]()
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