Obedience Experiment Research Articles

The effects of avatar customization and virtual human mind perception: A test using Milgram’s paradigm

This study investigated how “teacher” avatar customization and exposure to “learner” virtual humans who display mind-affected participants’ behavior and emotions in a re-creation of Milgram’s obedience experiment. Female participants customized avatars that merged their physical self with hero, antihero, or villain archetypes and then interacted with a mindful or non-mindful virtual human; 82.8% of participants went above the maximum electric shock intensity. Women who customized hero avatars delivered lower voltage shocks to a virtual human compared with those who customized antihero and villain avatars. Virtual humans’ display of mind did not affect shock intensity, guilt, or negative emotion though participants reported increased shame after shocking a mindful versus a non-mindful virtual human. Customizing antihero avatars increased shame and negative affect, especially after interacting with mindful virtual humans. We discuss the implications of these findings for the Proteus effect and Computers Are Social Actors perspective in extreme virtual encounters.

‘We have a choice’: Identity construction and the rhetorical enactment of resistance in the ‘two peers rebel’ condition of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment

AbstractRecent re‐evaluations of Milgram's obedience experiments have drawn attention to the role of social identity and group processes. Milgram himself was concerned to explore processes of group influence by varying the collective dynamics of his experimental scenario in several conditions. The present study seeks to explore archived audio recordings from one of Milgram's group experiments—the ‘two peers rebel’ condition—from a perspective informed by discursive and rhetorical psychology. The findings show that collectivity was an active concern for speakers in the sessions, with contestation over the relevant group boundaries, and the appropriate course of group action. It is suggested that explanations of behaviour in Milgram's experiments that emphasise intergroup dynamics would benefit from attention to the ebbing and flowing of solidarity in the experimental sessions.

“We must continue.” The strange appearance of “we” instead of “you” in the prods of the Milgram experiment

In Milgram's obedience experiment, one of the many adjustments made by the experimenter to his “prods” is the regular use of “we” instead of the “you” required by the protocol. For example, he might say “we must continue” instead of “you must continue.” This text aims to describe the appearance for this use of “we” and suggests ways to understand what the “we” means for the experimenter who uses it, for the subject to whom it is addressed. Although Milgram describes a dualism (I–you), with an authority dominating a subject reduced to the agentic state, the “we” is a sign of similarity between those involved in the interaction and indicates cooperation rather than domination.

An Embodied Perspective as a Victim of Sexual Harassment in Virtual Reality Reduces Action Conformity in a Later Milgram Obedience Scenario

Group pressure can often result in people carrying out harmful actions towards others that they would not normally carry out by themselves. However, few studies have manipulated factors that might overcome this. Here male participants (n = 60) were in a virtual reality (VR) scenario of sexual harassment (SH) of a lone woman by a group of males in a bar. Participants were either only embodied as one of the males (Group, n = 20), or also as the woman (Woman, n = 20). A control group (n = 20) only experienced the empty bar, not the SH. One week later they were the Teacher in a VR version of Milgram’s Obedience experiment where they were encouraged to give shocks to a female Learner by a group of 3 virtual males. Those who had been in the Woman condition gave about half the number of shocks of those in the Group condition, with the controls between these two. We explain the results through embodiment promoting identification with the woman or the group, and delegitimization of the group for those in the Woman condition. The experiment raised important ethical issues, showing that a VR study with positive ethical intentions can sometimes produce unexpected and non-beneficent results.

Influence of authoritarianism, vagal tone and mental fatigue on obedience to authority

ABSTRACTRecent research suggests that obedience in the Milgram paradigm is underpinned by stress vulnerability and inhibitory control over pain sharing. Because self-regulatory fatigue (SRF) induction is a suited method to investigate the influence of inhibitory control on behaviour, participants (n = 99) were randomly assigned to a High vs. Low self-regulatory condition. Heart rate variability (HRV, a biomarker of stress vulnerability) was collected during 5-min baseline and continuously during the experimental procedure. Prior to the experiment, participants completed an online survey assessing right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), a well-known predictor of obedience. Using the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment, we found (i) that lower resting HRV predicted higher destructive obedience, (ii) that low self-regulatory inhibition (induced by fatigue) reduced destructive obedience, (iii) that the well-established influence of RWA on destructive obedience was suppressed in the presence of SRF. Implications for future directions in obedience research are discussed.

Psychological and Physical Violence in Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

This study aims to examine the psychological and physical violence in Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter. This study analyzed the psychological and social influences on serial killers by using two theories; Milgram’s “Obedience Experiment”, the experiment proved that the majority of people will obey the instructions that came from higher authority without thinking about moral values. The second theory is Sigmund Freud's beliefs about violence and right he thought that violence is a natural thing and there is a strong relationship between violence and right. The research samples are the serial killers and their victims and how theories put forward affect those characters. The main results of this study are the deep analysis of serial killer characters and an understanding of the main point of the motivations for these violent actions. In Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Jeff Lindsay employs the traditional style of psychological horror to give a realistic image of serial killers.

Victims’ Dehumanization and the Alteration of Other-Oriented Empathy within the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment

Using the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment (IVMOE; Dambrun & Vatiné, 2010), we studied victims’ dehumanization and its underlying processes. Under the supervision of the national service of security, participants were ordered to psychologically weaken a person suspected of preparing an attack. We manipulated the ethnicity of the victim and his terrorist membership. The doubly stigmatized victim (i.e. a North African victim member of al Qaeda) was tortured more severely than the other victims. We found some evidence that this effect was mediated by a decrease in term of other-oriented empathy, but not by personal distress. These results suggest that an empathy alteration process underlies dehumanization in crimes of obedience perpetrated against members of extreme out-groups.

Torture morale sur antenne 2 ?

The re-staging on Antenne 2 of the famous Milgram Obedience experiment as a reality television show (Zone Xtreme) reveals how an organizational system can abet an individual to torture another one to death only by using scientific and/or pedagogical arguments. We describe the mechanisms that keep somebody from identifying the different stages of psychological violence and sufferings inflicted and that can occur within some organizations.

The Use of Virtual Reality in the Study of People's Responses to Violent Incidents.

This paper reviews experimental methods for the study of the responses of people to violence in digital media, and in particular considers the issues of internal validity and ecological validity or generalisability of results to events in the real world. Experimental methods typically involve a significant level of abstraction from reality, with participants required to carry out tasks that are far removed from violence in real life, and hence their ecological validity is questionable. On the other hand studies based on field data, while having ecological validity, cannot control multiple confounding variables that may have an impact on observed results, so that their internal validity is questionable. It is argued that immersive virtual reality may provide a unification of these two approaches. Since people tend to respond realistically to situations and events that occur in virtual reality, and since virtual reality simulations can be completely controlled for experimental purposes, studies of responses to violence within virtual reality are likely to have both ecological and internal validity. This depends on a property that we call ‘plausibility’ – including the fidelity of the depicted situation with prior knowledge and expectations. We illustrate this with data from a previously published experiment, a virtual reprise of Stanley Milgram's 1960s obedience experiment, and also with pilot data from a new study being developed that looks at bystander responses to violent incidents.

Exploring the abuse of robots

Robots have been introduced into our society, but their social role is still unclear. A critical issue is whether the robot’s exhibition of intelligent behaviour leads to the users’ perception of the robot as being a social actor, similar to the way in which people treat computers and media as social actors. The first experiment mimicked Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment, but on a robot. The participants were asked to administer electric shocks to a robot, and the results show that people have fewer concerns about abusing robots than about abusing other people. We refined the methodology for the second experiment by intensifying the social dilemma of the users. The participants were asked to kill the robot. In this experiment, the intelligence of the robot and the gender of the participants were the independent variables, and the users’ destructive behaviour towards the robot the dependent variable. Several practical and methodological problems compromised the acquired data, but we can conclude that the robot’s intelligence had a significant influence on the users’ destructive behaviour. We discuss the encountered problems and suggest improvements. We also speculate on whether the users’ perception of the robot as being “sort of alive” may have influenced the participants’ abusive behaviour.

Character and Consistency: Still More Errors

This paper continues a debate among philosophers concerning the implications of situationist experiments in social psychology for the theory of virtue. In a previous paper (2002), I argued among other things that the sort of character trait problematized by Hartshorne and May’s (1928) famous study of honesty is not the right sort to trouble the theory of virtue. Webber (2006) criticizes my argument, alleging that it founders on an ambiguity in ‘cross-situational consistency’ and that Milgram’s (1974) obedience experiment is immune to the objections I levelled against Hartshorne and May. Here I respond to his criticisms. The most important error in Webber’s argument is that it overlooks a distinction between ‘one time performance’ experiments and ‘iterated trial’ experiments. I explain why the former cannot begin to trouble the theory of virtue. For some time now, there has been a lively debate in philosophy concerning the implications of empirical work in social psychology for the theory of virtue. While its origins can be traced to Flanagan (1991), the real catalyst for the debate was provided by two papers by Doris (1998) and Harman (1999). The central point of contention is whether the experimental results of ‘situationism’ have shown that not enough people have the right sort of character trait, 1 where the right sort is the sort of character trait used to define ‘virtue’ in philosophical theories of virtue. Harman and Doris (also 2002) take the position that situationism has indeed shown this, from which they conclude that not enough people have any virtues (and hence that virtue theory is empirically inadequate). It is to license these further inferences, on which most of the moral philosophical interest of the debate hangs, that our specification of the ‘right sort of character trait’ must refer to the requirements of philosophical theories of virtue. In a previous paper (2002), I articulated various grounds for objecting to Doris and Harman’s conclusions. My principal objection was that the sort of character trait operationalized in, and so tested by, the situationists’s experiments is not the right sort to interest the theory of 1 How many people is ‘enough’ is a separable point of contention, but not one that will occupy us here.

A Note on Obedience to Authority

This note describes and discusses two experiments. In Milgram's Obedience Experiment, subjects acted as posing questions to learners. Inaccurate answers resulted in an electric shock being administered to the learner. When the errors increased in number, the voltage of the shocks was increased to a point of intolerable pain. Although the shocks were not real (learners faked their responses), the teachers believed them to be real. The experiment revealed the willingness of the teachers to punish the learners in obedience to directions from the person in authority over them. In the Zimbardo Prison Experiment, college students acted as either or guards in a mock prison setting. Guards had the freedom to run the prison as they saw fit, without direct supervision. Open hostility toward prisoners and rebellion by prisoners soon prevailed. What should have been a two-week experiment was aborted on the fifth day when it became evident that real suffering was being inflicted on the prisoners.

Stanley Milgram and Siegfried Lenz: An Analysis of Deutschstunde in the Framework of Social Psychology

Siegfried Lenz’s novel Deutschstunde is analyzed on the basis of work conducted by two American psychologists: Stanley Milgram and Lawrence Kohlberg. The concept of duty and obedience to authority are considered as social phenomena that go beyond personal disposition. The article uses Milgram’s famous obedience experiment in order to consider the literary depiction of psychological processes underlying compliance with orders to commit reprehensible acts. A comparison is made between Jens Jepsen, the fictional obedient policeman in Deutschstunde, and Paul Grueninger, a real policeman in wartime Switzerland, who refused to follow orders and saved many refugees at the Austrian border.

Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Centuryby Lauren Slater; New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2004, 256 pages, $24.95

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessOpening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth CenturyBenjamin A. Spinner M.D.Benjamin A. Spinner M.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Aug 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.8.1226AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Lauren Slater's book Opening Skinner's Box provides a description of and reflection on ten psychological experiments of the last century. Slater's choice of experiments, which includes Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment and Harry Harlow's experiments of primate attachment, points toward a concern with the social aspects of psychology. In this discussion of the limits and limitlessness of human behavior and human relationships, Slater chooses the Holocaust, which may be the central historical and psychological event of the 20th century, as one of her motifs. By doing so, she sets a tone in which psychology is intimately connected to social behavior and in which psychological inquiry gains immediacy in the aspiration for practical application. Slater would have written a better book had she not littered her text with purple prose and poorly written novelistic passages. On Milgram's youth, Slater writes "[h]e had spent his childhood years in the South Bronx, where wildflowers grew in gutters and cockroaches scuttled across buckled linoleum." On Milgram's death by myocardial infarction, Slater describes the hospital scene: "[T]hey shocked him once, twice, who knows how often his body rose into the air, flailing like a fish's, shock shock, the black cardiac cuffs beating down." Such passages are unfortunate and peculiar distractions from what is a very informative book. Slater's unacceptable misspelling of names such as those of psychiatrists Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing, among others, further detracts from the seriousness of the book.One of the more engaging chapters in the book deals with the 1972 experiment of David Rosenhan, who recruited several participants to visit psychiatric emergency rooms with a single complaint: "I am hearing a voice. It is saying, 'Thud.'" They were to present no other remarkable symptoms or behavior. Rosenhan's participants were purportedly all admitted to inpatient units and diagnosed as mentally ill. Celebrants of Rosenhan's study have a certain sanctimonious "gotcha" glee and criticize psychiatry as a discipline unable to differentiate between illness and health, between insanity and sanity. Slater joins the ranks of the gleeful and repeats a version of Rosenhan's study herself, in which she reports to various emergency rooms with the same single complaint. Slater claims that she was prescribed numerous antipsychotic and antidepressant medications during her visits to the emergency department. Psychiatry and psychiatrists, by necessity, continue to refine diagnosis and treatment. The fact that the system is flawed translates into continued effort to improve our tools, and the fact that the system can be fooled seems to be only a superficial satisfaction for those who wish to criticize the field. Psychiatry will continue to evolve, along with its imperfections as a clinical field. Evolution, after all, is a progress not to perfection but to improvement.Slater's final chapter is a thoughtful conclusion in which she raises the hope that experimental psychology might inform clinical psychiatry and that the stamp of several remarkable experiments might remain as a reminder of the need to progress by provocation. She stretches her criticism too far when she complains that psychotherapy has failed to incorporate the lessons and inquiries of psychology. "Psychotherapy," writes Slater, "is all about feeling good, to its detriment, I believe." Such silly generalizations tarnish Slater's criticism and her hopes. Nonetheless, the moral context in which she frames psychiatry remains a crucial context in which to continue to study human behavior.Dr. Spinner is a resident in psychiatry at the Boston Medical Center. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 57Issue 8 August, 2006Pages 1226-1226PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES August 2006 Volume 57 Number 8 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 August 2006 Published in print 1 August 2006

The Impossibility of Collaborating with Kathy, ‘The Stupid Bitch’

The Impossibility of Collaborating with Kathy, ‘The Stupid Bitch’

Self and Other Obedience Estimates: Biases and Moderators

The authors conducted 2 studies regarding behavior perceptions of “self” and “typical other” in hypothetical replications of S. Milgram's (1963) obedience experiment. In Study 1, participants' knowledge about Milgram's actual results was manipulated. Regardless of knowledge, results demonstrated several specific social and perceptual biases (e.g., the self-other bias; J. D. Brown, 1986), in addition to several general, fundamental lessons of social psychology (e.g., the perseverance of lay dispositionism). Study 2 was designed to explore the possibility that participants' own academic interests and worldview could influence the biases explicated in Study 1. The authors assessed perceptions of both criminal-justice majors and non-criminal-justice majors regarding their perceptions of behaviors of self and typical other. The criminal-justice students' self-other obedience estimates were significantly higher than those of the non-criminal-justice students. Further, the self-other discrepancy for criminal-justice students was significantly smaller than the difference reported by non-criminal-justice majors, suggesting that the criminal-justice students demonstrated the self-other bias significantly less than non-criminal-justice students in this context. The findings indicate that specific social-perceptual biases may have been moderated by career interest and worldview.

The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know About Obedience to Authority1

Guided by the belief that we cannot make broad extrapolations from the obedience studies without first firmly establishing what has and has not been found using the paradigm itself, this article draws on 35 years of accumulated research and writings on the obedience paradigm to present a status report on the following salient questions and issues surrounding obedience to authority: (a) How should we construe the nature of authority in the obedience experiment? (b) Do predictions of those unfamiliar with the obedience experiment underestimate the actual obedience rates? (c) Are there gender differences in obedience? and (d) Have obedience rates changed over time?

Attribution of Responsibility and Trust in the Milgram Obedience Experiment1

The two primary theoretical explanations for the findings of the Milgram (1963, 1974) obedience studies are that of Milgram, stressing the role of relinquished responsibility to the authority on the one hand, and that of Mixon (1971, 1972), for whom trust in the experimenter is the key element on the other hand. The aim of the 2 studies reported in this article, using edited portions of the film Obedience (Milgram, 1965), was to explore the naive social perceiver's understanding of the dynamics of obedience to authority through his or her attributions about responsibility and trust, and thereby to provide some input into the theoretical controversy between Milgram and Mixon. Both studies were more supportive of Milgram's than of Mixon's position.

The Milgram obedience experiment: support for a cognitive view of defensive attribution.

(1996). The Milgram Obedience Experiment: Support for a Cognitive View of Defensive Attribution. The Journal of Social Psychology: Vol. 136, No. 3, pp. 407-410.

Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedience experiment: The role of personality, situations, and their interactions.

Among the far-reaching implications that have been drawn from Milgram's obedience research is that situations powerfully override personal dispositions as determinants of social behavior. A focused review of the relevant research on the Milgram paradigm reveals that the evidence on situational determinants of obedience is less clear than is generally recognized; contrary to the commonly held view, personality measures can predict obedience; another kind of dispositional variable, enduring beliefs, is also implicated in the obedience process and approaches suggested by interactionist perspectives can provide some integration of the literature. The article concludes with a discussion of the broader inferences about obedience and social behavior called for by this review and the enduring significance of Milgram's obedience research