Stanley Milgram

Yeah.

Perhaps you'll do psychological studies in the future with Stanley Milgram or one of those chaps.

I was thinking about just getting people to buy me pints in the pub, but yeah, go on then.

I'll meet Stan Milligram and we'll do experiments on pints.

Classic evidence for the primacy of the situation has also lost force.

Take, for instance, Stanley Milgram's obedience studies, in which participants were asked to administer electric shocks to someone until the victim seemed to be unconscious or dead.

These classic studies have been taken as evidence that authority can override individual will.

However, subsequent research has found that personal traits associated with diligence and helpfulness predicted an increased willingness to administer the electric shocks.

Um, I think we had about 40 hidden cameras and There was a lot of discussion as to whether we should do this, and it was probably a stupid idea.

But we were trying out a psychological experiment called the Milgram experiment, which for those people who don't know what it is, was after the Holocaust, there was a psychologist called Milgram, I think Stanley Milgram, who wanted to work

out

why sort of intelligent Germans and other European citizens carried out mass murder.

But the issue is there is this acceptance now of political violence and this idea of virtuous violence.

of in order to be, to show my, how virtuous I am, I'm actually gonna hate and I'm going to show my allegiance to the group that I'm trying to impress by perpetrating a horrific act, whether it's online hate speech or bullying or actually in this movie, physical acts.

And that comes back to this idea of the Milgram experiment.

We worked with the leading experts on it now and they said it's really less about conformity and authority figures, which was the initial, what Stanley Milgram thought it was.

You might know, Dr.

B, you might know the Milgram experiments, which are experiments, obedience to authority.

And Stanley Milgram in the 1960s tried to explain why do people do things against their conscience.

And it's because of the person in authority.

So when there is an individual in authority, and the listeners can look up that experiment, in this case it was a person in a white coat, and the participants were delivering what they thought was deadly levels of shock.

What does it look like? Yes, I wrote recently a very short article.

It's on our website, on our blog, but also on Substack.

It's called Groomed to Obey, and it's rooted in this Milgram study that I explained.

They say...

Have you heard about the Milgram experiments before? Stanley Milgram, is it?

Stanley Milgram, 1960s.

He did a whole series of experiments, but the famous one, he has a participant come in who's to shock...

the learner every time they get something wrong on this word association task and each time they get it wrong the shock goes higher and the learner complains more and more and the shock gets higher and higher and eventually the learner starts to complain about their heart they start to say they want to leave the experiment and then they go silent And all along the way, behind the participant, the person delivering the shocks, is a person in a lab coat who says, you have to continue.

And a lot of what's taught even now in some of the leadership stuff that I've been a part of is that we need to watch out for this obedience bias, this deference to authority in the face of uncertainty.

What this identity leadership work talks about is that perhaps it's not obedience so much as it's being a part of an identity and following the leader, the identity leader in doing that.

And they talk about the Milgram experiment specifically and say, what's really interesting about that is the most dropouts happen when the experimenter gave the participant a prompt that had nothing to do with the scientific enterprise, when it was an order.

You have the OSH experiments.

You have the Milgram experiments.

What do we learn in the OSH experiments? Here's what they do.

They will literally say, we'll have 10, say we had five actors here and that's the real guy.

If you actually believe that your body is all that exists and you don't see a soul, or if you don't have a lot of confidence, you can't even distinguish reality, you're a slave to safety.

But it also relies with ego, social conditioning, addictions, et cetera, et cetera.

Likewise, have you guys ever heard of the Milgram experiment? Yes or no? Yes.

Okay, the Milgram experiment is basically where they bring someone in off the street and a guy in a lab coat gets you to electrocute somebody till they're almost dead.