The June 2011 issue of Isis, the official journal of the History of Science Society, is now out. Included in this issue are two articles of interest to historians of psychology. In his article on Stanley Milgram’s now infamous obedience to authority experiments, Ian Nicholson argues that Milgram’s research was less an attempt to explain … Continue reading Milgram and Masculinity, & More in Isis
BBC News reports that the Milgram obedience to authority experiments have been reimagined by a French reality TV show, The Game of Death. Participants on the show were instructed to administer electric shocks of near lethal voltage to other contestants, unaware that in fact these shocks were not being administered and that their rival contestants … Continue reading Reality TV and the Milgram Experiments
The BBC presented a(nother) successful replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment back in May, 2009. It is written up (with video excerpts) in The Situationist. Not surprisingly, 9 of the 12 participants gave electric shocks all the way to the highest level. This follows a successful replication conducted by psychologist Jerry Berger (UC Santa … Continue reading BBC Replicates Milgram
Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has posted a song online that incorporates sampled snippets of the recordings of Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments of the early 1960s. Very cool electrogroove… punctuated by screams that put the famous Wilhelm scream to shame. Perhaps something to play before your next leture on Milgram? (Thanks to Franklin Sayre for … Continue reading Milgram Obedience Study Song
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio Eye program has tracked down and interviewed four of the individuals who participated in Milgram’s now infamous obedience experiments. One of those interviewed by Radio Eye is Joseph Dimow, whose experience as a participant in the Milgram experiments has been covered by AHP previously. Radio Eye’s Beyond the Shock Machine … Continue reading Interview with Milgram’s participants
The long-awaited publication of the replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment, conducted by Santa Clara University (CA) psychologist Jerry Burger, has finally hit the pages of the American Psychological Association’s flagship journal, American Psychologist (unfortunately, only the abstract is freely available on-line). In the experiment, participants were told they are in a learning experiment … Continue reading Milgram Replication in American Psychologist
A meta-analysis by Dominic J. Packer, recently published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(4), offers to shed new light on how we interpret the influential series of studies conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in July 1961. A meta-analysis of data from eight of Milgram’s obedience experiments reveals previously undocumented systematicity in the behavior of disobedient … Continue reading Systematic Disobedience in Milgram’s Studies
Although nearly half a century old, it seems that there are still many things to say about Stanley Milgram’s famous series of experiments on obedience. Recently there was a new report in New York Times on the research program, in which many otherwise normal subjects were persuaded by white-coated experimenter to deliver (apparent) electrical shocks … Continue reading More on Milgram in NYT
AHP has already done a number of items on the famous obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram and their aftermath. Now we have come across a description from the perspective of one of Milgram’s subjects who refused to continue to the end. The January 2004 issue of Jewish Currents contained an article by Joseph Dimow entitled … Continue reading A Milgram Resister Speaks
Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies of the early 1960s have been something of a staple on this blog (e.g., here, here, and here), in no small part because there has been a lot of news about them of late. I have frequently mentioned that last year the ABC show Primetime did a modified replication of Milgram’s … Continue reading Full ABC Milgram Replication Online