Milgram

Suppose you were hired for a modest amount of money to assist in an experiment designed to fine-tune how well and how quickly students learned information. Surely that is a noble cause.

You showed up at the appointed time-and-place and there is another volunteer waiting for the experiment to start. A technician wearing a lab-coat shows up and asks for your names. He sorts alphabetically. The other fellow's last name is later in the alphabet than yours so he goes to the other side of a flimsy partition with a window in it.

You watched the technician hook some electrodes up to the other volunteers wrists.

Then he joined you back on your side of the partition.

 

You can see that the technician has a keyboard with very large dials on it. The technician reads off questions that the other volunteer must answer to the best of his ability. Your job is to depress the button (switch) on your keyboard when the technician indicates that the volunteer gave an incorrect answer.

The first time you do so, you hear a small yelp from the other side of the screen. The technician reassures you that the electric shock, although painful, is completely harmless.

***

You are involved in several sessions. Perhaps on one session the technician runs through some of the questions the other volunteer got wrong the first time and if he answers them incorrectly a second time the technician directs you to turn up the dial to administer more voltage for the corrective shock.

You comply. The dial is marked with green-yellow-red zones and the increased voltage is clearly in the green zone.

Perhaps the other volunteer answers a question correctly and the technician indicates the answer was wrong and tells you to administer a corrective shock.

You comply. 

***

Asking around, you learn that there are forty other volunteers from a wide range of ages and life-experiences.

Part way through the scheduled sessions, the technician (Larry) tells you that your team is not performing as well as the other teams. He suggests that it might be due to the lag-time between the wrong answer and when you push the key to administer the shock. Perhaps a shorter lag-time would result in better "learning". Larry also increases the voltage for all of the wrong answers.

The other volunteer not only yelps but is whimpering by the end of the "learning" session.

You need the money. You do what you are told to do.

***

In the final session, the other volunteer sounds very rattled and disoriented. The technician is also testy as the other volunteer's performance is very poor with few correct answers given. Out of what you think is frustration, the technician rapidly increases the voltage throughout the course of the sessions.

When he gets to the yellow, you don't say much but when he gets to the red you question him.

Do you push the key?

Perhaps Larry responds "We recycled the voltage dial from a different experiment and those colors do not mean anything." or maybe he says "The government makes us put those colors on the dial in case we get somebody who has a pace-maker." and the other volunteer is clearly a young and healthy looking fellow.

Do you push the key?

The volunteer is sobbing and shrieks when you push the key. Maybe you can see that he wet his pants when you look through the window.

Do you keep pushing the key?

65% of the volunteers did.

Yale. 1961. Stanley Milgram designed the experiment. The second volunteer was a paid actor. The keyboard activated a small light to tell the actor when to act shocked.

Milgram wanted to see if Americans were capable of committing the atrocities we saw in NAZI Germany. Nearly all Americans thought it was not possible. Remember, 1961 was a scant 16 years from the end of the liberation of the concentration camps.

We were wrong.

***

As a tiny bit of editorializing, one aspect of most social media and texting is that there is a "coolness" associated with rapid responses. It is inherent in how most platforms are structured. If you take the time to compose a thoughtful response then it is unlikely to be read. If you vomit strings of short, emotional posts then your "thoughts" will be near the top of the stack and are likely to be read and commented on.

Another thing about most social media is that the blizzard of calls for our attention makes "last week" seem like it was an eternity ago and therefore irrelevant. If last week is irrelevant, then 1961 must be Stone-age irrelevant.

Essentially, we are being shaped into a culture of mindless bots who are conditioned to inflict pain without thought or empathy; totally without connection to the past.

One of the things that I appreciate about the "blogging" universe is that people who want to think about topics for a day, a week or a month are not punished.