Milgram’s experiment, conducted to measure man’s submission to authority, has been repeated. The guinea pigs were also quick to torture their fellows.
Remember that experiment, in which scientists ordered participants to shock other people (actually actors) in order to test the degree of human submission to an authority? It was 1963 and the results were chilling. Almost all of the participants in the “Milgram experiment” sent the maximum discharge to these poor victims who had done nothing and who would all have died, if it had not been for a simulation.
We are in 2017; all those who have heard of these works have swept them aside with a confident wave of the hand: “Me, I would never have obeyed”. Since then, there has been May 1968, the Arab Spring, the affirmation of free peoples and the weakening of the notion of authority. In 2017, rebels that we are, we would never have electrocuted innocent people just because a white coat would have ordered us to… Right?
Servitude
Not sure. Researchers have undertaken to repeat the experiment in order to assess the level of submission of modern man. Suffice it to say: it hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. In fact, the results suggest the same servitude in the face of power, the same phenomenon of disempowerment and lack of empathy when it comes to torturing others. on order.
For ethical reasons, the authors, from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Poland), did not reiterate the principle of electrocution – the image of the electric chair being a little too significant. Instead, they developed a system of progressive buttons, each delivering a “shock” of different intensity when pressed by the participants.
Women more spared
For the experiment, 80 participants (40 men and 40 women) engaged in this “game” … and as many potential executioners. Indeed, according to this work published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, 90% of the participants were again ready to send the maximum dose. With a qualification, however: when it came to torturing a woman, the refusal rate of the participants was three times higher. However, the small sample does not allow any conclusion to be drawn, warn the authors.
“Our study has, once again, illustrated the enormous power of the situation with which the subjects are confronted and how easily they can accept things which they find unpleasant”, underline the researchers, who have thus just demonstrated the invariability of human psychology.
.
