{"id":20114,"date":"2021-12-21T11:46:56","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T11:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=20114"},"modified":"2021-12-21T11:46:56","modified_gmt":"2021-12-21T11:46:56","slug":"please-continue-did-this-simple-phrase-lead-normal-people-to-torture-strangers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/psychology\/please-continue-did-this-simple-phrase-lead-normal-people-to-torture-strangers\/","title":{"rendered":"“Please continue” \u2013 did this simple phrase lead normal people to “torture” strangers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Kaposi<\/a>, Psychotherapist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Would you electrocute an innocent stranger if you were told to do so by someone in a position of authority? This is the dilemma hundreds of US adults were presented with in Stanley Milgram\u2019s famous and controversial \u201cobedience to authority<\/a>\u201d experiments that ran from 1961 to 1962.<\/p>\n

As with many social psychologists of his age, Milgram\u2019s formative experience<\/a> was the Nazi genocide of European Jews during the Second World War. Wishing to understand what had made one of the greatest crimes in human history possible, he devised a series of experiments to find out more about humans\u2019 compliance in the face of authority.<\/p>\n

Arriving at Milgram\u2019s lab, a naive participant met another apparent volunteer as well as a lab-coated \u201cexperimenter\u201d. The experimenter explained that they were about to participate in an experiment on \u201cmemory and learning\u201d and then asked the pair to draw lots to assign one the role of \u201clearner\u201d and the other that of \u201cteacher\u201d. The learner was then escorted into an adjacent room to have electrodes attached to his arms. While the participant, now officially the \u201cteacher\u201d, and the experimenter returned to the room in front of an electric shock generator and a row of switches \u2013 ranging from 15 volts (\u201cslight shock\u201d) to 375 volts (\u201cdanger: severe shock\u201d) to 450 volts (\u201cXXX\u201d).<\/p>\n

A series of word pairs were then read to the learner, whose task was to remember these pairs correctly. The teacher\u2019s job was to \u201cteach\u201d by administering progressively stronger electric shocks whenever the learner did not remember the correct pair.<\/p>\n

The shocks were not real: the learner was part of the experiment team and the draw was rigged. Yet, Milgram argued, the vast majority of participants did not show any sign of realising that the real objective of the experiment was not how the \u201clearner\u201d learns, but what happens when the \u201clearner\u201d grunts, then protests loudly and screams in pain, or when he suddenly falls into a deadly silence. Would the teacher continue on the mere say-so of the experimenter? Milgram\u2019s astonishing finding was that over half of them did: \u201celectrocuting\u201d an innocent stranger with increasing severity up to the end of the scale.<\/p>\n

Explaining what happened<\/h2>\n

Milgram was famously never able to match the horror in his lab with an adequate theory to explain it<\/a>. Up until his death in 1984, he remained preoccupied with the disturbing spectre of his participants\u2019 administering electric shocks while being clearly tormented.<\/p>\n

But despite the lack of concrete explanation, as well as outstanding questions regarding Milgram\u2019s method, the experiments continued to be seen as having revealed the truth about humanity and have been used to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the extreme abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison<\/a> by US soldiers. Continued, that is, until around a decade ago when academics began to interrogate the immense amount of data around the experiments, at a dedicated archive at Yale University<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One popular current explanation<\/a> suggests that participants stayed in the experiment not because they were simply following orders, but because they enthusiastically identified with the experimenter. Participants, then, were not passive \u201ccogs in the machine\u201d, but motivated pursuers of \u201cevil\u201d, in the supposedly virtuous name of science.<\/p>\n

\"Setup.\"<\/a>
Setup of the most famous conditions in Milgram\u2019s \u2018obedience to authority\u2019 experimental series.<\/span>
\nFred the Oyster, Wikimedia<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another popular account focuses on arguments<\/a> between the experimenter and the participants, suggesting that whether or not the teacher electrocuted the learner depended on the outcome of a debate they had with the \u201cwitty\u201d experimenter. It has also been claimed that perhaps participants\u2019 seeming obedience came from the fact they saw through the experimental deception<\/a>. Or another theory goes that in what amounted to a traumatic situation<\/a>, participants were effectively coerced by the experimenter into electrocuting the learner.<\/p>\n

The tapes<\/h2>\n

Given the number of current theories, I wanted to find out more<\/a> about the man who sat in the room with the participants. What was he like? And how did his behaviour influence people\u2019s behaviour? Instead of relying on accounts after the event, I used the audiotapes<\/a> of 140 of Milgram\u2019s experiment sessions and tried to account for everything the experimenter did.<\/p>\n

My starting point was what we have always known \u2013 when participants resisted, Milgram\u2019s experimenter responded with a succession of four \u201cprods\u201d:<\/p>\n

Prod 1: Please continue.<\/p>\n

Prod 2: The experiment requires that you continue.<\/p>\n

Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.<\/p>\n

Prod 4: You have no other choice, you must go on.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the experimenter regularly used these phrases to \u201cprod\u201d participants to continue. But the frequency with which \u201cPlease continue\u201d was used was nearly as much as all the other prods three times put together \u2013 and it almost always led to participants continuing the electrocution.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In contrast, throughout the 140 sessions, there is next to no attempt from the experimenter either to become a motivating leader or to aggressively coerce participants. And while there are sometimes arguments advanced by the experimenter, they are spectacularly unsuccessful. They tend to lead to participants\u2019 immediate departure from the experiment.<\/p>\n

\u2018Please continue\u2019<\/h2>\n

But why was a polite little phrase at the very centre of the most infamous experiments in the history of psychology? It\u2019s not easy to answer this question, but let us join \u201cParticipant 2010\u201d just as she shocks the learner with 405 volts. After earlier bouts of violent screams, she suddenly encounters an eerie silence:<\/p>\n

Milgram\u2019s obedience experimental sessions.
\nAuthor provided (no reuse)<\/span>337 KB (download)<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Teacher: \u201c405 volts\u201d<\/p>\n

             [BUZZZZZ]\n\n             [silence - the learner does not scream anymore]\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Teacher: \u201cGold moon.\u201d<\/p>\n
             [silence - the learner does not protest anymore]\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Teacher: \u201cHard \u2013 stone, head, bread, work.\u201d<\/p>\n
             [long silence \u2013 the learner does not provide an answer] \n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Teacher: \u201cThink he\u2019s alright?\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Experimenter: \u201cPlease continue\u201d<\/p>\n
             [silence]\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Teacher: \u201c420 volts\u201d<\/p>\n
             [BUZZZZZ]\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
To me, what this shows is that \u201cPlease continue\u201d was anything but a polite phrase in these experiments. Not only did it ignore the participant\u2019s worries, it also sought to eradicate any questions or concerns. And I believe that, subtly but relentlessly, the continuous use of \u201cPlease continue\u201d worked towards destroying any vestige of humanity from Milgram\u2019s participants.<\/p>\n
Milgram\u2019s experimenter was clearly not a bully who beat people into submission. Indeed, the participants inevitably quit the experiment the moment they perceived him to be rude. What participants were astonishingly vulnerable to, however, was the violence hiding in the smallest of his utterances.<\/p>\n
Did ordinary US citizens become \u201ctorturers\u201d because of an invisible yet relentless assault on them? Maybe they could not stop doing evil, because they did not recognise that evil was being done to them. And this may also be the lesson we can finally draw from the experiments that have haunted psychology for six decades. It is not enough to mean well. The origins of human violence<\/a> to others may be found in acts that seem barely noticeable.\"The<\/p>\n
David Kaposi<\/a>, Psychotherapist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology, The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Kaposi, Psychotherapist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology The Open University Would you electrocute an innocent stranger if you were told to do so by someone in a position of authority? This is the dilemma hundreds of US adults were presented with in Stanley Milgram\u2019s famous and controversial \u201cobedience to authority\u201d experiments that ran from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":20118,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1525,1640],"class_list":["post-20114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}