Millgram and the Facebook generation

[[Castration Pop]]

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Millgram experiment, look it up.
Done it? Good. Pretty creepy huh?

Now... recreations of the millgram experiment in 2009 showed similar results. However with the rise of things like facebook and myspace, and online relationships and people ascribing emotional attachments to people they've never met face to face. And the addition of decentralizing media outlits and knowledge bases. Do you view that the Millgram experiment results will shift to a different result if it were reproduced now? How about twenty years from now?

[sora wonk]

I'm not sure how strong emotional attachments to internet friends are. I feel like no matter how long you've known someone online, your relationship will never be as close as with someone you know in reality. This is because despite contact, people online are still a little bit unreal to each other, which is why trolls are more prevalent online than they are in reality. Thus, I'm not sure how great an effect social networks will have on a repeat of the Milgram experiment.

Rather, I think the strongest factor in favor of a better outcome in a Milgram redo is the fact that we know about the Milgram experiment. We are taught it in high schools and colleges. We also generally know about the dangers of going along with the crowd, thanks to events like the Holocaust and the murder of Kitty Genovese.

I mean, I can't guarantee that this knowledge is going to prevent people from going along with authority and hurting each other nowadays because other factors like courage and empathy and whatnot are involved, but I feel like teaching these things should have helped set our moral compasses a bit at least?

[[Castration Pop]]

soracious wonk

I'm not sure how strong emotional attachments to internet friends are. I feel like no matter how long you've known someone online, your relationship will never be as close as with someone you know in reality. This is because despite contact, people online are still a little bit unreal to each other, which is why trolls are more prevalent online than they are in reality. Thus, I'm not sure how great an effect social networks will have on a repeat of the Milgram experiment.

Rather, I think the strongest factor in favor of a better outcome in a Milgram redo is the fact that we know about the Milgram experiment. We are taught it in high schools and colleges. We also generally know about the dangers of going along with the crowd, thanks to events like the Holocaust and the murder of Kitty Genovese.

I mean, I can't guarantee that this knowledge is going to prevent people from going along with authority and hurting each other nowadays because other factors like courage and empathy and whatnot are involved, but I feel like teaching these things should have helped set our moral compasses a bit at least?

I don't think it would be that easy. It is my theory that human society is a bit of an evolutionary mutation based upon a pack/herd mentality. Complacency and security are the backbone of why we live in the modern world. To deviate from the group is something that our instincts are programmed to fight. That other people are programmed against. (Bullies, for example, seeing a perceived deviation work to put that in check to improve the group's health and raise their own social standing at the same time.) I think that mere exposure to the experiment does little to resolve these instincts.

[UzuMaki-Rei]

I don't really think that social networks would have much effect on whether or not people obey authority figures. I think that this generation of people are actually given too much and not asked of as often to obey authority figures, so I think for this reason that it would actually be slightly to greatly less of the population that would be found to obey through the entire experiment. Also, the human rights movements that are going on, especially on said social networks, are definately going to have an effect on whether or not these participants will go through with delivering painful shocks to strangers. It think that it would be difficult to control for confounds in an experiment to test the association between social network and obedience because there will probably be an age gap between the experimental and control group.

[dxnobodyx]

I think it would be the same.

Online seems to be compartmentalised seperately to the real world with most ppl i know, in terms of socialisation.

[Ask Jappleack]

[Castration Pop]

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Millgram experiment, look it up.
Done it? Good. Pretty creepy huh?

you would probably like the clown doll experiment thing, where they had an adult beat up (bozo?) the clown thing and then kids would beat it up after they were allowed to interact with it. They should have a repeat experiment with adults though lol. Then itd almost prove how commercials work, and how television shows are responsible for bad behavior to a degree.

[Project Light]

[Castration Pop]

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Millgram experiment, look it up.
Done it? Good. Pretty creepy huh?

Now... recreations of the millgram experiment in 2009 showed similar results. However with the rise of things like facebook and myspace, and online relationships and people ascribing emotional attachments to people they've never met face to face. And the addition of decentralizing media outlits and knowledge bases. Do you view that the Millgram experiment results will shift to a different result if it were reproduced now? How about twenty years from now?

Absolutely not. If anything, I think the increase of Internet relationships only serves to decrease the strength of the average relationships. We aren't biologically wired to create such attachments to people we have not met. Those who do are outliers, not the mean. The removal of personal interaction from social groups only serves to weaken the strength of social groups, not strengthen the connection between physically separated individuals.

It's a good theory, worth testing perhaps, but I most definitely don't see it as a hypothesis that would succeed; with evolutionary psychology being the reason as to why not. We just aren't wired to make as strong of connections to text on a screen as we do with face-to-face individuals.