Context greatly determines behavior
In the movie I am going to invoke the Stanford prison experiment, the New Haven shock experiment, the Asch conformity experiment, and conditions that let up to the Challenger explosion to show that systems can to a large extent determine how people behave.
Now that’s I’ve written what’s below, I need to do other things so I am going to comment on all this soon.
Now a little on each.
The Stanford prison experiment
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment: “The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited “genuine” sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After sensing that everyone had been too absorbed in their roles, including himself, Zimbardo terminated the experiment after six days.
The experiment are said to support situational attributions of behaviour rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants’ behaviour, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.”
The Milgram shock experiment
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/01/milgrams_notorious_.html:
“In Milgram’s original study, participants were asked to give increasingly severe electric shocks to someone supposedly trying to learn a series of word pairs.
In fact, the ‘learner’ was an actor and no shocks were given, but they screamed as if they were in increasing amounts of pain, while the experimenter ordered the participant to increase the voltage.
The experiment tested how far someone would go in giving pain to another human being when being ordered by an authority figure. 65% of participants continued despite indications that the ‘learner’ might be unconscious or dead.”
From http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm: “Ultimately 65% of all of the “teachers” punished the “learners” to the maximum 450 volts. No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!”
“In his book Obedience to Authority, he [Milgram] elaborated two theories to explain his results:
- The first is the theory of conformism, based on Solomon Asch’s work, describing the fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person: “A subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person’s behavioral model.”
- The second is the agentic state theory, where, according to Milgram, “the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow.”
The Asch conformity experiment.
From http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html
“In 1951 social psychologist Solomon Asch devised this experiment to examine the extent to which pressure from other people could affect one’s perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situation went along with the clearly erroneous majority.”
“Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to be liked by the group and because they believe the group is better informed than they are.”
The Challenger explosion
I don’t have time to research this right now, but what I’ve heard is that some engineers who reported the O-ring problem were pressured and eventually consented to not stop the launch.
September 15th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Ted - this is a really important topic. The experiments you cite make it clear that structure molds behavior in extreme situations. I am wondering if anyone has ever done an experiment showing what a typical office environment does to behavior - or a typical factory situation. Or disconnected suburban neighborhood versus engaged neighborhood. Those are the structures that sociocracy is calling into question. It would be nice to know if we know what we are doing to ourselves with our present day institutions.
I look forward to hearing what you find out. - John
September 15th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Richard Feynman did an excellent analysis of the Challenger explosion.
Some of this work is online in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Challenger_disaster and
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html, and more is in
the book _What Do You Care What Other People Think?_.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Thanks, Abolitionist! Sorry I haven’t responded to your other comment yet. I’ll have time Friday.
Cheers!