On Aug. 28, the day Dr. Beck gave his Spotlight lecture, the NPR radio news show, All Things Considered, broadcast an interview with Gina Perry, the author of Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. In her book, Perry problematizes the Milgram study, detailing how she turned from a Milgram admirer to a critic. In order to balance your understanding of this famous experiment, you can listen to excerpts from the Perry interview on the NPR website.
- What kinds of questions does Perry’s book raise?
- Did Milgram’s personal interest in the question he was exploring compromise his objectivity? If so, does that matter?
- Perry notes that the results of the experiment have not been replicated. Does that matter? Why do you think they haven’t been replicated? Because they weren’t valid in the first place? Because psychologists now face stricter rules about using human subjects in their experiments?
(*Thanks to Dr. Dickson for finding this story when it aired on Wednesday.)
2 responses to “Behind the Shock Machine”
Perry asks the validity of Milgram’s work. How did he affect how many times the people shocked other? She states that Milgram might have done something to make people press the button more. If Milgram anticipated an outcome, he might have viewed the data in a way so that it came out the way he wanted, but I don’t think Milgram did this. If scientist could completely replicate the experiment, they may be able to replicate the results, but scientist have strict rules that prevent them from doing this.
Perry raises questions such as why did Milgram use such a small sample size, does Milgram have a personal interest in the experiment, and what influenced him. Perry questions the validity of Milgram’s study and why the results weren’t the same in a larger sample size. Perry is trying to understand why Milgram did the study and how scientific it was. Milgram’s personal interest in the experiment certainly could have skewed the results while no scientist can be completely impartial I feel that Milgram had too strong of an emotional interest to be effective. Also the fact that Milgram used such a small group of people the percentages look more inflated than they should and don’t provide an accurate view of the data.Also since Milgram’s results haven’t been properly replicated this puts its scientific validity in a bind.