Gina Perry has authored a new book about Stanley Milgram's famous
obedience experiment (
Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments) in which she argues that Milgram fudged his data and conclusions.
Boing Boing reviews it.
Perry suggests the fudging happened in several ways:
- First, although Milgram claimed his experiment always followed a set script, Perry reviewed the original audio tapes and found this wasn't the case. Instead, Milgram's experimenter "wheedled and nagged the subjects into turning up the shock dial."
- Second, she argues that a substantial portion of the experimental subjects saw through Milgram's ruse and realized that they weren't actually shocking someone.
I'll have to read Perry's book to get her full argument, but it was my impression that her allegations aren't exactly new. Milgram's experiment met with a lot of skepticism from other researchers. But other researchers have conducted versions of his experiment and, for the most part, gotten similar results.
For instance, in
Elephants on Acid I write about how many people suspected that Milgram's subjects saw through his ruse. Therefore, two researchers conducted a version of the experiment in which subjects were asked to shock a victim (a puppy) — and the puppy actually got shocked! ("Obedience to authority with an authentic victim" -
PDF). In other words, they eliminated the ruse. And their results were similar to Milgram's. The majority of their subjects obeyed the command to shock the puppy.
I'm sure Perry must address this, but I don't know how. Looks like another book to add to the pile.
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