I’m going to ask her to look up Milgram’s experiment and see if she notices the parallel as well! Hopefully the disciplinarian will switch me out of there after that.

It’s a really bad idea to shock people with experiments that predicts hurt to the subjects, no matter the way to minimize it ! If there needs some measure to minimize the stress, it means there are still stress within the subjects.

The subjects were asked to shock other people in the name of “instruction”.
How about Burger, himself, do the “same” shock to the subjects in the name of “academic research” !!

If we respect human rights, we respect well-beings of others. There is no reason we could use to make other people being hurt physically or psychologically in a lab in the name of academic or whatever. There is a built-in problem of this so-called psychological experiment !

More little-known facts in this post

Let’s say Burger runs this test again, with a different group of people. In this new group he tells them all exactly what he’s doing, that he’s replicating a study of Milgram’s, and he tells them all about the experiment itself as well as the original results. Then, he tells them that the machine in front of them is not actually used for electric shocks, and that when they pull the levers, the yells and screams are recordings and not actually people in another room.

If he tells the subjects all of this information, they will act absolutely differently than if they actually believed there was another human being getting shocked by their actions. At the point when they know the entire scenario is a fake, the results of the “experiment” are useless and meaningless. The entire point of the situation is to make the subject think they are actually inflicting pain on another human being by pulling these levers, because the point of the experiment is to gauge just how far the test takers will take the experiment and when they will decide to stop pulling the levers.

Psychological tests would no longer serve any purpose if the test takers knew exactly what was going on. This is no different than blind and double-blind comparison tests of two different products.. like bottled water vs tap water, for instance. If you fill one glass with tap water and another with bottled water, tell someone which type of water is in each glass and ask them to taste both, the majority of people will say the bottled water tastes better. But you will get very different results if you do not tell them which is which. Some will say they taste the same, others will say the tap water tastes better, etc.

Most of the time, truth pollutes results in tests like this.. so what do you propose they do? Cease testing entirely because the experimenters can’t be 100% honest all the time?

I agree, determining the level of religiosity (as you call it) would be interesting. As a Catholic, I was taught by my church that EVERY human being has inalienable human dignity from the moment of conception until a natural death. This dignity does not depend on the person’s ability to perform certain tasks, their race, religion or sexual orientation. This inherent dignity is to be given to saints and sinners, patriots and terrorists, victims and perpetrators. It is non-negotiable.

As a Catholic, I was taught that it is NEVER morally permissible to perform an evil act to achieve a moral good.

As a Catholic, I was taught that the God of the universe humbled himself to come and die for me, personally and I must follow that God regardless of the consequences.

I am also surprised they could find that many participants who were not aware of the experiment itself!

The original Milgram experiment taught the power that be that normal people would act inhumanely, if the circumstances were right. So they learned how to make the circumstances right, Sure enough — people acted inhumanely,

What doesn’t happen is that someone teaches the folks — like young soldiers, for example — how to see through what they are being told to do.

When do we get to see the result of That experiment?