Social Psychology Goes to the Movies (Summer 2018) Class ID: 2426

Study Leader:  Lloyd Stires  (lstires@auxmail.iup.edu)

Osher Ambassador:  Filomena Conti

Articles available on the internet (click on the links):

Milgram, S. (1973). The perils of obedience.

Blass, T. (2002). The man who shocked the world. A short piece by Milgram’s biographer.

Reicher, S., & Haslam, A. (2011). Stanley Milgram taught us we have more to fear from zealots than zombies. A plausible reinterpretation of Milgram’s findings.

Romm, C. (2015). Rethinking one of psychology’s most infamous experiments. A summary of several Milgram critiques.

Thomson, D. (2015). Obedience training. A review of the film Experimenter.

Sedacca, M. (2017). The man who played with absolute power. A recent interview of Phil Zimbardo.

Ratnesar, R. (2011). The menace within. Some recollections by participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Konnikova, M. (2015). The real lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A reinterpretation based on the BBC Prison Study.

Saletan, W. (2004). Situationist ethics. The military responds to Zimbardo.

Zimbardo, P.  (2018).  Response to recent criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

A website of interest:

http://www.prisonexp.org

Videos available on the internet:

Milgram, S. (1962). Obedience. A 44-min documentary film made by Milgram, some of which was recreated in Experimenter.

Zimbardo, P. (2008). The psychology of evil (TED Talk). Highly recommended.

Zimbardo, P. (2012). The Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib: Two studies in human nature. A longer Zimbardo interview.

Haslam, A. (2016). The psychology of tyranny: Did Milgram get it wrong? (TED Talk). The Haslam-Reicher reinterpretation explained.

Hersh, S. (2018). Remembering the My Lai massacre. Journalist Sy Hersh recalls breaking the My Lai story in an interview with Amy Goodman.

Zimbardo, P. (2011). Obedience: Fast food strip search. A real hoax in which someone posing as a police officer ordered managers to strip search employees.

Suggestions for further reading:

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper. Reprinted 2009.

Blass, T. (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books.

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking. Reprinted 2006.

Newman, L. S., & Erber, R (Eds.). (2002). Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust. New York: Oxford U. Press.

Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

Hersch, S. M. (2004). Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: Harper.

Parenti, C. (1999). Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis. New York: Verso.

Bandura, A. (2016). Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves. New York: Worth.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.

Session 1 (July 3)

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947)

Many early pioneers of social psychology were Jews who emigrated from Germany and other countries where they were not safe during the 1930s. Kurt Lewin, regarded as the founder of experimental social psychology, emigrated to the U.S. in 1933.

          B = f (P, E)

Lewin’s formula states that behavior is a function of both the person and his or her environment. Since most psychologists of his day explained behavior almost exclusively by traits, motives and other internal states of the person, Lewin emphasized the influence of the social environment or situation. His theory, and social psychology itself, is sometimes called situationism.

Lewin analyzed behavior by drawing diagrams of what he called the life space. The person was conceived as a point in psychological space. He drew arrows or vectors, having positive or negative valences, which consisted of the potential forces acting on a person in that situation.  For example:

Lewin said, “Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.” He advocated action research, research designed to address practical social problems. An example was his 1939 study of teenage boys comparing the advantages and drawbacks of democratic, authoritarian and laissez-faire leadership styles.

Social psychology

Social psychology = the scientific study of the effects of the social environment on the behavior and attitudes of people. It studies how our thoughts, feelings and actions are affected, directly or indirectly, by other people. Typical topics include attitudes and attitude change, attraction and friendship, group dynamics, conformity, behavior that harms others such as aggression, behavior that helps others, and prejudice and discrimination.

Persons		Situations
	In class	At a party	In an emergency
Sue	Takes notes	Talks	Helps
John	Takes notes	Gets drunk	Helps
Mary	Takes notes	Gets drunk	Runs away
George	Yawns	Yawns	Yawns

In the above chart, social psychology studies the effects of situations on behavior, while personality psychology studies individual differences among persons.

Two pillars of social psychology:

1. The power of the situation: Most social psychologists believe that the social environment has a greater influence on behavior than internal states of the person.

In a study by Darley and Batson (1973), theological students encountered a person in need of help while on their way to deliver a speech. A difference in speech topic designed to increase the salience of helping attitudes had no effect on the helping rate, but a seemingly trivial situational manipulation—whether they were early, on time or late—produced significant differences in helping.

A 2018 review of the literature on vaccination shows that persuasion intended to change attitudes toward vaccination seldom increases the vaccination rate and sometimes backfires. The most effective interventions directly shape the behavior of patients by arranging their situation to encourage vaccination. Examples included (1) prompts, or reminders that it is time to be vaccinated, (2) default arrangements, in which people are vaccinated automatically unless they opt out, and (3) incentives, sanctions and requirements, that reward vaccination or punish refusal to be vaccinated.

2. The social construction of reality: We construct a subjective representation of the social environment, and it is this interpretation—rather than the environment itself— that influences our behavior. For example, a credit card has little intrinsic worth. It has value because we have agreed to treat it as though it has value.

Because we implicitly assume that our perception corresponds to reality, we are typically unaware that “reality” is socially constructed. Studies that make us aware of social construction are those that show that (1) when presented with a sample of reality, people from different groups will interpret it in different ways (myside bias), and (2) false memories can be created and people can be induced to make false confessions of wrongdoing and believe them.

The fundamental attribution error

Attribution = the study of how we explain the causes of our own and others’ behavior. For example, to what extent is an action caused by the actor’s personal dispositions or by environmental influences?  Not surprisingly, people sometimes make systematic errors of attribution.

Fundamental attribution error = the tendency to attribute greater causality to the person, and less to the environment, than actual circumstances imply. For example, if we see a person behaving aggressively, we automatically infer that he or she is an aggressive person, and tend to overlook environmental influences on the behavior.

The armed robbery conviction of Patty Hearst can be seen as an example of the fundamental attribution error since she was kidnapped by force, held captive for over a year, severely mistreated, and threatened with death. Nevertheless, a jury found her guilty for not having defied her captors. While this example is a matter of interpretation, there are experimental studies that clearly demonstrate that the fundamental attribution error is an error.

The fundamental attribution error bears an ironic relationship to the field of social psychology. It implies that the average person will underestimate the importance of the social environment and will have difficulty believing some of our experiments (will find them counterintuitive).

Solomon Asch (1907-1996)

Asch was a refugee from Poland who made several contributions to social psychology, but is best known for his research on conformity.

Conformity = a change in a person’s attitude and/or behavior due to real or imagined pressure from another person or group.

In Asch’s experiments, participants thought they were participating in a study of perceptual acuity. On key trials, they found themselves alone against a unanimous majority (actually confederates of the experimenter) who gave obviously incorrect answers. About 35% of the participants’ responses conformed to the majority, and only 25% gave responses that were consistently correct.

Asch was Stanley Milgram’s primary mentor. Milgram’s doctoral dissertation was a cross-cultural study of conformity, comparing the conformity rate in Norway and France. However, he was concerned that judgments of line length might seem trivial to participants. He turned to his studies of obedience in part because he was looking for a way to make the his experiments more “humanly significant.”

Session 2 (July 10)–Experimenter

In the discussion following the film, several points were made (if I missed something important, please remind me):

1. Milgram’s obedience rate (approximately 65%) was replicated in a 2009 study by Jerry Burger. The study was made possible by several compromises Burger made with his university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). The most important was to stop the experiment at 150 volts. Burger discovered the almost all of Milgram’s participants who delivered the 150 volt shock continued all the way to 450 volts.
2. Are there personal characteristics that predict the obedience rate? Very few have been found. For example, men and women do not differ, nor do the results differ by race, education, social class, etc. However, Alan Elms found that people who score higher on a measure of authoritarianism are more likely to be obedient.
3. By contrast, obedience rates higher than 90% and lower than 10% have been obtained by manipulating aspects of the situation.
4. The point was made that some people who claim to object to the ethics of Milgram’s experiments may actually be uncomfortable with the results. Therefore, they say the study should not have been done. Milgram repeatedly stated this belief about his critics’ “real” motive.
5. Milgram’s after-the-fact explanation for the results of his obedience experiments is that participants entered into an altered state of consciousness, called the agentic state, in which they surrendered their autonomy to the authority figure. There is no strong evidence for this claim, and many social psychologists regard this as the weakest part of his analysis.
6. In the last scene of the film, director Michael Almereyda appears to confirm the rumor that Milgram’s death may have been caused in part by his and Sasha’s obedience to authority. Although they should have demanded to see a doctor immediately, he died while Sasha was filling out paperwork. Since Sasha was a consultant to the film, the fact that Almereyda included this implication probably means that she believes it.

Session 3 (July 17)

The validity of the obedience experiments

Milgram’s results have been called into question on the grounds that the are accounted for by some experimental error or bias.

They can’t be criticized for sampling bias, since his participants were a fairly representative cross-section of American adults.

Some critics have claimed that Milgram wanted to shock the world (with a high level of obedience) and that he somehow communicated this hypothesis to participants. In fact, Milgram was surprised by the results, and made changes during pretesting intended to reduce the level of obedience, i.e., introducing the information that the learner had a heart condition.

It is sometimes claimed that participants didn’t really believe the learner was being shocked. Milgram probed for such suspicion and found very little evidence of it. This claim was recently revived by journalist Gina Perry, who interviewed some participants more than 40 years after the fact. It is possible that these participants’ memories were inaccurate and self-serving (“He didn’t fool me!”). It is not clear that if subjects were suspicious, they would have complied. If participants suspected their willingness to obey was being tested, they might have chosen to present themselves favorably by not harming the victim.

Possible harm to participants

It is acknowledged that Milgram’s experiments were stressful for the participants and produced some serious discomfort. However, Milgram’s followups found no evidence of long-term harm and most participants said they were glad to have participated. Many psychologists reacted negatively to Milgram’s studies and these reactions effectively prevented most future obedience research.

Beginning in the 1970s, Milgram’s studies, among others, encouraged the establishment of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), intended to give potential subjects informed consent, and to protect them against harm and loss of privacy. When faced with a research dilemma, IRBs attempt to weigh the potential costs of the research to participants against its potential benefits to science and society. However, these costs and benefits are usually not known at the time the research is being evaluated by an IRB.

The question of obedience cannot be studied with surveys which ask participants how they would behave in hypothetical situations. Milgram, along with many others, found that such questions dramatically underestimate the rate of obedience.

Situational influences on obedience

Milgram ran a condition in which participants were free to choose the shock levels. They delivered very mild shocks, averaging about 54 volts. This shows that his participants were obeying the experimenter, not doing something they would have wanted to do anyway because they were naturally aggressive.

It is likely that obedience is partly due to the gradual and incremental nature of the task. Studies have shown that engaging in a behavior encourages people to take similar, but more difficult, future behaviors (the “foot-in-the-door” effect). It is unlikely that anyone would have delivered a 450 volt shock if they had been asked to do so on the first trial.

Milgram’s experiment can be analyzed, in Lewinian terms, as the intersection of two force fields: One from the experimenter, encouraging obedience, and the other from the learner, encouraging participants to disobey. Several studies have manipulated each of these two sources of influence.

Social influence from the learner is indicated by the fact that most of the subjects who disobey do so at 150 volts, the first time the learner demands to be released. Increasing the proximity or physical closeness of the participant to the victim reduces obedience. Obedience is also reduced in the “bring a friend” condition, in which the victim is the participant’s friend. On the other hand, when the participant is embedded in a bureaucratic structure in which someone else delivers the shock while they perform as subsidiary task, very few participants disobey (Kilham & Mann, 1974).

Social influence from experimenter is shown by the fact that reducing the proximity of the experimenter to the participant reduces obedience. Obedience is also reduced if the experimenter is an ordinary man rather than an authority, or if two experimenters give conflicting commands. Moving the study from Yale University to a downtown Bridgeport office building was also expected to reduce the experimenter’s authority, but it did not.

Haslam and Reicher have recently reinterpreted Milgram’s experiments as an example of social identity theory: Does the participant identify primarily with the experimenter (and with science), or with the victim? Their research does not actually replicate Milgram’s experiments. In their task, participant are asked to use negative adjectives to describe increasingly more likeable groups of people. While this is something subjects are reluctant to do, it does not have the emotional impact of Milgram’s paradigm.

Haslam and Reicher have found that of Milgram’s four prompts, the one that appeals to science (“The experiment requires that you continue”) is the most effective, while the one that demands obedience to authority (“You have no other choice; you must continue”) is least effective. They also found that participants who are induced to identify with science by thinking of three good things about science are more likely to obey than particpants who are asked to think of three things that are problematic about science.

Based on Milgram’s and their own studies, Haslam and Reicher suggest that harmful behavior does not result from blind obedience to authority. Instead, it comes from commitment to a cause with which the person strongly identifies. They refer to this as the engaged followership model. It suggests that followers may ask themselves what their leader might like them to do, and do these things without being told.

Session 4 (July 24)–The Stanford Prison Experiment

Session 5 (July 31)

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE)

The independent variable in the SPE was the roles, prisoner and guard, to which participants were randomly assigned. Why did Zimbardo did not study a real prison? One reason is that researchers have limited access to prisons. More importantly, Zimbardo wanted to study the prison environment separately from the type of person who becomes a prisoner or a guard. If this level of disorganization had been found in a real prison, people would have blamed the personal characteristics of the prisoners (or maybe the guards). Zimbardo deliberately chose participants who were not typical of real prisoners or guards, to see what the prison situation would do to them. 

While both Milgram’s obedience studies and the SPE involved reprehensible conduct that was situationally induced, in the SPE, participants were not given specific orders, and were freer to determine their own behavior. Their knowledge of appropriate prisoner and guard behavior was probably influenced by the culture, i.e., prison movies.

It has been argued that Zimbardo biased the outcome of the study by exerting too much influence on the behavior of the participants. As with the obedience studies, however, the extreme results of the SPE were largely unexpected. Due to the limited time span of the study (two weeks), Zimbardo tried to “accelerate” the prison experience with devices such as smocks, stocking caps, chains and numbers, designed to remind the prisoners of their lowly status. Guards were instructed to maintain control and enforce prison rules without resorting to violence. The prison rules were drawn up by the guards in consultation with one of the experimenters.

Zimbardo’s participants were free to quit the experiment, although the experimenters tried to discourage them from leaving. The first prisoner to demand release was initially talked out of it. When he returned to the prison, he falsely told the other prisoners that they were not permitted to leave. The experimenters did not correct this statement, since it was consistent with their goal of making the prison seem real to the prisoners. Ultimately, five of the nine original prisoners were released before the study ended, either at their request or because they developed physical symptoms.

Zimbardo ended the study after five days. In retrospect, he agrees that he should have ended it sooner. He also believes it was a mistake for him to play the role of prison superintendent, since he came to identify too strongly with the staff point of view and lost objectivity. It is also likely that he was reluctant to terminate the study because he had a research grant, and failure to carry out the study as planned could have had adverse consequences for his career.

Zimbardo gave his participants several personality tests prior to the study. There were no personality differences between the prisoners and the guards, showing that the random assignment was effective, or between the prisoners who left early and those who stayed. Mood data were collected twice during the study and after the debriefing. The prisoners showed more negative moods than the guards, and the prisoners who left were more negative than those who stayed. All differences in mood disappeared after the debriefing. Prisoners’ taped conversations were analyzed, and it was found that 90% of their talk was about the prison itself.

The mood data are generally consistent with Zimbardo’s hypothesis that the prisoners would experience learned helplessness—an experience of passivity and depression caused by repeated failure and punishment.

Was the SPE ethical? Not in the absolute sense, since prisoners suffered and guards came to realize their potential for bad behavior. Mitigating factors are the extensive debriefing in which the situational nature of their behavior was explained to the subjects, and Zimbardo’s extensive followups, which found no evidence of harmful aftereffects.

IRBs evaluate psychological research using a cost-benefit analysis in which inconvenience to participants is compared with anticipated positive effects on society. Zimbardo envisioned the SPE as an exploratory study, to be followed by further studies manipulating prison conditions to determine which produced the best and worst outcomes. Given the reaction to the SPE, that didn’t happen. An exception is an Australian study which found that giving prisoners individualized treatment or allowing them to participate in decision making mitigated the negative effects of imprisonment.

It is not clear whether the SPE and Zimbardo’s subsequent activism changed the conversation around prison reform in this country. Whatever positive effects it might have had were overwhelmed by political changes in the 1980s in which the two parties began competing to see which could be more punitive. In addition, the rise of for-profit prisons resulted in extensive lobbying and campaign contributions by large corporations intended to keep prison sentences frequent and long. The U. S. imprisons far more people for longer times under less humane conditions than any other Western democracy.

Possible applications of Milgram and Zimbardo experiments

• The Holocaust

In 1963, philosopher Hannah Arendt, after attending Adolf Eichmann’s trial, developed her banality of evil thesis. She viewed Eichmann as a rather ordinary middle-class bureaucrat who bore no particular animosity toward Jews and was only following orders. Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), rejected this “social-psychological” explanation, citing evidence of extraordinary cruelty toward Jews by ordinary Germans. This debate is difficult to resolve, since both sides can choose examples which support their position.

Arendt’s banality of evil thesis is consistent with Milgram’s original view of blind obedience to authority. Goldhagen’s position is more similar to Haslam and Reicher’s reinterpretation of obedience as engaged followership.

• The My Lai massacre in Vietnam

• Mass suicide at People’s Temple, Jonestown, Guyana

• The Hutu massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda

• The McDonald’s strip search hoax

• The Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison atrocities

Zimbardo cites many parallels between the SPE and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: prisoners with bags over their heads, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation, including simulated homosexual acts. The seven reservist MPs who were court-martialed were former correctional officers.

When the scandal broke, the military attributed it to a “few bad apples,” and only low-level personnel were charged with crimes. Zimbardo’s rejects this explanation, citing the incredibly chaotic and disgusting conditions under which they worked and the orders they were given to “soften up the prisoners for interrogation.” Zimbardo argues thattheir commanding officers and the Bush administration are more responsible, since they redefined torture to permit greater abuse of prisoners and, in effect, ordered American soldiers to disregard the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg principles.

• US CIA and military torture in the “war on terror” 

The military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program was “reverse engineered” by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen to create learned helplessness through repeated and extended torture. The current head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, participated in, and later covered up, this torture. Recent (2016) polling data shows the American public to be evenly split on the question of whether it is appropriate to torture prisoners of the “war on terror,” with 48% in favor and 49% opposed.

• Bureaucratic and political crimes of obedience, i.e., Goldman-Sachs employees who, prior to the 2008 recession, obeyed orders to sell their clients worthless securities.

Zimbardo has suggested that Kurt Lewin’s formula, that behavior is a function of the person and the environment, be replaced by a new statement: Behavior is a function of the person, the situation and the system. The situation refers to the immediate context of the behavior. The system refers to those leaders and institutions with the power to create situations and to dictate expectations for the behavior of those placed in these situations.

“Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose.”  (Stanley Milgram, 1974)