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"Please, sir..." [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-23
In 1961, in the basement of a Yale University building, a social science experiment was conducted using American male test subjects from the New Haven area who were: "Barbers, factory workers, professional people, clerks, business men, construction workers, city employees, laborers, telephone workers, salespeople, white-collar workers, others" willing to participate in a Yale experiment on "memory and learning". They were paid the 2023 equivalent of $40 for just one hour of time.
The study was not actually an experiment on memory and learning but on the psychology of genocide. It was designed by Yale psychologist Dr Stanley Milgram to answer the lingering question that followed the defeat of Hitler and the uncovering of the horrific scale of the mass murder of millions of Germany's targeted victims: How could millions of average normal "very fine people" have participated in murdering millions of their fellow "very fine people on both sides"? Were the millions (of average people) whose mass participation was essential for in the success of this scale of murder, were they simply following the orders of others to kill? Can they be considered accomplices to mass murder?
Milgram predicted American subjects would not behave the way average Germans did in their complicity to mass murder. He posited that German culture historically functioned in blind obedience to rule, and was distinctly different from independent Americanism. That the national German culture that permitted the Holocaust was fundamentally antithetical to Americanism.
Milgram polled a few of his psych students, other colleagues and professors, 40 psychiatrists at the medical school, etc to predict how 100 hypothetical subjects would fare in this experiment. The consensus was that only 1.2% of the subjects would inflict a fatal killing shock, would participate in murder, that instead, most would stop inflicting pain (torture) when the test victim cried out.
The Milgram Experiment shocked those who had refused to fathom that the universal depth of fealty to authority could turn "good Germans" ("very fine people") or "good American men" or ... anyone ... into obedient accomplices to mass murder or to the torture of authority-sanctioned victims.
Contrary to deeply-held American belief, the experiment showed that all of the average American subjects agreed to inflict pain, even if they themselves showed signs of discomfort or stress as the test victim cried out or begged them to stop. More than half the subjects continued to inflict increasing shocks until they believed they had committed a sanctioned Yale-lab-approved murder. And each and every subject deferentially asked permission from their Yale experimenters for their actions, even those who finally, adamantly, refused to continue the experiment and inflict harm.
The Milgram Experiment has lasting lessons for our American media and political class who continue to refuse to learn that "American Exceptionalism" is not exceptionalism to fascism or genocide. We are not unique. This is provably us.
"Please, sir, may I be excused from killing my neighbor?"
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[fyi. No test victims were actually harmed, they were actors who were participants in the experiment. However, because of the psychological harm caused to the subjects who believed they had tortured or killed someone, these kinds of Human Subject Research are now strictly regulated.]
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