Hazards of Obedience

So, yet another bunch of pop Psychologists, this time in the guise of a panel responsible for a fake French Game Show have attempted to replicate Stanley Milgram's classic albeit controversial experiment conducted at Yale University in the 60s.

The original Milgram experiments investigating obedience to authority used a simple experimental design and placed one of two subjects in the role of a "teacher" and the other was the designated 'Student'. The subjects were informed that the experiment is on memory and learning and on the effects of punishment on these. The 'student' is then put in another room strapped to a chair and explained that he needs to learn word pairs. E.g. When initially presented with 'Butter - Bread' he needs to be able to respond with Bread when the 'Teacher' presents the cue Butter. If he failed to recall the correct second portion of the presented word-pair, he would be administered an electric shock. What is noteworthy is that the 'Student' is actually an actor and receives no real shocks. The subject in the role of the teacher however, does not know this and is expected to operate a panel delivering shocks of varying intensities going right up until a fatal Voltage on the insistence of the experimenter whenever the student is wrong.

How far is too far?

Surprisingly (contrary to the consensus that Milgram himself obtained from a range of individuals including Psychiatrists, general educational community etc.) more than 60% of the subjects were willing to go to the absolute limit of the shock spectrum administering almost 450 Volts at times to the 'students'. This was despite the full realisation of the discomfort being voiced by the actors in the other room who in some cases pleaded to be set free and demanded to be released from the experiment.

What is interesting to note is that while a few subjects refused to carry on, a majority were quite compliant to the demands of the experimenter and pulsed lethal dosages of electric current to strangers! The moral compass, it seemed, collapsed when faced with an authoritative figure. This platform is inadequate for discussing the ethical, moral and legal ramifications of this experiment. Needless to say, the French TV show has brought these issues in the forefront again. Another quite similar offspring of this fascination of Media with Psychology was the Oliver Hirschbiegel movie Das Experiment (German, 2001) which tackled issues of authority and role playing gone wrong.

Milgram experiments of the 21st Century

Try approaching a Grant awarding body with a proposal of replicating Milgram experiments! Understandably the entire issue is laden with too valid an argument against carrying out experiments that knowingly put people in extremely distressing situations and are designed on deception. However, compliance, obedience, authority and personality characteristics that make some people more vulnerable to these than others is a valuable field of research and it would be a shame not to explore it further.

In comes immersive virtual reality.

Slater et al (2006) carried out the original Milgram experiments but replaced the 'students' with a virtual female human being on a computer. The cyber victim protested with genuine discomfort and demands for experiment termination as the original Milgram actors. The researchers concluded that "in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real."

Read More

1. Milgram S. Obedience to Authority: McGraw-Hill; 1974

2. Slater M., Antley A., Davison A., Swapp D., Guger C., Barker C., Pistrang N., Sanchez-Vives M. V. (2006. ). A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PLoS ONE 1, e39.

3. Telegraph Story on the French Game show, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7457780/French-contestants-torture-each-other-on-TV-Game-of-Death.html

Shots from India #1

You can click on an individual picture to view the title and description. Please feel free to click through to my associated Flickr page and let me know which pictures you liked and/or any suggestions for future photographic activities.

Nervous Cockroaches

One of the most striking Research Studies that I encountered in my Undergraduate Social Psychology year was the work by Robert Zajonc. It, like most seminal works in Psychological Research elicits the response "Oh, I could've told you that!" or "That's just common sense!"

So what did the guy do? Rather, who did he do it on?


72 lovely cockroaches were recruited to run on a race track of sorts (easy) as well as in a maze (difficult).

Another variable introduced into the proceedings was the presence or absence of an eager audience (cockroaches again).

The Roaches were then made to run either in the company of conspecifics (fancy word - identical species) or by themselves.

Results

It was found that the mere presence of other roaches hurt the running times of the antennae sporting athletes, whether it was in the audience stand or alongside on the maze.
However, exactly reverse findings were registered when the difficult maze was substituted with a runway track. Here, the presence of conspecifics on the track or as audience actually resulted in better performance ('facilitation').

Zajonc concluded these results as confirmation of his drive theory centered social facilitation. In Psychology, Drive refers to any state of deprivation. This state of deprivation (physiological - like hunger etc, or psychological - ambition/desire for achievement) leads to actions that seek to reduce this drive or state of inequillibrium. More specifically, it was proposed that presence of an audience or co-participants resulted in an increased state of arousal. This increased arousal aids what Zajonc refers to as 'dominant responses' and impairs 'non dominant responses'. Simply put, think about these as indicators of task simplicity. A dominant response in this experiment was running along a straight, simple track and these are facilitated in the presence of others. The non dominant response would generally require some additional cognitive effort and in this experiment this was the complicated maze where performance was impaired in the presence of additional participants and audience.

What does it all mean? Are there any applications of this today?

You tell me.
Think about the boat races. In an indoor practice gig, how do you think the rowing times of a single rower, rowing in isolation would compare to the times recorded when his Crew joins him? Or reminisce back to your Science projects in school - did you work/research harder when you and you alone were responsible for the output or when you were part of a team with 5 of your best friends?

You know what Social Facilitation would say. Just to complicate things further, read about another phenomenon - Social Loafing and reconsider your answers. Social loafing is described as a decrease in individual effort due to the social presence of others (Latane et al. 1979). Essentially individual effort decreases as the group size increases. In one study, subjects were asked to clap and shout in a large group and alone. The average sound amplitude produced by groups of different sizes was significantly less than the levels produced by each individual participant. This difference increased with an increase in group size. (Latane, Williams and Harkins, 1979). The most agreed on supposition that explains Social Loafing holds individual identifiability/accountability for one's performance at the core of this phenomenon. Indeed loafing can be reduced if identifiability can be introduced into the group by some mechanism.
Of course, individual preferences and working styles do have a great effect on how prone someone is to demonstrate social loafing. Studies indicate that a lower preference for group work is inversely related to social loafing behavior.

Read more:

1. Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.
2. Zajonc, Robert B.; Heingartner, Alexander; Herman, Edward M. (1969) Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 13(2), 83-92.
3. Latané, Bibb; Williams, Kipling; Harkins, Stephen (1979) Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 37(6), 822-832.

NYC

These are few of the pictures from my recent trip to New York for Fleet Week 2009. You can click on an individual picture to view the title and description. Please feel free to click through to my associated Flickr page and let me know which pictures you liked and/or any suggestions for future photographic activities.

Ukraine

Sky Dive - The one where the Plane Crashed

For people who religiously follow my clockworkish Status updates and moans in the form of Notes, here is another one. Things have gone up a notch in seriousness.

So, sky dive attempt number 1 happened in February. In short, after a 6am train to Cambridge and a wait that was longer than 9 hours, I had to return unjumped and dissatisfied because the cloud happened to be too low and the Plane wouldn't take off.

Sky dive attempt 2 was scheduled for yesterday after much careful syncing with other equally busy Consultant pals. Got there (again a 6am train on a Saturday) and after a few hours wait, finally got on the plane. Camera rolling, plane going steadily higher. We got to about 13,000 Ft and the crappy plane shutters (yes!) opened to give me the biggest scare of my life. Instructor gave us a final nudge to jump which is when an alarm sort of went off that very second. It was discovered that it was way too windy to jump. Shutters went down and plane started descending. We were told that we'll have to wait a couple of hours for the winds to die down.
I was disappointed but perversely happy not to have jumped out into that ridiculously clear sunny sky above Cambridge.

Plane came to 1000ft...then some more and then it was touchdown time!
This very moment, we hit the ground with the biggest thud I have ever experienced. We were given full emergency briefing in about a second and I was just asked to run as quick as I could away from the plane. I looked back....we had crashed!!! The Wheel apparatus was in the ground and the plane was almost buried into the ground on one side. Very unsettlingly wonky. The instructors were desperately trying to make light of the situation but one of them did point out to the vehicle in question and came up with this little gem: "I don't know how familiar you are with aircrafts, but it's not supposed to look like that!"

I could only smile. Why me!? Why, the hell me! Every time?
Here's to sky dive attempt number 3.

Tale of the Oversized Suitcase

My generously proportioned suitcase and the contents therein survived the tremors of the Piccadilly line, Heathrow, a 10 hour flight, taxi ride to hotel room in Delhi. Disaster struck when said monster was being loaded onto the train back home from Delhi. After much hassle of plonking the thing remotely close to my seat, I heard excited shouts from passengers in the seats behind, alongside and everywhere really. The shouts translated to "Your suitcase is leaking!". On closer inspection I discovered that my precious container had left a trail of red liquid across the coach.

A swift mental checklist followed:

1. Do I have a body (Human/Animal) in the suitcase, chopped into fine bits but without adequate fluid limiting features in the lining?

2. Am I carrying pricey red wine inside with the only protection in the form of a light blue cashmere jumper wrapped around the bottle? Were both these things intended to be gifts for people back in India?

This precise line of questioning yielded a "No" to the first and a sad affirmatory nod to the second.
I now have a suitcase full of stinking,semi-red stuff and the first friendly face in the home-town would have to be the dry-cleaners. And I cut myself while rescuing the shattered contents. Nice.