Various thoughts on human morality

[Jeunemaitre]

also when they did those experiments they expected certain results.  that they got the results isn't what is suprising, what is suprising is the degree of the extremes.  in the shock experiment they never thought people would go that far.
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I may not have a doctorate in Psychology, but I do have a bachelor's (BS Psych cum laude, Syracuse University, Class of '00) and I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express in the recent past. I have to disagree with the second line there: Milgram did not get what he was expecting.

Milgram actually conducted that experiment shortly after the end of WWII when Nazi soldiers were defending themselves in international courts by stating that they were "following orders." Milgram was appalled at the idea and designed the experiment with the expectation that rational human beings would protest to the authority figure and would decline to continue the experiment when presented with the suffering their actions caused, despite direction from the "authority figure" to proceed. The experiment rather showed that the power of a white lab-coat outweighed the perceived (although false) suffering of another human being. Despite his original intention to disprove the ability of authority to overrule individual morality, he was forced to conclude that in certain instances, direction of authority was indeed more powerful than an individuals sense of right/wrong.

In the series of experiments that followed, Milgram and others using similar design's found that the proximity of the authority could overpower the proximity of the "subject" in predicting the willingness of the "teacher" to continue. The original experiment placed a physical barrier between the "teacher" and the "subject." This trial was the one that found most participants were willing to complete the shock board even when they were directed that "no response should be considered an incorrect response," and the "subject" had ceased responding 10 questions earlier after loud protests and cries of pain. Removing the physical barrier in the later experiment was the one that still resulted in many still completing the board.

I'm not as familiar with the Stanford Prison experiment, but I believe there was a variant where the group was divided into two and spent three days on either side of the bars, then switched for three days. I think I remembered that the group that went guard->prisoner felt that they were treated worse when they were prisoners than they treated the prisoners when they were guards; and the group that went prisoner->guard felt the opposite: that they treated prisoners better when they were guards than they had been treated when they were prisoners. Just another argument for the old "what you see depends..." statements.

edit: clarify what degree I'm talking about