Too Bad To Be True: Famous Psych Experiments And How They Lied

Towards the end of my relatively brief sojourn in a small editorial services company in the early 1990s, I had an official conversation with a management consultant hired to help us to--well, I was never quite sure what he was hired for.

 But he was a genial and intelligent older guy.  In the course of our conversation he told me about what is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment: for a simulation of a prison, students were split into two groups: guards and prisoners.  The social scientist conducting the experiment took the role of superintendent, and his assistant played the warden.  (More details of the experiment are on the wikipedia page.)

During the experiment the guards became authoritarian and even sadistic.  The prisoners became passive, and turned on each other.  What this all meant, the consultant said, was that we inevitably become our roles in an organization.  No matter how we think we will behave, our position in the power structure dictates how we actually will behave.   There could be no doubt of this, he said, because the experiment has been replicated many times.  He seemed to suggest he'd taken part in a similar experiment.

Shortly thereafter I left the organization, though not entirely because of this conversation, or the explanation it supposedly provided for how some people in the organization actually were behaving.  It was only recently that I learned that almost everything the consultant told me was untrue, overblown or based on fraud.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, a classic in psychology texts, was itself a fraud.  According to this recent article in Vox: "But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit."

The guards were coached, a prisoner was acting.  It was fixed.  But this blatant fraud is only one of many, many lavishly publicized experiments called into question or proven to be bullshit.  The Vox article has many links to the various problems.

As supposedly scientific experiments, the biggest problem has been how few of these startling conclusions could be replicated in subsequent experiments.  (The consultant was quite wrong in saying the Stanford study was often replicated.  It was never successfully replicated.)

But even studies that apparently were replicated are rife with problems that belie their conclusions, including the most famous: the Miligram experiments in which test subjects repeatedly gave what they thought was an electric shock to a person they thought was another test subject, because they were told to do so.  Results showed a high percentage of participants kept on giving shocks even when the receiver was evidently in pain.

That initial experiment has also been called into question: "In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired. She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter.""

But this experiment apparently was replicated many times with the same conclusions--or was it?  Critics point out that failed attempts to replicate were unlikely to have been published.  A statistical study of the later experiments in various places and under various conditions showed that the percentage of those who gave the full shock treatment varied from 28% to 91%, which suggests at the very least that time, place and choice of test subjects matters a great deal.

A lot of these psych experiments just don't pass the smell test--the experiments are poorly designed, and the subject pool is too small, too limited (mostly white college kids) to merit universal conclusions.  (If you don't believe me, that's the more seasoned analysis of the eminent professor of psychology Jerome Kagan.)

Yet those universal conclusions and even more universal extrapolations are made, and not just by management consultants.  They are made above all by best-selling authors like Daniel Kahneman,  Robert Sapolsky and Dan Ariely.

In a review of Ariely's 2008 book Predictably Irrational for the San Francisco Chronicle--a review I consider now to be one of the best I wrote--I noted some of the psychological experiments he wrote about--which, as it happens, includes at least one thoroughly debunked since, as noted in the above Vox article.  I expressed my doubts about their conclusions (due especially to the age, racial and cultural biases inherent in testing mostly or only college students) but I also questioned the author's overall assertion: "While Ariely's stated goal is to understand the decision-making processes behind behavior ("yours, mine, and everybody else's"), he may be overreaching in the applicability of his conclusions. "We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains," he writes, but he presents no evidence of this causal relationship."

That is, not only aren't the experimental conclusions valid, but the reason he gives, while typical, is totally unsupported by other evidence: it's because of the wiring of our brains.

The metaphor of our minds or brains as computers, with certain aspects being "hard-wired," is deceptive enough when not taken so literally, though indeed most people who use the metaphor do take it this literally.

Our brains may be like computers in some respects, but mostly, not at all. And our brains or minds are definitely not actual computers, any more than they were telephone exchanges or steam engines or clockworks, which were the metaphors (often taken literally) of previous times.

There are, for one thing, no wires in our heads, hard or otherwise. It's amazing how glibly psychologists and economists assert they know anything about "wiring" in everybody's brains.  I doubt they know much about the wiring in their cars.


The Miligram experiments have been an obsession with me for years because of a personal connection.  They were conducted at Yale for years, from the early 1960s into the early 1970s.  I was in New Haven in 1970, and answered an ad in the newspaper for participants in an experiment--the ad was nearly identical to the ones from the 60s to entice participants to the Miligram experiments.

Those experiments depended on deception, beginning with their purpose.  Subjects volunteered for what they thought was an experiment in memory.  I was enticed by the ad--mostly by the money offered ($25 sticks in my mind), as I was at loose ends at the time.  So I called the number but instead of making an appointment immediately, I asked questions first.  I got only vague answers and I smelled deception, so I didn't participate.

Later I read accounts of these experiments, at least one of which claimed that nobody had refused to give the electric shocks as ordered. (The actual percentage registered in the first series was 65% compliance.)  I was furious. If I had participated, I certainly would have refused.  When I told my story to a prominent social scientist, he cautioned that I could not know how I would actually behave in the circumstances.

I may not know how I would respond under all circumstances, but I certainly do know how I would have responded under those circumstances.  If for no other reason, it was 1970 and I was 24!  I had long hair, I was a veteran peace activist and Vietnam war protester with a record of defying authority, including college science departments.  What's the likelihood that I would inflict pain on an innocent person because some asshole in a white coat told me I had to?

New Haven Green 1970

And of course it wouldn't just be me.  There were students on the streets angrily rebelling against college administrations, against participation of science departments in the military industrial complex, plus hippies and Yippies and so on gleefully defying authority in general.  The idea that any of them would sit there obediently pressing the button is ludicrous.

But then, they were unlikely to volunteer in the first place.  One also suspects that if they did, they likely would have been screened out.  Which is the larger issue in the test subject problem: who are these people who volunteer to be test subjects and why?  And conversely, who wouldn't even consider it?

What is the mindset of someone who volunteers, or who is doing it for the money?  If they do it for the money, aren't they predisposed to do what they're told?  And even volunteers--why would somebody volunteer for an experiment and then refuse to take part in it?  A volunteer would more likely have faith in the experimenters, in their expertise and in the scientific experiment.  These folks were self-selected to obey.

If the results were otherwise valid, some extrapolations might be possible--to volunteer soldiers following orders, or those who agree ideologically with the authority figures, or perhaps even with the social contract of doing the work you are assigned for the money you earn.  But not the kind of universal conclusions typically made because of what these experiments purport to prove.

Similarly, that people may violate their own morality at the behest of authority figures, or that people may find themselves committing acts because of the role or situation they would not have believed they would commit, are phenomena that have happened under real world conditions.  Atrocities are real, and happen with alarming frequency. But these experiments, however sensational, are not necessary to confirm this.  They just don't seem to be very enlightening on the question of why, let alone who, when or where.

Instead, they lead us farther from possible insights, and suggest that such behavior is determined for us all.  Hard-wired.  That is perniciously false.

Behavioral psychology is probably at the apex of its power and acceptance, at the same time as its methods are falling apart.  Other kinds of experiments are also being called into question, based for example on faulty statistical methodology or deception,  as well as the still poorly understood phenomenon of confirmation bias applied to experimental design and findings.

But a kind of confirmation bias on a larger scale is the most troubling, because such experiments confirm an ideology of determinism, of only mechanistic explanations, that dominates science.  In the life sciences particularly, the bias is towards the destructive side of human nature: violent instincts, individual competition, fights to the death.  It is against--and often doesn't see--social and conciliatory instincts, cooperation and empathy.  These were ideologically judged long ago to be evolutionary losers, selected out by the struggle for existence. There is perhaps less of this now, but it still seems to be the prevailing ideology.

These inflated conclusions supposedly confirmed by science are especially dangerous, because we begin to base our beliefs about society and ourselves on them, and therefore our behaviors and expectations.

Our societies and our lives within them are based on cooperation, conciliation, compassion and a shared sense of fairness. As individuals as well as groups,
we are mixed creatures, we are complex, as life and the world are complex.  In literature, if characters are internally compelled to act contrary to their morality we call it tragedy, not hard-wired or human nature.  It is part of a much more complex human nature.  We can to some extent govern our behavior through educated self-awareness and through culture.   If science can't acknowledge that, it isn't telling the truth.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.  The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

Shelley
(a quote I copied in a notebook in 1966.)

To Whom Much Is Given

Things have changed a lot since I was a student at Sacred Heart School, St. Paul's School, the Most Blessed Sacrament Cathedral School and Greensburg Central Catholic High School.  Though I'm no longer intimately acquainted with it, it seems the American Catholic Church has changed, and the role of religion in politics has vastly changed.  When I was at Central Catholic, the second Catholic in the history of the U.S. to be nominated for President, Senator John F. Kennedy, made a major speech to Protestant clergy asserting that, no, he wasn't going to take orders from the Pope, that he was not going to let his religious affiliation interfere with his oath as President of all the people.  Today, presidential candidates seemingly must prove that they will take orders from their religious affiliation in order to qualify for office.  That's not just a little different.

The Catholic Church's doctrine on contraception hasn't changed, though perhaps their attitudes towards it and other such issues has.  (It was also then, as it is now, the most widely ignored ban among Catholics.)  The federal government decision on requiring American hospitals and other health care institutions caring for the general public, regardless of the institution's religious affiliation must offer insurance that covers contraception I believe one that would have been understood in the Catholicism of my youth.  We used to hear the phrase, you can't legislate morality.  That a Catholic hospital is required to cover contraception services does not require anyone to accept those services if they violate their religious beliefs.  Sin, forgiveness and redemption are individual matters, for freedom to sin or not to sin under any circumstances is pretty the whole point.  (For other views on this recent policy decision, here are some collected by Andrew Sullivan, himself a Catholic, with links to even more discussion.)

In the Catholicism of my youth--and to some extent today as well--there were different degrees of emphasis on moral lessons derived from the teachings of Christ and his disciples, leading to different approaches to public policy and action.  But major lessons were felt to support what may be considered "liberal" policies (and "liberal" was an acceptable and often admirable description then, particularly in the years of Pope John XXIII, one of the great voices of the 20th century.)

I mention this now because the major lessons President Obama described as the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday that drew from his Christian faith were lessons I learned then, through Catholic teaching.  They remain bedrocks for me, especially as they are supported by so many other teachings,  from many religions as well as from ethics that require no divine authority.   Yet these moral statements were either dismissed or ignored, or interpreted only in the politics of Washington.

Love your neighbor as yourself, and the action program resulting from that--otherwise known as the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount--and "the least of these," as well as the verse President Kennedy quoted--"To whom much is given, much is required"--were commonplace in my Catholic education.  Are they so radical now?

There's no question that they are relevant to the moment--that's the point of moral standards, that you apply them to situations of the moment.  And President Obama did that in talking about them, as he said that he does in informing his actions.  The video of this speech speaks volumes.  Wearing soft brown in contrast to his usual dark blue or black, the President was speaking from the heart--speaking strongly, but seeming to know how vulnerable he was being.

Dorothy Day

"We can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel -- the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action -- sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance."

Dorothy Day--how brave to mention her, and a radical Catholicism that eclipsed even mine in high school, though for some reason a subscription to her newspaper that I never bought, The Catholic Worker, followed me from residence to residence for years. The others he named suggest how his faith informed his community organizing days, and vice versa.  But it is equally important that with each example from the Christian Bible he gave, President Obama noted parallels in other religions (although he neglected to mention the very strong Buddhist call for compassion.) 

"Treating others as you want to be treated. Requiring much from those who have been given so much. Living by the principle that we are our brother’s keeper. Caring for the poor and those in need. These values are old. They can be found in many denominations and many faiths, among many believers and among many non-believers. And they are values that have always made this country great -- when we live up to them; when we don’t just give lip service to them; when we don’t just talk about them one day a year."

He began his remarks with a plea for the relevance of these ethics rather than parading political affiliations with particular ideologies endorsed by particular religious groups. "At a time when it’s easy to lose ourselves in the rush and clamor of our own lives, or get caught up in the noise and rancor that too often passes as politics today, these moments of prayer slow us down. They humble us. They remind us that no matter how much responsibility we have, how fancy our titles, how much power we think we hold, we are imperfect vessels. We can all benefit from turning to our Creator, listening to Him. Avoiding phony religiosity..." 

The heart of his message, simple and yet complex in its rejection of a certain kind of religiosity while grounding his moral beliefs in his faith:

"Now, we can earnestly seek to see these values lived out in our politics and our policies, and we can earnestly disagree on the best way to achieve these values. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Christianity has not, and does not profess to have a detailed political program. It is meant for all men at all times, and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another.”

Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical. It is God who is infallible, not us. Michelle reminds me of this often. (Laughter.) So instead, it is our hope that people of goodwill can pursue their values and common ground and the common good as best they know how, with respect for each other. And I have to say that sometimes we talk about respect, but we don’t act with respect towards each other during the course of these debates.

But each and every day, for many in this room, the biblical injunctions are not just words, they are also deeds. Every single day, in different ways, so many of you are living out your faith in service to others."

Though I do not share his faith, I share his values, and I recognize their grounding in the Catholic teachings that informed JFK and--though he was either ridiculed or ignored for his statements on faith and works--Senator John Kerry when he ran for President in 2004. 

Certain clergy were asserting that the Constitution is a Protestant document (another way of saying that America is a "Christian" nation within their narrow definition of Christianity) during JFK's campaign in 1960.  Catholics in those days largely saw the separation of church and state as protecting them.  Now it is being challenged in ways I wouldn't have believed possible, with the Catholic Church among the challengers.  But these so-called religious wars should not distort or distract from the moral basis of our public life.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

The “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...is...the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
Adam Smith

Illustration: Keeper of the Beach by Tim Paul at Spirit Wrestler Gallery.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobel Prize Lecture

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"There is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly."

Vaclav Havel

Guided Missiles, Misguided Men

Norman Solomon uses the above Martin Luther King quote in his essay published in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section yesterday, in one of the more apropos and insightful pieces I've seen during this Sputnik 50th anniversary week.

He links the science and technology that got a big boost from the fears generated by Sputnik to a military-industial complex that has grown ever more powerful:

Sputnik accelerated a process that was already well under way 50 years ago. Schools were to produce America's intellectual pistons for the space race and the broader arms race. As the atomic physicist Philip Morrison had predicted in 1946, federal largesse would deftly hook the nation's colleges into active compliance. "The now amicable contracts will tighten up and the fine print will start to contain talk about results and specific weapon problems," he said. "And science itself will have been bought by war on the installment plan."

We saw this trend accelerate in the late 1960s, during Vietnam: the overt addition of the university to this miltary-industrial complex. Since then it has gotten worse--and so normal nobody seems to notice. Solomon charges:

Today, no educational institution more symbolizes the magnitude of that moral corruption than the University of California. The UC system avidly continues to provide key management functions - serving as a prestigious air-freshener for the stench of annihilation technology - at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories.

On the broader disconnection of technology and moral values, Solomon points out that even though liberals are correctly championing the scientific evidence for the causes and solutions to the Climate Crisis, they should not deify science, for science does not in itself make the correct policy or moral decisions, and scientists work for harm and destruction as efficiently as for good:

For instance, the technical and ecological advantages of mass transit have long been clear; yet foremost engineering minds are deployed to the task of building better SUVs. And there has never been any question that nuclear weapons are bad for the Earth and the human future, but no one ever condemns the continuing development of nuclear weapons as a bipartisan assault on science. On the contrary, America's nonstop R&D efforts for thermonuclear weapons are all about science.

He concludes:

Fifty years after Sputnik, the American love affair with cutting-edge technology has never been more torrid. Everyday digital achievements are so fantastic that they fill our horizons and often seem to define our futures. The emphasis on speed, convenience and technical capacity keeps us fixated on the latest new frontiers. But technology cannot help with the most distinctly human and vital of endeavors - deciding what we truly care about most.

I would add one thought and a clarification. The thought is this: today's amazing technology will mean little or nothing, and the even more amazing technologies of the future that some say can transform human life, will never happen, if the world is thrown into chaos, with uncertain and unavailable energy, crippled infrastructure and more and more resources devoted to simple survival. Which all could happen if we continue to dither over the Climate Crisis.

The clarification is this: most of us would say we know very well what 'we truly care about most.' But we cannot begin to talk out a consensus on how best to preserve, protect and make those things better, or just make them happen, until we learn how to recognize and resist the lies and distortions thrown at us by the powerful who act in their own temporary self-interest, and not in the interest of anyone or anything else. For that they will destroy the future of most of humanity and of the planet itself. They are doing so now, with ever accelerating success.

On the Edge of the Knife

The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife, says the Haida proverb, and the image of the knife’s edge or the razor’s edge as a narrow space of safety or certainty between dangers and chaos is widespread.

In our either/or culture, moral questions seem like huge expanses separated by definite borders. Abortion or anti-abortion, Evolution or Creationism, Red State or Blue State, and so on. But the test of moral questions is in the narrow space at the knife’s edge, where the stakes are high but the answers are not so easy.

Still, our politics, our “culture wars” admit of only two sides, and only opposite conclusions. Yet the same people who deride racists or the Right to Lifers and their “abortion is baby-killing” as extremist, will march with blood-curdling yells under signs demanding “Zero Tolerance” for one thing or another.

Of course, this is not to say there aren’t moral principles or moral issues in the political realm. There are, and there are political banners it’s necessary to march under. Often the clearest issues have to do with expanding rights—or, as in the case of many 60s causes beginning with Civil Rights, making Constitutional rights real by enforcing them with law and practice. But even rights are more complex in practice, because reality is way more complicated than slogans or even principles.

The Right To Die

Take the “Right to Die.” Some states have passed laws which describe general circumstances in which doctors can help patients medically defined as “terminal” to end their lives painlessly and at a time of their choosing. Those patients are said to be exercising their “right to die,” which creates an exception to laws against murder and also suicide, bizarre in any case, in that the successful criminal is beyond direct punishment.

Even if granted in principle, the morality of this right to die is complicated in reality because of the danger of abuse, which our bureaucratic, capitalistic and either/or society makes all but certain. The right to die becomes the right to kill for the hospital’s bottom line or even perhaps the family’s profit (in harvested organs) or convenience.

Does that mean such laws should not be passed? No. It's just that we need to think beyond the all-or-nothing discourse of politics, and the whose-side-are-you-on of the “culture wars.” Actually, I do support such laws, though I believe the need to place yourself in the hands of institutional medicine or to lose control to anyone, makes your fate dependent on the dice you can’t even watch being rolled. Despite my doubts, not of morality but of misuse, my reason to support such laws is very practical: I want the right to have the plug pulled before the hyenas of medicine-for- profit bankrupt people I love. With a civilized health care system, I would not be confronted with that possibility. But we make actual moral decisions where and when we are in the world as it is.

Good and Evil in London

President Bush has used the London terrorist bombings as another occasion to broadcast his analysis that we are the Good guys and they are the Evil ones. There's no question that killing civilians in a terrorist attack is evil, and we mourn for the London victims. And it's good to address the climate crisis and world poverty, as the G8 Summit is trying to do.

But Bush's argument is deceptively simplistic, and it damages our ability to focus on what needs to be done to prevent terrorist attacks.

Does this mean there is no such thing as good or evil? No. Not at all.

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