Milgram

The war in Iraq has brought to the fore some very old questions about the visual representation of conflict, war and pain. I shall be examining the particular twist given to those issues by the developments in Iraq and in particular the so-called Abu Ghraib photographs, now world (in)famous. The issues of Third World people represented by the denizens of Western power, the USA and UK, and especially of Muslim males being subjected to the force and rule of non-Muslims in what was understood as a neo-Christian moral and globalising crusade, are some of the more complex issues of our time. The article will examine images of unidentified Iraqis taken by their jailers and torturers. How do such images compare with ones taken during the war in Vietnam when the US liberal media arguably played a significant role in bringing the war to an end? The question of the role of the media in this latest conflict, and especially of the visual imagery of pain, will be assessed through the Abu Ghraib visual record of scandalous and inhuman treatment of the detainees by US forces and the effect this had on the American public.
Some deep sociocultural fault lines, historically linked to the representation of war and conflict, will be also examined, such as the question of veracity instanced by the off-staging of scenes and the re-creation of emotions by visual direction of the documentary image. Such issues are the staple of postmodern textual analysis but occupy a position of special importance here.

Experimenter and The Stanford Prison Experiment serve to highlight role-playing in bureaucracy, with the emphasis on distancing oneself from the responsibility for the execution of acts of cruelty in the face of situations of assumed social hierarchy.

Just to be clear, this is not to be a diatribe about social justice and the rationalising of negative behaviours as a result of assumed positions of privilege.  Personally I feel that this unapologetically dominant mode of current politicised discourse, particularly with those who profess that they reject authoritarianism (fascism, oppression, the list goes on ad nauseam), whilst simultaneously adopting an authoritarian (etc.) stance, falls precisely within the realms of critique which both of these films deal with.

Societal norms are frequently used as an excuse for such Behavioural Live Action Role Playing across the board, both consciously and subconsciously. ...

http://www.whenthenewsstops.org/2016/07/experimenter-stanford-prison-experiment.html

This paper discusses the use of the Milgram obedience experiments and the Tuskegee syphilis study in the bioethical literature. The two studies are presented and a variety of uses of them identified and discussed. It is argued that the use of these studies as paradigms of problematic research relies on a reduction of their complexity. What is discussed is thus often constructions of these studies that are closer to hypothetical examples than to the real studies

People believe that they would disobey immoral authority in the Milgram experiment. We asked whether high (vs. low) communal and agentic narcissists would manifest a more pronounced better-than-average effect (BTAE) in their predicted disobedience. Participants (N = 348) estimated the moment at which they and the average peer would quit the Milgram experiment. High communal narcissists claimed that they would disobey the immoral authority and quit the experiment earlier (positively predicting the BTAE), whereas high agentic narcissists claimed that they, as well as an average other, would obey longer (negatively predicting the BTAE). Differences in the impression management component of socially desirable responding played a role in these links.

In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue ethics is currently the most popular underpinning for ethics education in the military, it is important to know to what extent the claim situationists make is correct. Fortunately, a closer look indicates that an interactionist perspective, with our character and the situation interplaying, is more accurate than the situationist perspective.

People believe that they would disobey immoral authority in the Milgram experiment. We asked whether high (vs. low) communal and agentic narcissists would manifest a more pronounced better-than-average effect (BTAE) in their predicted disobedience. Participants (N = 348) estimated the moment at which they and the average peer would quit the Milgram experiment. High communal narcissists claimed that they would disobey the immoral authority and quit the experiment earlier (positively predicting the BTAE), whereas high agentic narcissists claimed that they, as well as an average other, would obey longer (negatively predicting the BTAE). Differences in the impression management component of socially desirable responding played a role in these links.

The exchange of luxury goods may be regarded as Europe’s first complex trade network, which bestows an interprovincial and transmaritime character to these connections. The main purpose of this study is to look at the existence of intermediary hubs between very distant territories such as Rome, India and China. In 1967, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments, commonly known as the small-world experiment, where he argued that two states connected by an import-export network cannot be separated by more than two links. Therefore, if one wants to apply Milgram’s ‘six degrees of separation’ concept to an analysis of trade networks, this interprovincial and transmaritime trade should be understood as connected by intermediary hubs.

The Roman and Chinese ancient literature agree on the extraordinary wealth of Egypt and the Middle East (Ta-ts’in) both in production and exchange of luxury goods, benefiting from their central location within this exchange network in Classical Antiquity. This leads us to think of Egypt and the Eastern Roman provinces, as well as the Parthian Empire and the Kushan Empire, as intermediary points in this network. The hegemony of Rome in the western half of the Middle East began with the annexation of Egypt by Augustus. As a result, Rome promoted the presence of Italian merchants both in terrestrial and maritime routes. The Eritrean Sea had already witnessed trade routes and marketplaces prior to the Roman conquest of Egypt. However, the exchange of exotic products between the Mediterranean Sea and the three major markets on the Eritrean Sea (e.g. Northern Arabia, India and Eastern Africa), experienced a substantial increase upon the arrival of sailors from the Mediterranean, under private and public initiative. During the following 300 years, as we shall see in this paper, the Roman market saw a significant rise in luxury goods due to an ever-increasing demand.

Inmerso en un grupo, el sentido de responsabilidad individual tiende a diluirse. Diversos estudios evidencian que la obediencia, ciertas expectativas contextuales y el miedo a sobreactuar, entre otros, pueden facilitar conductas lesivas, peligrosas o faltas de compasión, que se acompañan de una sensación de ausencia de responsabilidad.

One aim of participatory innovation is to find new ways of engaging people in various situations that result in ideas and suggestions. For a socio-technical system – whether the design process or its implemented result – to work smoothly (aesthetically) as a specific social order, we should understand just how it is practically accomplished. In this paper, the just-thisness of an experimental teaching situation is explored in which students were acting as cyranoids for their teacher who was located elsewhere. The situation gives us empirical materials about a relatively simple task (listening through headphones words to repeat and instructions for action), though extraordinary circumstances (mediating teaching which would normally have been relayed through video/audio). We show how the surrogate has to orient to the on-going lecture as intelligible, to show their understanding of the situation to the absent teacher, and to recipient design the delivery to the fellow students. They have to become a porous membrane that mediates between the two sites, exactly like a user friendly interface or any fitting part of a socio-technical system would. Thus the data shows what seen but unnoticed interactional work is required to participate, rather than to purely mimic or mediate.

Milgram’s classical studies famously suggested a widespread willingness to obey authority, even to the point of inflicting harm. Important situational factors supporting obedience, such as proximity with the victim, have been established. Relatively little work has focused on how coercion affects individual cognition, or on identifying the cognitive factors that underlie inter-individual differences in the tendency to yield to coercion. Here, we used fMRI to investigate the neural systems associated with changes in volitional processes associated with sense of agency and sense of responsibility under coercion. Participants either freely chose, or were instructed by the experimenter, to give mildly painful electric shocks to another participant, or to refrain from doing so. We have previously shown that coercion reduces temporal binding, which has been proposed as an implicit proxy measure of sense of agency. We tested how reduced agency under coercion related to differences in neural activity between free choice and coercion. In contrast to previous studies and to participants performing the task outside the MRI scanner, on average there was no effect of coercion on agency for participants in the scanner. However, greater activity in the medial frontal gyrus was reliably associated with greater agency under coercion. A similar association was found using explicit responsibility ratings. Our findings suggest that medial frontal processes, perhaps related to volition during action planning and execution, may help to preserve a sense of accountability under coercion. Further, participants who administered more shocks under free choice showed reduced activity during free choice trials in brain areas associated with social cognition. Possibly, this might reflect participants cognitively distancing themselves from the recipient of the shocks under free choice, whereas this was not observed under coercion.