Howie Mandel appeared on Leno tonight to plug his new television show, Howie Do It. It looks fairly dumb, but what I found interesting was the clip he brought and explained, in which an unsuspecting participant is tricked into thinking that he has electrocuted his friend. The strikingly similar Milgram Experiment has been roundly denounced for the cruelty inflicted on the participants, while simultaneously praised for the surprising and disturbing results. But television, of course, has no such ethical guidelines. Cruelty for the purpose of useful science would be wrong, but cruelty in the name of entertainment is just business I suppose.
January 23, 2009
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ha. I didn’t see the Howie clip, but how similar is it to Milgram? I mean, did it involve the same parameters (authority figure etc) and was it escalating rounds of shock? I want to say I’d be surprised if they reenacted something like that, but, actually, I guess I wouldn’t be.
If I’m remembering high school psych correctly, wasn’t it designed in part to try to explain how people could have possibly followed orders from authorities like the SS? I think I’ve read that the hope was that it was going to prove that Germans as an ethnicity are by nature susceptible to these things…of course, I didn’t show that. I might be mixing my remembrances of crazy 20th century psych experimentation…
Comment by Christopher — January 23, 2009 @ 2:57 am
oh, and any time I see a single word followed by a question mark, I hear it as “Playoffs?!?!?”
Comment by Christopher — January 23, 2009 @ 2:58 am
There wasn’t enough detail to be sure, but it sounded pretty close. The setting was a fake Japanese game show, and I believe the person being duped was told to “shock” their friend after each wrong answer. By my knowledge there were no goals for the experiment regarding ethnic differences, but it was indeed designed to find out if people’s willingness to follow authority against their conscience was an isolated instance in Nazi Germany. It found, of course, quite the opposite.
Comment by chadhogg — January 23, 2009 @ 9:58 am