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NancyLebovitz comments on Why Don't People Help Others More? - Less Wrong
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The funny thing about Milgram is that the people who trusted the scientist and obeyed were factually right even if it didn't feel that way to them at the time. No experimental subject was being hurt.
Of course, by the same token they were factually wrong: no experimental subject was learning to memorize a list of words.
I thought the experimental subjects reported feeling extreme duress about causing apparent harm to another human being.
You're reffering to the experiment itself; they're talking about the experiment within the experiment.
I was compelled to post that clarification after being primed for "helping behavior."
I'm just being overly literal because people believed that an experimental subject would be hurt and coincidentally it was the actual experimental subjects who were hurt. This would have been more apparent if Milgram had just hooked subjects up to real electrodes and told them he was testing reinforcement learning and then instructed them to actually shock themselves (which presumably many people would have done up to some pain threshold).
It would have been even more apparent if he could have lied about the voltage/current levels so that subjects received exactly as much physical pain (in terms of negative utility) to themselves from the actual shock as the emotional pain they would experience if they administered a shock of the imagined strength to another person.