Dinhternet

Everyone who has taken Psychology 1 has read about the Milgram Experiment. If you haven’t, it was a famous study on obedience to authority figures where subjects were instructed by a “researcher” to punish a “test-taker” for wrong answers with increasingly strong electric shocks, leading up to a lethal voltage.

The study found that even when subjects could hear the screams of pain from the “test-taker,” some still went all the way and administered the lethal shock. This study has never been repeated because it was so traumatic to the subjects. (Not the “test-takers,” they were actors who were in on the trick and weren’t actually shocked. I’m talking about the subjects who were asked to do the shocking.)

Well, now someone is trying again! The twist is, it’s with a virtual test-taker. There’s a computer model of a woman strapped to a chair, and subjects are still asked to “shock” her for wrong answers. Surprisingly, subjects’ tension levels still rise as the voltage increases, just as it did with the real experiment back in the 1960s. Also as in the real experiments, some subjects are so troubled that they refuse to continue.

Personally, I think it’s very interesting that subjects are able to empathize so intensely with a virtual person. (Makes you wonder about that old argument about violent games desensitizing kids!) Some critics say this makes it as dangerous as the original, while the researcher in charge of this new version says that the subjects know perfectly well that it’s not real, but part of their mind blocks that out in the short term. He plans to virtually recreate the Stanford Prison Experiment next!

(On a semi-random tangent… Das Experiment is a great movie adaption of the Stanford Prison Experiment!)

What do you guys think? Dangerous and potentially psyche-damaging risk or innovative new way to safely conduct controversial experiments?

Tags: Computer, Games, Son

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 2:26 and is filed under Education, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.