CathNews New Zealand

Has the tradition of the crude and often cruel laboratory experiments, conducted in the name of psychology explained the human psyche to us? Has it brought us the understanding of how low humanity might sink, or of the importance of love? Or can we learn more from the laboratory of real life?

These are the ethical questions presented by the revelations of psychological research conducted in Melbourne almost four decades ago.Behind the Shock Machine, by Melbourne author and psychologist Gina Perry (launched last week), documents and analyses the so called ‘willingness to torture’ experiments, conducted by the psychology department of Latrobe University in the 1970s.

The experimenters’ intent was to observe the capacity of first year students to inflict pain by electrically shocking others, and to extrapolate the findings to humanity as a whole. Ironically the academics who designed and implemented the research may themselves be seen as subjects to be analysed.

The studies were a replica of the Yale Professor Stanley Milgram experiments of 1963 where subjects were asked (and verbally coerced) to inflict painful electric shocks on others despite hearing the screams of pain. Controversially these studies were performed at the time of the trial in Israel of Nazi Adolf Eichmann whose defence had been that he was ‘just following orders’.

The experiments may have come out of a desire to test an ethnocentric conceit that Nazism was somehow a Germanic cultural flaw. However Milgram concluded that 65 per cent of Americans may have by implication been as capable as the Nazis of following such orders.

The double irony of the Milgram and Latrobe experiments is the apparent insensitivity of the academic staff and researchers to the evidence of the emotional pain they were inflicting on the subjects of their experiments. When the Latrobe staff disclosed, sometimes laughingly, that the shocks and screams had been faked, it left many subjects with an awareness of their own dark side. Continue reading

Sources

• Lyn Bender in Eureka Street
• Image: textually.org

 

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News category: Features.