Over at The American Scene, Jim Manzi makes a brilliant observation about the infamous experiment wherein subjects were given the opportunity to press a button they were told would shock others. Perhaps it doesn’t expose the dark underbelly of human nature after all:
What’s always struck me as ironic about the typical interpretations of the Milgram experiment is that the subjects did not actually deliver painful shocks. Now, you will say, yes, but they thought that they did, which indicates that they would be willing to do so. But I’m not so sure about that.
After all, they were making a (likely unarticulated) judgment about whether an action was “right” in the context of what presumably seemed like legitimately professional scientists at a major research university in the middle of a law-bound, peaceful republic. Operating in the way that most decision-making under pressure works, which is not necessarily linear processing of logical statements, they likely thought something that could be crudely represented as “Well, they wouldn’t be allowed to do something that was really heinous, and would destroy their careers if they did. I don’t understand exactly what’s going on, but all my assumptions about how the world works would be violated if Yale University could really run a torture chamber operated by random people picked off the street. It would just be too crazy.” This muddled-headed, superficial thinking turns out to have been a correct judgment.
Posted by Mayo 
