Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
producer.
Christopher Shea writes the Critical Faculties column for Ideas.
 Send the Brainiac bloggers a
comment on a post.
  Week of:
November 11
Week of:
November 4
Week of:
October 28
Week of:
October 21
Week of:
October 14
Week of:
October 7
Mind the gap
Shop talk What he learned in the newsroom Mr. Boffo lays an eggcorn Curse of the mummy's tummy More in Word Watch  |
« Happy 75th, American Scholar | Main | The American Scholar, digitized » Friday, January 5, 2007Ordinary torturersI was too busy finishing my column to follow up on this till now, but I was amazed Wednesday night, while flipping channels, to come across this piece on ABC's "Primetime," which appeared to replicate -- with the help of a Santa Clara University psychologist -- the famous Milgram experiment at Yale involving electric "shocks" and authority figures. The unwitting subjects in that experiment were told to administer electric shocks of increasing strength to another test subject. The shocks weren't real and the second subject was in on the experiment. The point was to see how far ordinary people would go in torturing another human being. I'd thought the experiment was unrepeatable, given modern human-subjects regulations. I've emailed the psychologist, Jerry Burger, to find out how they pulled this off -- and what restrictions, if any, his university placed on him.  Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:24 PM
|
