On Stanley Milgram’s Social Experiments and the Application to Generation Loss
Essay Word Count: 2,222 words
(Title and Headings not included)
About the Poster
Hello! My name is Auri. The start of this essay is a brief blurb of conversational talk from me to you as the reader, largely addressing the credentials I have to begin a discussion on this topic. Which isn’t really much! It really only amounts to the fact that I have passed a singular college/university class in general psychology in which we discussed and researched this specific experiment. In no way am I a professional psychologist, and I do not expect my words to be taken at face value. If you are interested in the topic, do your own research too! I am fully willing to have conversations and debates regarding the material in this essay, especially if you have more knowledge and education on the topic than I do.
All of the information in this essay will be presented for a more rounded basic understanding of the experiment and my thoughts on whether or not the application of the experiment to the events of Generation Loss is appropriate. I will be covering an explanation of one of the simplest versions of the experiment as presented to me by my psychology professor. This will not be an extensive explanation of every variable, although it will go beyond the information that was included in MatPat’s Game Theory video about Generation Loss. Above all, please do not take my words to be the end all be all of this experiment and Generation Loss itself! These are my thoughts with the information I currently have. Doing your own research and developing your own thoughts and opinions on the subject is very important and highly encouraged.
Additionally, please do not give hate to either creator in the discussion of this topic. This essay is meant to be informative so that others may draw their own conclusions. The thoughts and feelings I express in this writing are my own, and I do not expect everyone to agree with me, and the content creators are doing nothing more than freely producing content for viewers to watch and discuss. Be respectful to everyone, including the creators and other Tumblr users who may comment or reblog. Thank you!
Warnings
Please do note that this essay will discuss events such as the Holocaust, World War II, death, perceived torture, Nazis, and concentration camps in uncensored ways. Nothing in this essay will in any way be graphic, but topics in this list may be brought up and discussed in various ways. In no way are anti-Semitic views or intentionally harming another person endorsed in this post, and endorsing either of these in discussion will not be tolerated. Please keep your own mental health in mind while reading, as this is a serious topic.
Introduction
On Sunday, May 30, 2023, MatPat released a video on the Game Theory YouTube channel regarding Ranboo’s horror series Generation Loss. This video, titled Lies of the Founder, covered the events of Generation Loss since the release of the T_1 video. This included information given in The Inauguration and Generation 1: The Social Experiments. During this video, MatPat also included the idea that the social experiment designed by Stanley Milgram could be comparable to the Social Experiments of Generation Loss. However, this should not be taken into account without considering the full scope of the experiment and its design, including ethics, historical context, and social implications.
Historical Context and Social Implications
Milgram’s social experiments occurred in the early 1960s following the end of World War II. During this time, many of the people who had working in concentration camps during the Holocaust were on trial for a myriad of crimes, including the slaughter and injury of Jewish people. This included not only scientists and leaders of the Nazis, but also people of working class backgrounds who believed in the cause. These people were asked why they would intentionally participate in mass murder, to which they responded that they were told to.
Society would largely like to believe that people have a moral compass that would keep them from performing such acts. Therefore, it was thought that these people must either make up a small portion of the population or that they were lying as to their motivations. This was the basis of Milgram’s experiments: to determine whether or not the average person would intentionally cause another harm because they had been told to by a figure of authority. The expectation was that they would not, however this would not turn out to be the case in the majority of situations.
The Experiment
Before discussing the outcome of the experiment, it is important to understand the structure of the experiment itself. It had many different iterations with the same basic design, all intended to simulate a similar experience to the people who had been running the gas chambers in a more controlled environment. There were even iterations that appealed to different demographics, including women, which did show minor variation in data. Despite this, each time the experiment was run the general outcome remained the same.
In a basic version of the experiment, an ad was placed in the newspaper that stated that volunteers could apply to take part in an experiment at Yale, which they would be financially compensated for. However, volunteers were not told the true purpose of the experiment. Volunteers were told that the experiment was a test to see how the introduction of pain impacted how well a person learned. This was similar to other experiments that had taken place to see the influences of pain versus reward in learning behaviors among animals. Upon applying, each volunteer would be given a date, time, and place that they were to go in order to partake, and told that they would be paid upon arrival.
The times and dates were set so that only one participant would arrive at a time for each experiment session, and all of the sessions were done late at night when no one else would be in the area. Even the police had been told that there would be strange and potentially disturbing noises coming from the building, and that these noises should be ignored. Volunteers would arrive to see another person sitting in the waiting room, who would introduce themselves as another volunteer. Unknown to them, this person was not another participant, but instead a paid actor who had been told how the experiment would work. The two would be left alone in the room together while waiting for someone to begin the experiment.
Eventually, a person wearing some kind of designation of power, such as a lab coat, and referred to as the experimenter, would come into the room. The experimenter would then present the volunteer and the actor with the money they had promised the volunteers, and the volunteer was told that they could leave at any time. If they wished, they could take the money at that moment and walk out the door without proceeding further into the experiment. If they chose to proceed, the volunteer would then be given a choice to select a piece of paper from the experimenter’s hand, which they were told would determine their role in the experiment. They were told that they could be either the learner, the person who would answer questions, or the teacher, the person who would ask questions and administer the punishments. It was intended to appear as random chance, however both of the papers in the experimenter’s hands would say teacher, thereby rigging the roles that were given. The remaining paper that wasn’t chosen would then be given to the actor, who would pretend that the paper told them to be the learner. After being given their roles, given that they still wished to participate, the volunteer and the actor would then be taken back to the area that had been set up for the rest of the experiment.
The volunteer and the actor were then separated into separate rooms where they were not able to see each other, although there was an intercom system set up so that they would be able to hear each other. The volunteer was then told that they would be asking questions and would be administering a controlled shock to the actor if the answers that they had given were wrong. In many cases, these questions were a series of associated words that had to be repeated in order. Given that the volunteer might have concerns about shocking someone, volunteers were also given a light sample shock to show that each shock would not equate to more than a pinch. They would then be told how to work all of the necessary equipment and instructed to proceed with the experiment. Nothing would change until the first time the actor intentionally got a question wrong.
After a question was answered incorrectly, the volunteer would be directed to give the actor a shock. For every wrong answer after this, they would then be told that the voltage would be raised by a given interval, so that each time the actor answered a question wrong, the “shock” would be more painful. Eventually the shock would rise to a voltage that should have been painful, and increasingly distressed noises would either be acted out by the actor or played from a previously recorded tape. Should the volunteer refuse to administer the shock, the experimenter had a few statements along the line of, “The experiment must continue.” This was intended to make the volunteer continue to administer the shocks, however the volunteer was still free to leave at any time. In fact, some volunteers would. For those that continued with the experiment, the shock levels would continue to increase to the point where shocks could be potentially fatal.
At this point, the actor or the tape had lines that were intended to convince the volunteer that they could die, such as yelling that they had a heart condition that could be made worse or kill them because of the shocks. Regardless of this, the experimenter would continue to say that the experiment should continue. This had the potential to reach the point that all sound would cease to come over the intercom from the actor’s room altogether, even though questions are still being asked. The experimenter would then inform the volunteer that should no answer be given, it was to be taken as an incorrect answer and a shock should be administered. After a shock or multiple shocks had been administered in pure silence, the experimenter would then tell the volunteer that the experiment had been concluded and escort them out of the room.
The Outcome and Ethics
It is important to remember that no one was ever physically injured in these experiments. All of it was acting, rigged to see how the volunteers would respond. A majority of the volunteers did proceed all the way to the end of the experiments, a number of almost 66%. This shocked the general society at the time, who had estimated that the majority of people would not go through something like this. The rest of the volunteers who did choose to walk out or threatened to call the police were then told how the experiment worked, and were asked to remain silent about their experience so that they could continue to collect accurate results.
However, volunteers experienced major trauma because of this. Instances of survivor’s guilt were recorded years later regarding the experiment, with some volunteers admitting to having persistent nightmares. So while there wasn’t any physical harm, there was certainly potential for mental harm done to the volunteers who followed all the way through. In addition to the deception as to the true purpose and methods of the experiment and the lack of informed consent from the volunteers, this experiment violates multiple sections of the modern code of ethics. As such, this experiment would never have been approved or allowed to continue today.
Application to Generation Loss
In my personal opinion, this is an experiment that should not be applied to Generation Loss. While I do understand the concept of Generation 1: The Social Experiments being about the audience and seeing how far they would be willing to take things, I do not believe there is truly enough similarity to use them as a one-to-one comparison. The roles of learner, experimenter, and teacher are not significantly filled out from the cast we have in Generation Loss in my opinion. Additionally, there is something about using an experiment that breaks the code of ethics and was designed in regards to behaviors from the Holocaust, a very serious historical event, to describe elements of an entertaining horror story that rubs me the wrong way. I do believe the appropriateness of this can be subjective, but I would like to give other people evaluating this all of the information that I also have.
In Conclusion
This essay has been designed to give readers more information as to a particular subject that was brought up in a Game Theory video. It serves the secondary purpose of displaying the reasons that I believe it is not appropriate to use in the way it has been compared to Ranboo’s Generation Loss series. I am more than willing to hold an ongoing conversation and civil debate on this matter, and encourage everyone to do their own research if this matter interests you for if you feel there is something important that I have missed.
