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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Amnesty is really spending its credit on a rainbow bench, eh? At least the local hardware stores must be doing a roaring trade in paint šŸ˜

And really, if a silly fight over painting a bench is the worst that happens, it's all good.

Itā€™s Milgram and Robbers Cave all the way down.

Both of those were faked, if memory serves.

No? I guess you could say they were ā€œfakedā€ in the sense that all social science experiments are ā€œfakedā€.

What I have seen are allegations that the experiments were unethical, usually framed in a way that suggests the results cannot be trusted (the suggestion is transparently bullshit. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the scientific method knows that informed consent forms make experiments less reliable). You may have been misled by one of them.

My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.

I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.

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