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Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong...

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Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong...

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Standing in front of a keen psychology audience, Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) said he felt like he was at a primary school to tell children why Santa wasn't real. But, in fact, his and Alexander Haslam's extensive research on the 60s researcher Stanley Milgram has only made the man, and his electric shock box, ever-more interesting.

Milgram's 1961 experiments into obedience set out to answer a question that we've been asking for centuries - what makes normal individuals do monstrous things? Milgram's participants were told the experiments were a study of punishment and its effects on learning - they acted as 'teachers' giving electric shocks to 'learners' when they misremembered the second word from a list of word pairs. Participants were in a separate room to the learners - who, in reality, were confederates of Milgram and received no shocks - but could overhear their shouts of pain as the shocks increased in power. These sessions were overseen by a white-coated experimenter who would coax any struggling participants to continue with the experiment.

Prior to this work Milgram asked colleagues how many people would give a shock of 300 volts or more, and many said only true psychopaths would do so. But in his first baseline study of 40 people, 26 went all the way to 450 volts and beyond - in other words two out of three people would kill someone for making an error in a learning experiment.

From this work Milgram developed a theory that, during obedience, people adopt an agentic state seeing themselves as instruments to carry out the will of another and feel little or no responsibility for their actions. However - and it's a rather big however - there are some key elements from Milgram's studies which undermine the theories he developed from them.

First, while his baseline study would back up the agentic state theory he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent... overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter. How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?

Second, when we consider the goings-on during the actual experiment and look at the experimenter's four prods to encourage participants to continue, they reveal that people really do not like following orders. The four prods used were: 'please continue', 'the experiment requires you to continue', 'It's essential you continue' and 'you have no other choice - you must go on'. Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order. As Reicher said - Milgram's own research here is emphatically not showing that people have a tendency to obey orders.

Finally, Milgram's work did not account for the role of participants hearing the learner's voice shouting in pain. While agentic state theory would suggest we are bound into the voice of the experimenter, deferentially following orders, this is not revealed in Milgram's own archived materials - Reicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in.

All of this flies in the face of the overriding narrative Milgram established after his experiments of obedient people in agentic states blindly following orders. While his findings are in no way artificial, Reicher said, he could have reached the conclusion that people aren't programmed to take orders but rather make choices over which 'voice' to listen to in a given situation, which can vary depending on an individual's relative identification.

- Find much more about Milgram and his studies in our archive, including this from Reicher and Haslam, and an exploration of rhetoric and resistance in the studies.

- You can read more coverage from the Annual Conference online, and in the June and July print editions.

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Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong - The British Psychological Society

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Standing in front of a keen psychology audience, Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) said he felt like he was at a primary school to tell children why Santa wasn't real. But, in fact, his and Alexander Haslam's extensive research on the 60s researcher Stanley Milgram has only made the man, and his electric shock box, ever-more interesting.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-human-beast/202209/does-your-cat-you

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Key points

In the presence of people they trust, cats express their relaxed state by slowly blinking, and sometimes by purring.

Many cats develop a close relationship with their owners that has similarities to their relationship with their mothers.

Cats may express their displeasure at strangers by hissing, arching their backs, elevating their fur, growling, and baring their teeth.

Recently, cat videos outnumbered dog videos online as the fascination with their strange behavior increased. At the same time, animal behaviorists are revising our understanding of the cat-human relationship.

Cat Adaptation to Domestic Life

We do not know exactly when cats were domesticated but it was at least 5,000 years ago and perhaps twice that long. Cats have modified their behavior to fit in with human activities.

Even so, they are less domesticated than dogs and can be considered very similar to their wild ancestors.

This is assessment is based on evidence that cats can live independently whereas dogs cannot. Cats are highly effective predators and do not rely on humans for their food. Indeed domestic cats are a leading killer of birds.

Conversely, domestic dogs are ineffectual predators. They rely on humans for their food. This conclusion comes from an analysis of the diets of dingoes in Australia compared to their domestic counterparts. Dingoes rely primarily on food scavenged from garbage dumps.

As essentially wild predators, cats can be quite unpredictable. Many owners who are devoted to their cats complain that the cat often scratches them unexpectedly. One acquaintance had the cat declawed and found that the pet reverted to using its teeth on her!

Of course, some dogs have serious behavior problems as well but they are unlikely to attack their owners without warning.

Despite the occasional intrusions of wild predatory behavior, cats are interested in people and develop strong attachments to them. We know this because they choose to spend much of their waking time close to their owners and other people. Domestic cats have developed an expressive repertoire for communicating with people that is different from wild behavior.

Communication Between Cats and People

The cat's meow is often used to express hunger but it also serves as a social greeting. This sound is used by wild kittens to express hunger to the mother (but not among adults). Many cats develop a close relationship with their owners that has similarities to their relationship with their mothers.

Like most wild animals, cats are fearful of people. They tend to withdraw from strangers whereas dogs generally have the opposite response of approaching strangers with effusive displays of affection.

Dogs are territorial, however, and respond aggressively to intrusions of their home territory.

Cats are also territorial. They may express their displeasure at strangers by hissing, arching their backs, elevating their fur, growling, and baring their teeth, all unmistakable signs of aggression.

In the presence of people they trust, they express their relaxed state by slowly blinking, and sometimes by purring.

Cats have several qualities that make them appealing subjects for videos. One is that they are highly athletic and their control over movement is spectacularly good. For example, they have a well-developed righting reflex so that they always land on their feet when they fall. Another trait is that they are highly curious so they often get into trouble by chasing balls of wool, jumping into drawers, and otherwise creating mayhem by playing with household objects. Cats manifest a great deal of individual variation.

Variation in Cat Temperaments

Domestic cats have a great deal of freedom about what to do with their time. Most of it is spent asleep, which is an adaptation of predators to save energy. Some cats sleep as much as 18 hours per day, similar to wild predators, but others might only sleep half as much. Cats are generally most active in the morning, and again at night, a pattern that mirrors the movements of people in a household.

Cats vary greatly in how social they are. Most are initially fearful of strangers and inclined to withdraw from unwanted attention, such as a hand that reaches menacingly from above. They are attracted to people who do not like cats and shrink from contact which means they are not threatening.

Some cats enjoy interacting with people and being stroked by them. Others prefer to go out in search of prey. Their predatory activity is useful to a variety of industries from the farm cat to the ship's cat to the warehouse cat.

Domestic cats vary greatly in their responses to human-provided food. Some eat too much and make themselves ill, suggesting that eating may relieve anxiety for cats as it does for people. Many are finicky eaters, refusing food if it is cold, for example, possibly reflecting an aversion to long-dead prey. Some are social eaters and prefer to eat in the company of their owner, or another cat.

These variations in emotionality, activity level and sociability are consistent with key temperamental differences in humans and other mammals. They suggest that beneath the skin we may have surprisingly similar experiences reflecting a shared mammalian ancestry.

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In the presence of people they trust, cats express their relaxed state by slowly blinking, and sometimes by purring. Many cats develop a close relationship with their owners that has similarities to their relationship with their mothers. Cats may express their displeasure at strangers by hissing, arching their backs, elevating their fur, growling, and baring their teeth.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/natured-nurture/202209/understanding-dopamine-can-help-us-create-better-habits

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Key points

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that governs reward in the brain.

Impulsive pleasures reward more immediate dopamine than long-term, more meaningful, but more difficult, goals.

Dopamine resets and delayed gratification are key to optimizing feelings of reward for long-term goals.

By Adam Omary and Nicholas Ford

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in our brain's reward processing systems. When you do something that feels good, it's usually because of an anticipatory or consummatory reward mediated by dopamine. (Passive feelings of good mood are more so regulated by another neurotransmitter, serotonin; good feelings involving others, such as love, are more strongly regulated by yet another neurotransmitter, oxytocin).

Anticipatory Reward

Anticipatory reward is the good feeling you get when moving towards a goal. Have you ever noticed that sometimes, the feeling of being about to achieve a milestone is more exciting than the feeling you get when you actually achieve it? Or perhaps the feeling of accomplishment is short-lived, and you quickly move on to your next goal?

You may wonder if you simply chose the wrong goal in the pursuit of happiness. But perhaps not. From an evolutionary perspective, your brain has every incentive to motivate you with good feelings as you progress towards your goal, but little incentive to keep rewarding you with happy chemicals once you achieve it. The anticipatory reward for another new goal is more exciting, from dopamine's perspective.

Consummatory Reward

That is not to say that achieving something never feels good. Rather, our brain rewards us with dopamine for consumption, too. That is why things taste good, for example. But the reward is short-lived. As soon as you swallow and deliver your brain the energy it desires, what more incentive does it have to keep you happy?

Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation and a professor of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University, describes how this consummatory reward is precisely what can lead to "couch potato syndrome." If you are just laying down on the couch, you likely feel more or less neutral. But for the few seconds you chew on that potato chip, you receive a dopamine spike of consummatory reward.

It's not just about the spike. Future dopamine reward is dependent on previous dopamine reward, where our nervous system wants more of that previous stimulus. This leads to both diminishing returns in our feeling of pleasure from the same repeated stimulus, and a dopamine dip if you suddenly lose access to that reward stimulus.

This is why couch potato syndrome can sustain itself even when you are no longer hungry. The first few bites elevate your mood slightly above neutral, and once your brain gets used to its mini-high, the dopamine dip of returning to neutral manifests as a craving for more.

Drug Addiction

Things get more pernicious when talking about forms of consummatory reward that hijack our brain's pleasure system: drugs. Opioids, for example, form extremely strong bonds with inhibitory neurons, blocking the firing that normally tells our brains to stop producing dopamine. We become flooded with much more positive emotion than would ever be natural-remember, dopamine is meant to be fine-tuned, so as to reward you just the right amount to keep you in pursuit of your goal.

Drugs aren't a problem because they make people feel good. Drugs are a problem when they cause addiction, narrowing our dopamine sources to one destructure behavior, drug use, and disrupting our incentive to enjoy the normal pleasures of life.

Behavioral Dopamine Rewards

Just as our brains were not evolved to keep up with the massive dopamine spikes caused by opioids, evolution has not prepared us for the abundance of pleasure that exists in the world today.

We evolved to receive spikes in pleasure when eating naturally sugary foods, such as fruit, because of their high energy content. Fruit cannot compete with the amount of sugar (and thus, dopamine reward) of modern processed foods, such as candy and ice cream. Of course unhealthy treats make us feel better (in the short term). Our brains were designed to maximize our incentive for calorically-rich foods.

Similarly, it is much more gratifying to sit down and play a game on your phone or browse social media than it is to pour a large amount of effort into a long-term goal. We feel as if we are achieving something meaningful when we watch the points go up on the game. We feel as if we are receiving in-person validation when we receive a like on a post. Why would we toil away for some dopamine later when we can have a lot more now?

Dopamine Resets

It is not a bad thing that we have evolved to chase the greatest sources of dopamine in our lives. We evolved this way because it is adaptive. What is unadaptive is when we receive artificially high hits of dopamine from things that are genuinely not good for us.

Lembke advocates for practicing dopamine resets in our lives, to get back to our natural baseline of incentive. For example, if you cut out all sugar for a month, eating a piece of fruit would suddenly give you a large spike of consummatory reward. But conversely, if all you ate was candy, fruit would hardly taste sweet at all. And the simple joys of life may be a little dull, as well.

Dopamine keeps us craving short-term pleasures, but it doesn't have to. Eliminating, or even taking periodic breaks, from short-term pleasures in our lives, can allow us to feel more reward from the pursuit of long-term goals.

This is, essentially, the neurological basis for how practicing delayed gratification can be the key to happiness.
Nicholas Ford is a senior at the University of Southern California studying Cognitive Science.

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Understanding Dopamine Can Help Us Create Better Habits

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Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that governs reward in the brain. Impulsive pleasures reward more immediate dopamine than long-term, more meaningful, but more difficult, goals. Dopamine resets and delayed gratification are key to optimizing feelings of reward for long-term goals.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/29/the-big-idea-do-animals-have-emotions

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hen a dog growls at you, is it angry? When a squirrel flees up a tree at your approach, is it fearful? When an elephant stands for days on a spot where another has died, is it grieving? If you live with an animal (the non-human kind) you might think the answer is obvious, but the scientific question remains tantalisingly open.

Let's start with some well-established findings. Every animal's brain regulates its organs, hormones and the other systems of its body via electricity and swirling chemicals. Inside your own body, these processes keep you alive and also, somehow, produce your general mood in ways that scientists are still puzzling out. Your mood is kind of a summary of how your whole body is doing. It ranges from pleasant to unpleasant and from still to activated. Mood is not emotion - it is always with you, even when you're not emotional.

Do other animals consciously feel mood as we do? They cannot tell us, so we can't know for sure. Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, in his book Metazoa, proposes three behaviours that may provide clues. Does the animal tend to and protect and tend to its injured body parts? Many do, including birds, mammals, octopuses and crustaceans, but flies can lose a limb and carry on as normal. Does the animal appear to consider costs and benefits? Crabs will tolerate electric shocks in order to remain in place if the smell of a predator is wafting about. Does the animal seek pain-killing chemicals after an injury? Chickens do - they choose drug-laced feed over the regular stuff when they're hurt. Some fish will swim in shallower waters, where predators may lurk, to reach and consume opioids. Bees, however, don't display these kinds of behaviours.

Moving from mood to emotion is trickier because the question of animal emotions depends on how you define "emotion" in the first place. Some scientists think emotions are specific feelings, such as the dread of fear, and ask if other animals feel them. Other scientists define them as behaviours with useful survival functions, such as actions that allow an animal to escape a predator. Still others define emotions as the brain circuits that correspond to those behaviours; for example, they search for a specific "fear circuit" that could trigger freezing in situations we would consider fearful.

Each of these definitions of emotion requires human inference - observing an animal's physical state and guessing at its psychological meaning. To tackle this problem, let's attempt to separate out the human perspective. Consider a fly, a rat and a person in situations that we'd think of as frightening. Sweep a fly swatter above the fly, and it rubs its legs together rapidly. Train the rat to associate an audio tone with a painful shock; play the tone alone and the rat freezes in place. Observe a man who is being followed by a stranger on a dark street and he widens his eyes, constantly looking back while his heart pounds in his chest.

Empathy is important, but this view also tempts us to see other animals as inferior versions of humans

A typical scientist observing these animals concludes that all three are exposed to a threat and are therefore in a state of fear. But here's the curious thing: the three examples have virtually nothing in common physically. They involve different kinds of brains in different situations, moving different kinds of bodies in different ways. So, where's the similarity that makes all three situations "fear"? It's in the scientist's own brain. You may well experience a world full of animals who cry in sadness, screech in terror and skulk in guilt but these are effortless inferences on your part - human perceptions that give meaning to cries, screeches and skulks.

I'm not saying emotions are imaginary. I'm saying our brains have evolved to instantly group things together as similar, even when they are physically different, such as leg-rubbing flies, freezing rats and wide-eyed humans. We categorise like this 24/7, most of the time without realising it. As an example from a different branch of science, Mercury, Earth and Jupiter are all planets, so they must be similar in some way, right? Well, Mercury is a tiny, hot, barren rock. Earth is three times larger and its surface mostly water, teeming with life. Jupiter is a gigantic ball of gas. Where's the similarity? In our brains. We focus on abstract features such as "orbits the sun" and ignore immense differences in size and substance to group these heavenly bodies into the same category. A big rock in space is physically real but the category "planet" is a human creation.

Emotions that you see and hear in others are also human creations. When you experience another animal as fearful, you are not "detecting" fear in any objective sense. It is a construction in your brain that happens automatically, and faster than you can snap your fingers. Your brain groups different movements, sounds and other physical signals together, into the same category, to give them emotional meaning. If a fly beneath a looming fly swatter rubs its legs together on one occasion but freezes on another, a human brain can generalise across both cases to interpret the fly as being in a state of fear. But are fly brains equipped to go beyond physical features and construct this level of meaning? How about the brain of a cat or dog? The answer is probably no. Some animal brains, such as those of chimps, can categorise abstractly, but to the best of our knowledge only we have the wiring to compute abstractions of this magnitude. A non-human animal's fearful state is real for human observers but not necessarily for the creature itself.

As scientists, we must be extremely careful to separate our physical observations from our mental guesses. When we don't, it can be really problematic. If a scientist discovers a brain circuit that controls freezing behaviour in rats, calls it a "fear circuit" and discovers that a certain drug can suppress the circuit, it's a mistake to assume that the drug tames the symptoms of human disorders such as PTSD.

When we slip off our lab coats, it might be beneficial to assume that other animals have the same emotions we do because it encourages empathy - it's easier to admit them into our moral circle and protect them. Empathy is important but this view also tempts us to see other animals as inferior versions of humans, full of emotionality but lacking the rationality to tame it. And placing ourselves at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom in this way can lead us to mistreat creatures which seem less sophisticated than we believe ourselves to be.

Perhaps it's more respectful and scientifically useful to contemplate animals on their own terms. Dogs can smell things we cannot. Birds can see colours we cannot. So maybe they can also feel things we cannot. When one elephant stands by the body of another for days, clearly something is happening, but why must it be a primitive version of human grief? How do we know the elephant isn't guarding the body from scavengers, gloating over the death of a rival, or experiencing something else that we can't possibly comprehend? The idea that other animals share our emotions is compelling and intuitive, but the answers we provide may reveal more about us than about them.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions Are Made (Pan Macmillan).

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith (William Collins, £20)

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (BBodley Head, £20)

Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions. Author by Batja Mesquita (Norton, £24.14)

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hen a dog growls at you, is it angry? When a squirrel flees up a tree at your approach, is it fearful? When an elephant stands for days on a spot where another has died, is it grieving? If you live with an animal (the non-human kind) you might think the answer is obvious, but the scientific question remains tantalisingly open.

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Hate Small Talk?  It could reveal more than you think...

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Hate Small Talk?  It could reveal more than you think...

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/31/four-minutes-of-small-talk-can-reveal-key-personality-traits-study-says?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

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The British may be mocked for their weather-related small talk but exchanging idle pleasantries can leave a lasting impression and affect future social interactions, research suggests.

The study found just four minutes of chit-chat can give away aspects of our personality, such as whether we are extroverted or introverted, and influence subsequent social interactions.

"It might seem like a drain on time and productivity but our research suggests small talk is an important way to learn about the personality of others, which in turn helps us to better predict how they will behave in the future," said Prof Daniel Sgroi from the University of Warwick, the co-author of the study published in the journal PLoS ONE (pdf).

The researchers recruited 338 participants and divided them into two groups before they met in person, with each participant asked to complete a personality and IQ test. Within each group, participants were paired up and either engaged in a four-minute conversation by text or had no contact with their partner.

The participants then had to guess aspects of their partner's personality, such as how extroverted they were, and predict whether they would act cooperatively or selfishly in two money-based strategic games.

The team found those who chatted scored more highly on predicting their partner's IQ and answers to the personality test, although they were also more likely to project their own personality traits on to their partner.

"In even a few minutes we will start to form a mental model of the person we are talking with: are they extroverted or introverted, do they seem upbeat or downbeat, cooperative or uncooperative? These sorts of impressions won't be perfect, but they will be useful," said Sgroi.

Next, the participants met and played with their conversation partner - or with a stranger if they were in the no-contact group - which allowed the scientists to assess the impact of prior small talk on their tactics.

The researchers gave each participant £20 and asked them to contribute to a communal pot shared with their partner, a cognitive experiment called the public goods game.

The team say those who had chatted to their partners were more likely to correctly predict their contribution to the pot. What's more those who had chatted beforehand contributed 30% more than those who had not - a finding the researchers suggest was also down to the relationship they had established through small talk.

Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning
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"Those who engaged in small talk with their partner had a better understanding of their partner's personality - they scored much better at predicting their character traits and in turn this helped them to predict how they would behave," said Sgroi. "The bottom line is that they performed better and earned more money than those who didn't have the opportunity to chat."

Georgie Nightingall, the founder of Trigger Conversations, said small talk is a great way to facilitate collaboration in the workplace: "It's funny how we spend our lives at work yet hardly know the people we work with. If we're not talking, we're missing out on the opportunity to enjoy our work lives.

"People find small talk hard because it can feel like it's never going to end. Once you have all the information you need it can feel awkward and pointless. But if you see it as a gateway and ask follow-up questions it can help you relate to people. If you're going to bring up the weather, think of ways to expand beyond that. The weather is a great opener to every moment of our lives where it is relevant," said Nightingall. "People are more willing to share if you show you care. My advice is: be genuinely curious."

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Four minutes of small talk can reveal key personality traits, study says

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The British may be mocked for their weather-related small talk but exchanging idle pleasantries can leave a lasting impression and affect future social interactions, research suggests. The study found just four minutes of chit-chat can give away aspects of our personality, such as whether we are extroverted or introverted, and influence subsequent social interactions.