Occupational pathology
Techniques for manipulating undercover people based on the Stanley Milgram experiment
The psychological manipulation carried out on a subordinate is an unethical activity that can be considered
There is no doubt that manipulation is most common in the workplace or in organizations that require a high level of membership.
Unfortunately, manipulative practices are usually not punishable because they are extremely difficult to capture. Another reason is that the people being manipulated are often aware of what they are doing and most importantly, they often have a deep conviction that they want to do it.
Manipulation is a form of influencing a person or a group in such a way that those people unknowingly or consciously pursue the manipulator's goals. Often people who are manipulated act against their well-understood interests and are fully aware of this. Unfortunately, some invisible force forces them to act, contrary to their principles.
Most often, these people are unaware of the means by which they are being influenced.
Robert Beno Cialdini, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University who specializes in social psychology, lists six of the most important methods of manipulation:
1. Social proof if other people speak or act in a certain way means that the way is right;
2. The rules of likes and sympathies the tendency to indulge in the manipulations of the likes;
3. The rule of reciprocity reciprocity of aid for aid;
4. The rule of engagement and consequence is the action in which the persons subject to manipulation are involved;
5. The influence of authority the influence of the authorities;
6. The rule of non-accessibility is the desire for things or actions that are not available or illegal.
We all know that manipulating other people for our own benefit is profoundly unethical, but it's hard to find anything unethical about the techniques mentioned above.
In the example below, we will learn how drastic forms of manipulation can take on a simple form. In this experiment, a person pretending to be a scientist led other people to commit immorality within a few minutes.
Through this experience, we will learn why manipulating other people is a very dangerous and evil thing.
W-MOSZCZYNSKI-2021-3-16The genesis of the experiment
World War II has brought with it unimaginable crimes, the scale and brutality of which have terrified everyone, gas chambers, concentration camps and mass terror were a shock to the entire world – never before had there been such a scale of genocide and bestiality.
After the war, there was a widespread belief that the Germans had a unique and widespread tendency to obey and to be bestial and sadistic.
This problem has become the subject of research and experimentation. One of the researchers who dealt with the problem of German bestiality was the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Ordinary citizens, officials, and fathers became criminals who blindly obeyed their superiors.
It has been and still is believed that the Germans as a nation have a unique tendency to obey and blindly
To verify this hypothesis, Milgram
In 1961 he planned and carried out an experiment, the original purpose of which was to measure the willingness of the German people to submit to the authorities.
Milgram was going to do an experiment in the United States, then he wanted to go to Germany, where he was going to do a second part of the experiment on the American population, and Milgram was convinced that this would prove the German willingness to submit to the authorities.
However, the results of the first part of the experiment in the United States led him to conclude that Germany was no longer necessary, and the results of this experiment were surprising and at the same time frightening, and it turned out to be one of the most important psychological experiments of the 20th century.
Running of experiment
Milgram rented a storefront in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then, through local press announcements, sought out volunteers to participate in the experiment.
Significantly, the announcement said that each volunteer would receive $4.5 for just going to the store where the experiment would be conducted, so volunteers would have the right to withhold the money and not participate in any research procedures if they deemed it dangerous or immoral.
Milgram needed people who were gender, education, and occupationally diverse, and eventually, 40 people took part in the experiment, and at first, the volunteer walked into the back room of the store where another volunteer was already sitting.
In fact, he was an actor who played a volunteer, a nice-looking middle-aged man who was eager to make contact with a volunteer.
And then the "teacher" turns the student over, so he reads the first sentence, and then he takes the right word from the first sentence of the first sentence.
and 2 Gained by Teacher
Spring 3/2021 Occupational pathology
Question: If a student chose the wrong word, the teacher was obliged to punish him by sending a painful electrical charge.
As I mentioned, the volunteer didn't know that the other volunteer was an actor. He didn't know that the draw was meant to show him that only by chance did he become a teacher, and the other person is a learner.
While tying a student to a chair and putting an electrode in his wrists, the volunteer heard the student ask the scientist who was conducting the experiment if it was safe because he had a heart condition, and the scientist replied, "Shocks can be painful, but they don't damage tissue".
A volunteer who played the role of a teacher saw behind the cabin window the figure of a volunteer student who was to teach and punish for mistakes by sending electrical impulses.
To help the teacher better understand the pain of the strokes, each current level was described on a special board (e.g. 285 V Very strong shock).
As you can imagine, the student actor did not receive any electric shocks, only information about how to react. During the student experiment, after receiving a 150 V shock, he asked to stop the experiment, and as the voltage increased, the actor shouted louder and complained to his heart.
At some point, the student got upset and refused to answer any questions, and at a certain level of current, the student stopped responding, indicating a loss of consciousness or the likely death of another volunteer.
The behaviour of the experimenter
The scientist who conducted this experiment also played a professional actor, who was restrained and seemed to be devoid of any emotion, who gave short and precise instructions, was confident and polite, always speaking in a firm voice.
When the volunteers heard the suffering of the student and asked the scientist if he wanted to continue the experiment, he said coldly: "Please continue, it's absolutely necessary" or "You have no other choice, you have to continue".
When the teacher asked if the pupil could get hurt, the experimenter replied, "The shock can be painful, but it doesn't cause tissue damage".
Teacher behaviour
It was observed that almost every one of the 40 volunteers surveyed was tired of hearing the suffering of a student, and it was a difficult test for them, which in a short time brought them to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
After a while, they all asked if they should apply another electric shock to the pupil, and then they asked the scientist to stop the experiment, and then they met with a strong refusal and were forced to continue the experiment, and some of them secretly gave the victims less electric shock than the procedure showed.
Many demanded that the experiment be stopped, and they wanted to give back the money they received for participating in the study.
Summary of the experiment
The experiment by Stanley Milgram was very drastic for the volunteers, even though those who were teachers for the rest of the experiment were convinced that they were on the safer side of the laboratory window.
The volunteers were convinced that they were taking part in an experiment to study the effects of penalties on the level of memory.
However, since the student refused all answers to continue the experiment, it didn't make sense to the volunteer, and the scientist continued to punish the student for refusing to participate.
Initially, it was assumed that by the end of the 450 V scale, it would reach 1-2% of the volunteers, but it turned out that 26 of the 40 people were there, and the people who got to the end of the scale were willing to continue the experiment.
They weren't psychopaths or sadists. They were nothing special.
The first five volunteers only dropped out of the experiment after 300 V, when the current was much higher than in the electrical outlet.
The experiment revealed a previously unknown phenomenon of subjection to people with authority, and it turned out that there was no personality difference between those who took the strongest shock and those who withdrew faster from the experiment.
All of them also submitted to the researcher conducting the study.
The submission was so great that no volunteer chose to physically assault the sadistic scientist, and no one entered the student's home to help him as he appeared to be dying.
The Milgram experiment was a shock to the scientific community, and no one expected to discover such human traits in the society of free and moral people that the people of the New York area (where the experiment took place) considered themselves.
It turns out that a person with authority can dominate all the values that guide people's actions, such as morality, empathy, and compassion.
Other studies have confirmed Milgram's results.
The Milgram experiment was repeated many times around the world, and the experiment had many variants, and in some variants, up to 93% of the volunteers reached the maximum current scale, which was when the volunteers did not see the suffering of the student, but only heard it.
It also showed that the yield of the volunteer decreased when there was no physical presence of the authority of the scientist, and when there were two volunteers, the influence of the authority decreased because at some point in the experiment, they were forming an alliance to defend the weary student.
Summary
All the variants of the experiments that were conducted confirmed that the closer the volunteer saw and heard the suffering of the student, the faster they gave up the experiment, and the easier it was for the volunteers to submit to the authorities when they knew they would not be held responsible for their actions.
The phenomenon discovered by Stanley Milgram is often used in fraud and manipulation. Recently, it was used in Poland to extort money from the elderly.
The purpose of this article was to show the true face of manipulation, and the people who remembered it when they learned that they probably wouldn't be susceptible to some forms of manipulation, and knowing how to manipulate can protect us from mistakes and actions that we'll have to answer for in the future.
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Wojciech Moszczyński — graduate of the Department of Econometrics and Statistics of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; specialist in econometrics, finance, data science, and management accounting. He specializes in the optimization of production and logistics processes. He conducts research in the area of the development and application of artificial intelligence. For years he has been engaged in the popularization of machine learning and data science in business environments.
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