I came across a very interesting story on Slashdot yesterday. Having studied Advanced-Level Psychology, I am well versed in the Milgram experiment (Wikipedia); An experiment performed in 1963 by psychologist Stanley Milgram. Much TV coverage has been given to Milgram clones over the past number of years, yet the original experiment remains the subject of some debate.
Milgram placed subjects in a room with another person in an authority role. The subject was then given instructions to question a third person (confederate), located in a second room. Upon receiving an incorrect response, the subject was to shock the confederate in increasing doses. The confederate, at no point, actually received a shock, but was instructed to act as if they had.
The aim of the experiment was to “measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant’s personal conscience.”
The following was pulled from Slashdot, and describes the same experiment being performed against a computer character; with surprising results;
Considered unethical to ever perform again with humans, researcher Mel Slater recreated the Milgram experiment in a immersive virtual environment. Subjects (some of whom could see and hear the computerized woman, others who were only able to read text messages from her) were told that they were interacting with a computer character and told to give increasingly powerful electric shocks when wrong answers were given or the ‘woman’ took too long to respond. The computer program would correspondingly complain and beg as the ’shocks’ were ramped up, falling apparently unconscious before the last shock. The skin conductance and electrocardiograms of the subjects were monitored. Even though the subjects knew they were only ’shocking’ a computer program, their bodies reacted with increased stress responses. Several of the ones who could see and hear the woman stopped before reaching the ‘lethal’ voltage, and about half considered stopping the study. The full results of the experimental report can be read online at PLoS One. Already, some (like William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute) are asking whether even this sanitized experiment is ethical.