The drugs under experimental control should include caffeine, tobacco, and sugar, which are all known to influence human judgment.

An experiment performed with aboriginal bushmen might lend some credence to the “hard-wired” conclusion.

With the reign of the Bush administration at an end, one issue that has plagued his legacy is the government-sanctioned acts of torture. The United States government was involved with several controversial actions ranging from the indefinite detention …

However, I wonder what would happen if you took a cohort of children who were raised to be autonomous, rational individuals, used to thinking for themselves and assessing the worth of theories, even when these theories issue from an apparently authoritative figure?

Unusual they may be, but such children do exist in the form of autonomously home educated children. I know quite a few of these and regard their expressions of rational scepticism at some of the stuff that teachers of their occasional classes tell them as being extremely healthy.

Such children are also not confused on the ethics of cruelty…for example: they are not told not to bully by people (teachers) who frequently repeatedly bully them.

I would therefore say that it is almost impossible to conclude with any certainty that a trait either towards cruelty or deference to authority is hard-wired, since we educate our youngsters to behave in exactly this sort of a way all the time.

For e.g.: if someone twists my arm to the point of dislocation, my arm is no longer optimally functional and my usage will be compromised somewhat. If perchance, in the aftermath of my accident I were to witness a defenceless old lady being mugged, my ability to physically attempt to apprehend the offender may be diminished and the offender might not be brought to justice by my own hand. This is not to say I would be considered morally corrupt because my piss-weak effort would be judged to be disproportionate to the situation in hand, but rather the power of an unfortunate external condition would have affected my capacities. Ergo, my hypothetical self is not a sadistic old lady hater, but a product of a circumstantial blip. My hard-wiring, so to speak, is still intact.

There are any number of factors inherent in the design and conduct of the experiment that could explain some of the nuances of the results and some of the particular behavior or reactions of the participants. But the bottom line (on which it would seem we all agree) is indeed the most important point here, and it scares the hell out of me.

Oh, and I of course exclude Happeh from my comments. We can “never be sure” about psychology…but we can be certain about “eating” the “energy” from the guy in the next room. Got it.

In your clarification, you claim the participants must not “truly” have had moral objections to torture, or else they wouldn’t have participated. How can you make any claims about their moral beliefs? I interpret their distress at the situation as evidence that the participants do have objections, probably moral objections, but that in most cases those objections are easily overridden by the mere presence of an authority figure. The lack of direct coercion does not mean that 70% of the experimenters lacked moral objection to torture, as you claim. It simply wasn’t strong enough to overcome whatever rationalizations they made to themselves to justify their actions. If the participants had been polled beforehand on their attitudes toward torture or punishment, and thus primed to consider their actions in that light, the experiment may have had different results.

All we can conclude from the Milgram experiments is that our obedience often trumps our morality. That’s a terrifying enough lesson without claiming that we’re all natural-born torturers.

1. I am aware of the Stanford prison experiment, but this article was meant to highlight the recent approval for a recreation of the Milgram experiment, and how despite a 30-year gap the compliance rates still remained the same.

2. I understand where people are coming from with their dispute of my conclusion. Although I didn’t include these points in my article, I wanted to add them here. In Dr. Milgram’s book, he talks about his various recreations of this study, and he brings up some caveats which he found curious. Firstly, almost nobody inquired about the well-being of the victim that they were torturing, even after the study was concluded. Nobody independently chose to contact authorities or call an ambulance or even knock on the door to see if the victim was still alive (remember for the highest shocks the victim falls silent).

3. Nobody put a gun to the head of the participants. Nobody forced them or threatened bodily harm if they did not comply with the experiment. If they truly had a moral objection to torture and refused to torture under any circumstances, then this scenario should have proven an easy refusal on their part. More often than not, however, these subjects chose to willfully suppress their feelings and comply. The situation was distressing, but they went along with it with minimal encouragement.

When I conclude that humans are hard-wired for torture, I am implying that when put into certain scenarios, we have the capacity to inflict harm on another person without regard for their well-being. That is not to say that I condone torture or even give a free pass to those who committed torture.