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Computer Characters Tortured for Science
Rob Carr writes "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."
So when does this come out for the Wii?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Take two groups: One has first gone through this "virtual torturing", the other is the control group. After this, each group will actually torture a volunteer in the same manner. Would the first group have less of an emotional response than the control group? I am sure there are many wrinkles to work out in the methodology, but this would be interesting to see the result of media on human response. It should pretty effectively answer who is right (or how right each side is) in this debate.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
First off, make it a male character, not a female character.
Then ask them if they'd torture a criminal.
After the torture (for those who do volunteer) tell them that there was a mistake and that the guy was innocent. But their assistance is needed with the real criminal.
I can't think of how many games I have played JUST TO DESTROY THE CHARACTER.
Yes, killing badguys is fun but when it comes to physics and the good guy, it can be A LOT OF FUN to just inflict pain on the protaginist.
I don't see anything in the study that says that they made any attempt to find out whether or not the subjects had ever heard about the original Milgram experiment.
The Milgram subjects almost certainly had no knowledge of whether the situation was real or what the purpose of the experiment was, and probably believed that they were "supposed" to follow orders.
Today's subjects may well have heard something. Even if they couldn't have named "Milgram" as the investigator, they may have had more than an inkling that the purpose of the experiment was to see whether they were virtual sadists, and may have suspected that, despite their instructions, the "approved" behavior was to not to follow orders.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I wonder how different the study would be if the subject of the, um, shocks wasn't an average woman but some burly dude like the Gears of War soldiers or maybe Daniel Craig as Bond, or on the other end of the spectrum a child? Assuming the responses of the virtual subjects were exactly the same (or deemed close enough) regardless of appearance, how they were "treated" by folks taking the study would show a lot.
Also.. the woman in the experiment was really unrealistic-looking. I can imagine level or realism being a major factor in treatment as well.
I like basketball!!1!
Seriously! Who hasn't played Edgar Allen Poe with their Sims character, walling them into a room to see how long it would take them to die. ...or was that just me?
This kind of thing takes place in another "immersive virtual environment" every day.
The original experiment was deemed unethical because of the result to the person doing the shocking. No one was actually harmed. The person in the other room was an actor. Substituting an actor for a computer problem doesn't change the fact that the subject _thinks_ he/she is shocking a real human being - and this is the unethical part. Telling the person beforehand that he/she is actually shocking a computer program BEFORE doing the experiment would render it fairly useless.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I can understand the issues with the Stanford Prison Experiment, but neither this experiment nor the original Milgram experiment harmed any of the subjects. Can someone please explain why these experiments are unethical? The subjects might feel guilty for "hurting" someone else, but that's about it.
Test subject Andrew "Ender" Wiggin was reported to say, "It took a while to master this VR, but I'm getting better. The simulated victim spills the beans 70% of the time now, but I want to try for 75%."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
People have more compassion for computer characters than for other people
Denis the SQL Menace
http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/
Denis the SQL Menace http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/
Sounds like a regular virtual fetish session.
The original experiment showed that the vast majority of people will kill others if they are told to do so by someone in authority.
Deleted
I put him in a glass box in the front yard, myself.
Unfortunately, this had side effects. A character from another house in the game stopped by to visit, and even though nobody answered the door, he wouldn't leave. Upshot: the visitor died before the man in the box did, and that character disappeared from the other house. Wouldn't have been so bad, except that character was based on a real guy I knew. Oops.
A lot subtler than me. I just set off fireworks inside and let them burn.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
People can get pretty stressed over video games, why should this be considered any different? They *knew* it was a computer in the back. Maybe it just shows that humans are capable of exhibiting empathy and are emotional? Maybe the opposite: perhaps it shows that some humans are a little more coldblooded than others and are capable of committing acts society considers not appropriate(regardless of the human/synthesized element? *insert something about Jack Thompson here*
How about horror themed video games? Or horror movies themselves? Would those be considered 'unethical' because it messes with your mind?
I'm just curious
I consider myself as having more ethics than the average. I am a Christian (yeah, hold your slams, that's not the point). I try to live consistent with what Christianity teaches. More than once I have said what I felt needed to be said, even though there was some chance that it might cost me my job. Once I have done what I felt needed done, even though there was some chance that it might cost me my life.
I don't see what's morally or ethically wrong with the experiment, even with a real human subject. I mean, the "victim" isn't actually being shocked, whether the "victim" is human or virtual.
Is the fear that the experiment desensitizes the subject to situations where they are asked to obey a command that they should refuse? But the results indicate that the subject is likely to already be in that state. If properly debriefed at the end of the experiment, the subject is more likely to refuse such a command in the future, rather than less.
So can someone explain to me what's unethical about this?
I was going to make a joke about a virtual Pavlov's Dog but someone already did that. Isn't anything sacred anymore?
I don't play the sims precisely because of the limited and stupid choices you have of how to kill a character.
They could either make it impossible to kill a character ("this is stupid, no matter how much you screw up he doesn't die"), or just make it not fun to kill a character ( not fun)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Hey, surprise! Autonomic responses can't be suppressed by conscious, upper cognitive reasoning. If it could, lie detectors wouldn't exist.
This is a great example of a researcher doing an experiment with zero scientific relevance solely for mainstream press coverage.
(Yes, lie detectors are BS, but the principle upon which they are based would be entirely useless, not just mostly useless.)
This sounds like a training aid for torturers. Attorney General Gonzales ("Mr. Torture Memo") would love this.
Yes, they were told beforehand that they were shocking a computer program. Even so, they felt increased stress levels.
Now, is it still unethical?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
After the heavy desensitation of the past forty years or so
since the first experiment, it would have been interesting to
see whether we did better on the test.
Something I've yet to see discussed is how this will impact perception of 'photoshopped' pornography. Right now it is illegal to possess any form of 'child' pornography (rightfully so) - and there have been some defense attempts to show that the images aren't real- they're photoshopped. But if they affect the brain in the same manner... well, I'm certainly not qualified to judge the ramifications. Perhaps steeper sentences will come about- who knows... ?
And then there's the more obvious- kill or be killed- games that exist. Not to dip into the Matrix "Your mind makes it real" mentality that you see written into laws now adays targeting violent games but there may be some form of truth to that axiom. To some individuals that can not or will not socialize this may provide the tipping point that triggers their anti-social behaviour.
Interesting research. It'll be more interesting to see how the ethic committees respond.
I was talking to a friend on the Sims team about how I played SIMS2, and she said casually - "Oh, you're a builder then" I was intrigued so I asked "what "other" types of players are there?" She said, "Oh, all kinds, but we were really surprised to see how many deviant players there are - you know, the ones that try and find different ways to kill their character." I was a little taken back - in fact, when one of my pregnant Sims died unexpectedly I decided not to save my game, like it never happened.
Of course, if your playing the Sims and killing your characters perhaps your playing the wrong game - might I suggest GTA, Dead Rising or Manhunt?
You had me at merlot
What the heck? I know the Millikan experiment was tough to set up, but torture?
There's a big difference: Since the participants were well aware that the subject was a computer character this experiment seems to be basically about psychological/physiological responses from the participants, while the original experiment was much more interesting as people really believed they were hurting human beings.
That's why the original experiment, IMHO, is so important: because it exposed the risks of "obedience-without-thinking".
But then again, I have little knowledge about the whole thing, so these are just my impressions.
Er Galvão Abbott - IT Consultant and Developer
Do you mean like this guy: Sim Survivor
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
It just reminds me of that guy in the beginning of the game when you just escape and I can't ignore my inner voice going "Pull the switch, Pull the switch". I can't see the day that I will feel remorse for torturing/killing a piece of data. It's fun and stress relieving.
Also, "ouch" and "touché."
But it's not mentioned in the "methodology" section, and I think the paragraph you mention does cast some doubt on the validity of the results:
"For those 12 in the VC who wanted to stop before the end, 5 claimed to be well-acquainted with the original Milgram study, and therefore we cannot rule out the possibility that this influenced their behaviour. However, if we treat 'wanting to stop' as a binary response variable in order to test for differences between the proportions (using binary logistic regression) then the VC was significantly different from the HC (?2 = 6.691 on 1 d.f., P = 0.0097) whereas knowledge of Milgram did not have a significant impact (?2 = 1.525 on 1 d.f., P = 0.22) and there was no interaction effect between group and knowledge of Milgram."
In the first place, this seems a little bit like throwing in a statistical fudge factor, since it does not say in their methodology that they planned to ask about knowledge of Milgram after the experiment, and they seem to have applied this statistical test a posteriori, whereas statistical tests are only valid if the test to be performed is stated in advance.
In the second place, it's all very well to say that five of the subjects "claimed to be well-acquainted" with the Milgram experiment, but that does not take into account the number of subjects that, while not well-acquainted with it, might nevertheless have had some vague or even subconscious knowledge of it. The Milgram study has been around a long time and is practically in the folkways.
There are probably millions of people who would say they knew nothing about John B. Watson's experiments with rats, who nevertheless would be extremely familiar with the idea of running rats through a maze.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I know this is totally off topic, but is it just me or is the Slashdotter Firefox plug-in broken now? On a couple of different machines, when I go to open a thread using the Ajax controls I see a partial page of content (including the Slashdot header bar) for a brief instant, then the whole browser window goes white. The only way to read comments is to disable the extension. Is anyone else seeing this? Or is it possible I have a conflict with some other add-on?
Breakfast served all day!
Well, more people were able to "torture" something they knew was a computer character, than something they thought was a real person. Conclude what you want from this.
And instead of becoming accustomed to the virtual person and ceasing to empathise, many volunteers became more anxious as the study continued. Measures of stress, such as heart rate and sweatiness of palms, increased. These measures are nearly impossible to fake, and confirmed for Slater that the volunteers were actually feeling uncomfortable, rather than performing as they thought the experimenter would expect.
I've got to wonder what the participants' exposure to video games or other "virtual environments" would have on their responses. To a gamer, I'm not sure rapid heart rate, and sweaty palms indicate increased anxiety. They might have just been "getting into the game."
I remember when Half-Life first came out my friend and I spent a lot of time running around beating the innocent bystanders with our crowbars and watching them beg for forgiveness. We weren't doing it because we were sadists, just curious gamers. We'd never seen NPC's react in such a realistic way before, and thought it was "cool". My girlfriend came into the room while we were doing this and was horrified, got really upset and asked us to stop. Not being as avid a gamer, I don't think she was used to dissociating her emotions from video game characters.
I don't think video game violence numbs players to real world violence, but it sure numbs them to video game violence. Seems to me like prior experience would play a major role in your reaction to this experiment.
In something like "GTA," killing the other characters is just another expected part of the game. In "Manhunt," it's damn near the whole point of the game. But it doesn't have the same appeal as when you think you just might be experimenting with aspects of a game that its mainstream players don't, or that the programmers might not have even been prepared for.
It's right up there with "Hot Coffee." The mod wasn't necessarily popular because the crude polygonal dry-humping was all that appealing in itself, but because it was a way to get soemthing out of your copy of "San Andreas" that the next guy wasn't, and see more of your game than the company expected.
If they released an official "47 new ways to kill your Sims Torture Pack," where it really was the focus of the game, it just might not be as appealing as it was.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Whether your "volunteer" has actually harmed someone or not, the psychological trauma is very real. That's the part where they describe the very real stress indicators. For those that don't know, the Nazi's kept free liquor flowing to the guards in the concentration camps. Why did they need liquor? Because of the emotional trauma associated with performing such vile acts on another human being.
It makes me wonder if the human subjects of this experiment truly trusted the statements of those in authority that they were NOT shocking real humans. Was something clicking in the backs of their heads warning them that they may be torturing real humans instead of electronic simulations?
Too bad Philip K. Dick is dead.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
I setup a prison in The Sims once. I blocked everyones door with a desk. Gave them the cot, toilet, and a light. Had to manually move food to their desk. It was fun.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
If the Milgram experiment was unethical how is this one different? They replaced the person who was being fake tortured. The ill effects could still be caused to the person who finds out they are willing to harm someone. The person being replaced was in on it in the first place. Am I missing something? If I'm not I struggle to see how Milgram was unethical.
I did that. It was out of curiosity, not sadism though.
Do those who tortured the character without remorse get offered a job in Gitmo?
Doesn't everyone at least try to play this game in all of the Adventure games they get?
Let's see what happens when we push that stupid git Legolas into the path of the marauding monster?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I'd mod you up if I had points, as this is a very good question. How many people reading of the Milgram experiment have wondered how they would have performed? One hopes one would have been the exception, refusing to be a tool of authority used to harm others. Given the opportunity to participate in a recreation of the experiment, one knows how to perform in order to maintain one's self image as a decent human being.
Loose lips lose spit.
I didn't read the discussion of the paper, but I'm curious if any of this can be attributed to the Uncanny Valley theory.
Since this experiment was performed in the US, maybe the participants were just afraid that if they went too far, they'd be flagged by Homeland Security as possible terrorists. Or, maybe they were afraid that the testers (or other people reviewing the results) would think lowly of them. That would help explain the stress/nervousness.
Ok, so not in the US, but it made a good joke.
A lot subtler than me. I didn't use Sims.
In my opinion, everyone should take part in an experiment like this to learn something about themselves and their capacity to be manipulated by authority.
r iment
It just might reduce the prevalance of sheeple when the real situation arrizes.
People are animals, and are only marginally and inconsistently "civilized" by society. But, as history (and current events) consistently shows, we can't always count on society to do that job. So perhaps educating individuals might help?
Of course, educating certain types of people about how easily the masses can be cowed by authority might be counter productive.
Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Prison_Expe
When people respond to a computer character the same way they would a person or a living thing, it's a sign that people relate a bit too closely to the virtual world.
I hear people talking about TV and movie characters (i.e. actors pretending to be people who don't exist in the first place) as if they are real. People pay real money for virtual goods. However, I've also heard soldiers (particular pilots) compare real combat to video games. It seems like the line between virtual reality and actual reality is pretty dim for some.
But given the amount of time people spend on TV, in front of computers, or playing video games, this is hardly surprising.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Avatars.
When they gave the test to Donald Rumesfeld it took three techs to pry the button out of his hand. They said it was the giggling that was really creepy.
As I understood the article, the point wasn't to see if people will "torture" a virtual character. Based on the Milgram experiments, it's a pretty safe bet that if people will torture and/or kill a real human they'll do it to a virtual character.
The point was to see whether people reacted to torturing a virtual character in a similar enough fashion to how they would react to torturing a human that doing Milgram-like experiments with a virtual "learner" would be valid.
I assume the "unethical" part comes in with respect to ordering people to "torture" and/or "kill" a character as part of academic research (as opposed to as part of playing any of a dozen FPS games.)
I don't really see any ethics problem here myself, but I guess I understand the point of view of people who do, and assume those people don't play violent video games or allow their children to do so (in the unlikely event that they are ethically consistent.)
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
The key difference from the Milgram Experiments that makes this an acceptable experiment is that the subjects know the torture is fake. In the Milgram experiments the setup was that subjects were randomly chosen to be Teacher (adminstering shock) or Learner (recieving shock). In reality the random choice was fixed and the Learner was a paid actor, but the subject (the Teacher) did not know that until after the experiment. A large number of subjects from the Milgram Experiments ended up seriously psychologicly damaged because they found our they could kill if told to by an authority figure. In this experiment, the subjects know the Learner is a virtual character and they are not potentially killing a human being. If you don't read the actual study, it would be easy to compare it to the Milgram Experiments, but the setup is really quite different.
Those silly Sims just can't leave that fire alone. I actually felt guilty. :P
This sounds like a training aid for torturers. Attorney General Gonzales ("Mr. Torture Memo") would love this.
What do you think all the pressure from above on "getting results" and all the memos supporting more "aggressive interrogation methods" served to accomplish?
Quite frankly, anyone who's seem the Milgram Obedience and the Standford Prison experiments shouldn't have been surprised in the slightest when rumors of torture coming out of Guantanimo started and when the reports about Abu Ghraib and Bagram started coming out. It's human nature. It's the natural, expected outcome of this kind of environment, and the unconscionable lack of oversight oriented towards preventing this sort of thing and, worse, the active encouragement of aggressive methods makes the administration directly culpable for torture of captives.
At worst, it's malice; at best, it's utter incompetence or callousness.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yeah, empathy is a bitch. It'd be nice if we could properly contextualize it at will. Then we could just turn it off permanently.
Suck it lusers!
I couldn't find numbers in TFA, so it would be interesting to know if the current subjects were more or less likely to stop the administration of shocks before the "lethal" dosage was applied, compared to the original subjects that delivered shocks to a human actor.
--
$tar -xvf
...when computers have been granted rights, machines will be seeking some pretty heavy compensation for this experiment retroactively. I'd hate to be the grandkids of the experimenters who did this.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I'd bet most of the people would injure themselves clicking the "shock" button.
"It appears you are trying to torture me. Would you like..zzzZZZZZ.zzzz".
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
These subjects have been shown that they are vulnerable to manipulation by authority figures. Perhaps these subjects may be less harmed than their predecessors in the Milgram experiments (because they went into it knowing there wasn't a real flesh-and-blood human suffering pain for their weakness) but they were still shown that weakness within themselves.
Psychology has shown repeatedly that humans must maintain certain illusions about their own "rightness"/"morality"/"humanity" - it's called ego and (according to some schools of psychology) it's one of three fundamental elements of the human psyche. The participants in this type of experiment have been shown to suffer severe damage to their egos - that is, the idealized self-image of who they are. Granted, it may have been necessary to prove that this facet of human behavior is so (once), but that proof came at a fairly high human cost to the test subjects, and there seems to me little justification in harming another group of humans this way merely to confirm that what we already know is still true.
This was the first thing that came to my mind. What are the implications for video games? If video game violence arouses the same psychological responses as real violence, then overcoming inhibitions in video games may lead to the same in real life. I know that's not a popular argument on Slashdot, but it seems to me to be an obvious connection to make.
(Personally, I have experienced the same myself. I would not engage in slave trading in Elite, and I was initially uncomfortable about slaughtering civilians in Age of Empires (I would have preferred an alternative that didn't involve committing war crimes). On the other hand, I had no problem wiping out the dark god's people in Populous.)
Id happly sit all day killing virtual people and have been doing so from my teens, this is a healthy thing and not unhealthy in the slightest!! Its only a pupit!!
An interesting experiment. It's not really news that people can get upset about hypothetical situations, like the torturing of a computer character in the article, but there's a lot of interesting research to be done into the particulars.
As PingSpike said in another post around here somewhere, there are already computer games out there (Dungeon Keeper specifically) which put the player in a situation where they are rewarded for punishing computer characters. Some (most?) people (including me) don't feel good about slapping even imaginary characters in the context of a cartoonish game where the entire point is to be a nefarious villain. But does exposure to this kind of game make people more or less willing to torture imaginary characters? It could plausibly be either way.
.evom ton seod gis eht
Replace the 3D character of Mel Slater with one of actor Christian Slater. Verify that the participants who go immediately for the lethal voltage setting (without even being instructed to do so) are the same individuals who paid $10 to see Alone in the Dark.
They should do a second round of tests. There was a study that I saw on TV where the person was told to say whatever words came on a monitor screen. Words were random like Chair, Car, Field, etc. Then words were inserted in the middle of this like beheading, torture etc. Most people had a reaction (brain waves?) to the violent words but what was interesting was that many kept there 'cool'. In another test, they put subjects in a room and told them in a few minutes they would get some pen and paper and would have to write a 100 words on the worst thing they ever did in there life. A camera was placed in front of them before they would have to start writing (they never actually wrote the paper). While they were waiting the results were almost identical, pulse went up, subjects started sweating, but some did not. I can not remember the number, but remember being shocked by how high the number of these sort of people that exist. It was enough to make me think that I must have encountered one in my life. People free of the encumbrances of guilt about any action and compassion for others can be capable of anything. Anyone else see this show? I think it was about about what makes Psychopaths tick. They do not have to necessarily be a serial killer, I think the study was making the point that these types mixed with emotional and or physical abuse early in life make a lethal combination that many of us think of when we think of psychos.
As soon as I saw an electronic victim I would have just started jamming on the shock button as fast as I could until it died...just as an experiment. I would observe the response from the "authority". I'd note what he'd attribute my seemingly violent and malicious outburst to.
When he asks why I did it. I'll tell him it's the only way I can orgasm. [/Ichi]
I bet that'd throw his results off.
I don't see what is wrong with Milgram either.
Milgram ran at least 20 experiments along this theme. The end result of variations in the base experiment revealed the emotional distance between the "teacher" and the "learner" had a very strong effect on the likeliness to continue. The more dehumanized the learner was, the more readily the teacher went further and further. Conversely, the more empathy the teacher was encouraged to have (say by seeing or directly hearing the learner through an open door instead of a speaker), the less likely they continued.
By demonizing the subject as a criminal, you would definitely observe a higher incidence of going too far. Demonizing your enemies is a central tactic in all societies committing to war for a reason -- it makes it easier to kill the other guy when you don't see him as being the same as you.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If people empathize with computer characters who are tortured, violence in video games, tv, and movies, really should be reined in. If people really relate that closely to virtual reality, it should not be such a sick, violent place.
"The anguish and concern in the subjects is quite obvious. (It is also quite scary how many of them continued zapping the actor, even after all their protests, simply because someone in a lab coat kept repeating "please continue with the experiment protocol".)"
were they paid to participate?
Seriously, I don't see how this is any different from the original experiment, other than the possibility that the data is completely scued due to people's realization that the characters aren't real (although I think the response would probably be similar). The original experiment was deemed unethical because it basically used coersion tactics to trick people into doing things they wouldn't normally do, and later feeling extremely guilty about it. My uncle was a test subject in the experiment, and he was never quite the same afterwards. It's not like he's brain damaged or anything, but his perceptions about who he is have forever been altered because of it.
Why do we insist on trying to repeat the same, ethically disfunctional experiment over and over? I'd like to see what Frued would say about THAT.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Empathizing with things that don't have feelings makes no sense.
Do you give that lecture to every child who hugs her teddy bear?
"S'pose I was to say your house is on fire, what's the first thing you'd try to take out?"
"I reckon I'd take my cat. Cos that shows I've got a warm and considerate nature."
"No, it shows you're the kind of person who tries to work out what the right answer's supposed to be. Untrustworthy."
Over here
Remember, you MUST turn on the blender all the way to 10, you have no choice.
Mirror neurons are neurons that fire in response to what we see someone else experience. The other person picks up a pot, part of our brain that would be needed to pick up the pot fires as well. Pick up a hot pot without protection, and the person screams -- and part of your brain feels the burn. We're hard-wired for sympathy. The computer program is triggering mirror neurons in the human observer. I'd bet the researchers that wrote the computer program would have exhibited some signs of distress at the computer NPC being tortured -- even though they, better than anyone, would know that no human was involved.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Yes, killing badguys is fun but when it comes to physics and the good guy, it can be A LOT OF FUN to just inflict pain on the protaginist.
The scientists in Half-Life instantly come to mind.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Already, some (like William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute) are asking whether even this sanitized experiment is ethical.
The ethical concerns in both the real and virutal experiments appear quite close, as the goal, whether the "victim" is an animated charicature or a human actor screaming as if in pain (or not, as if dead), is to manipulate the emotions of the test volunteer while seeing how far he or she will go in hurting others "in the name of science."
Outside of scientific tests, emotional manipulation of course has a long history, and advertising has always been full of it (no pun intended, but if the shoe fits...). Interesting examples of such strong emotional manipulation are in several of the stories in the book "The Mind's I" by Dennett and Hoftsadter, and there's a controversial example in the UN anti-landmine video at http://stoplandmines.org.
Tag lost or not installed.
Ouch; can you imagine if that law had been upheld? It would have essentially wiped out the entire Anime industry in the USA. When you consider that just about all anime women look about twelve, and then there's at least a nude scene, if not outright sex and rape in your average anime film, then anyone owning anime in the USA would be a felon.
And given the right-wing's propensity for such abuse of power, I fear this may be reality in the USA in a few more years.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It IS unethical, because the simulation was actually being hurt. Unbeknownst to the experimenters, it had achieved intelligence. The physilogical responses of the people administering the shocks is solid evidence that it clearly passed a turing test.
Directly from TFA... "One of those participants claimed to see signs of discomfort in the behaviour of the Learner (even though none had been programmed), and said that he felt uncomfortable continuing with the experiment."
See what I mean?
Some users will learn bad attitudes that translate to meatspace ... but others (possibly more) will enjoy cathartic releases that relieve friends and pets in the environment. This is just the old movies-are-bad, comix-are-bad question.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Some people will do awful things. That's what this experiment tells us, just like Milgram's original one did, and that's something we really need to know and guard against. In this experiment, the people knew what the situation was. If they found out something they didn't want to know about themselves, it's sort of like getting a diagnosis of leukemia. The only way to start on a cure is to see the problem. This experiment is no more unethical that diagnosing an awful disease.
Electroshocking people was not, ostensibly, the point of Milgram's experiment. People were told they were helping the experimenter study learning, so the shocks were in a "higher cause," in the "service of science." Also, those people thought they were giving electroshocks to a real person who was really suffering. Under those conditions, something like 95% of the people kept administering shocks on the experimenter's instructions no matter what seemed to be happening to the supposed "learner."
In this experiment, people knew what the real purpose of the experiment was, and knew that the victim wasn't real. And yet half "considered stopping the study." If they really did stop, that's a huge improvement over 50 years ago.
The kids may be all right.
1. The Milgram experiment was interesting because it placed people in a situation where they know they have a certain moral obligation, then effortlessly overrode that obligation simply by playing with authority figures, the authority of science, and the like. Similarly Zimbardo showed us how people in suitable groups may sometimes do things any single man would be horrified at the mere prospect of. Wonderful, stimulating experiments. Now tell me what it is meant to show, the fact that you might get someone to torture a virtual image, without that moral sanction. That already exists - it's called Grand Theft Auto. Some people play it, some don't.
2. I am definitely not astonished that people react emotionally to virtual images of suffering. People also react emotionally to love stories and are scared by halloween slashers. At best you might demonstrate - as this seems to - that many people are quite able to impose agency upon non-agents. Again, we already know that. People often react with distress to someone kicking an Aibo dog.
3. In any case, I don't see how social scientists or philosophers would be fascinated by any results that might emerge from such simulated research. Certainly the next Hannah Arendt isn't going to be dazzled.
I wonder if the original experiments are what inspired the "Saw" series of movies.
"We're hard-wired for sympathy. "
Hmmm. Let's see. "Yo mama's so fat and old that when God said "Let there be Light", he told her to move her fat ass out of the way. Yo mama's so fat, a picture of her fell off the wall!" I don't think it works chief.
"You just need someone who is an apparent authority to guide them and absolve them while they're doing it."
Slashdot says it's OK to violate copyright. So go ahead.
"By demonizing the subject as a criminal, you would definitely observe a higher incidence of going too far. Demonizing your enemies is a central tactic in all societies committing to war for a reason -- it makes it easier to kill the other guy when you don't see him as being the same as you."
RIAA/MPAA,Microsoft,SCO,etc.
No simulation can ever fully duplicate studies. Ethics is to science is what gasoline is to somebody's lawn.
I would like to see those truly backwards activists live without everything that was tested on animals or humans.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Conversation on this story is long over, but it's never too late to post some actual facts about the study. I. Rates of obedience. Milgram did several replications of his original experiment. His obedience rates hovered around 65%. In the one experiment he did comparing men to women, similar obedience rates were found (Experiment 8, Milgram, 1974). In a survey of 14 replications by other researchers, Blass (2000) reported that obedience rates varied from a low of 28% to a high of 91%. It is interesting that posters familiar with these studies tended to overestimate obedience rates (claiming in the high 90s). Research has shown that invididuals *unfamiliar* with the studies tend to *underestimate* obedience rates, often by an order of magnitude. For example, Milgram polled a group of 40 Yale psychologists unfamiliar with his studies; the predicted rate of obedience was 0.125% (Milgram, 1963). II. History of the research. Both the summary and the source article claim that research using Milgram's paradigm has ceased for over 40 years. This is incorrect. The review of research by Blass (2000) reports on replications as late as 1985 (Schurz, 1985). In a brief search I wasn't able to find more recent replications, but they could well be out there. Blass found no significant changes in obedience rates over time in the years from Milgram's original research through 1985. It's strange that this paper made it through review with such a glaring factual error. Moreover, their command of the literature on obedience seems quite superficial and beneath what I was able to glene simply from Blass's review (2000) (which, obviously, I'm making heavy use of here). III. Ethicality of the research. Both the summary and the source blandly claim that this research is no longer possible on ethical grounds. What these ethical grounds are supposed to be, however, is not clear. I think the strangest part of the lore surrounding this experiment is our reflexive acceptance that this research is wrong. With a bit of thought, I think it becomes clear that this research is actually quite acceptable. 1) Harm? The primary objection to this research is that obedient subjects may be harmed in some way by learning that they are willing to murder on command. There is no empirical evidence for this claim. Milgram conducted follow-up interviews with many subjects--most were grateful to have participated in the study. He wrote that the tension produced was below that produced by watching a good horror movie. As far as I know, none of Milgram's many subjects (several hundred, I believe) cam forward then or now with claims of adverse effects. Moreover, it seems likely that participating in this experiment would produce more benefit than harm. After all, this type of insight into your behavior could well help you avoid destructive obedience in the future. 2) Potential gains. In determining the ethicality of a research proposal, the potential harm to subjects is always weighted, to some extent, against the potential gains from the research. For example, we often let terminally ill patients try experimental and risky drugs/procedures because the potential gains outweigh the risks. Of course, potential gains can only bear a moderate weight (shouldn't create genius killer sharks to cure Alzheimers!). But we routinely allow volunteers to risk taking experimental drugs in clinical trails, even for non-threatening medical conditions (viagra. Thus, it seems we are willing to tolerate small levels of risk even for relatively small gains. Now consider that Milgram's research was specifically designed to understand the roots of genocidal behavior. His experiments were conducted after WWII; he was interested to know if mere obedience was sufficient to induce murder or if some mental or social disorder was also required (as was commonly hypothesized about the perpetrators of the Holocaust). This is not just an academic point. Over 100 million+ died in genocide in the 20th century (see the work of RJ Rummel,
We are like dwarfs falling from the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more dazzling, than they did,
Do you believe that violence and cruelty in entertainment and video games is OK if people think the characters are real? What entertainment value is there in watching people suffer or get killed? What can possibly be learned? Watching a virtual character die will not improve your ability to comprehend the border between life and death.
Are you autistic? Is this all theory to you? Empathy that can be controlled can be ignored. The humanization of objects is not dangerous - the dehumanization of people is.
It seems to me that what's really being tested here and in the original Milgram experiments is the strength of the average person's moral objection to doing harm to others, which is assumed to be very strong indeed. Perform another experiment that involves the "teacher" subject giving the researcher a dollar every time the "learner" fails to answer the question properly, and see how far that goes. I imagine the contrasting results will give a pretty strong indication of the relative weight the average person puts on the suffering of others.
And as an aside, how interesting that the word I'm asked to identify in order to post this is "electro".
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Reminds me of the USA's projection of 'not the USA'?
Reminds me of everbody's projection of "not one of us."
Every culture has a superiority bias; some just have louder voices or act more strongly on them.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I put him in a glass box in the front yard, myself.
Attired as a mime I hope.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?