Thursday, December 21, 2006

Classic 1960's obediency experiment

reproduced in virtual reality
Scientists have recreated Milgram’s classic obediency psychology
experiment using virtual reality. Back in the 1960s Stanley Milgram
appeared to show that student participants would obey a
researcher and administer lethal electric shocks to a stranger, but
the studies have not been replicated because of ethical concerns.
Now Mel Slater at UCL and colleagues have tested participants’
willingness to administer electric shocks to a computer animated
woman in a virtual reality environment.

Twenty-three participants donned a virtual reality headset and

tested the computerised woman on a word memory task. Each time
she responded incorrectly they were instructed to administer an increasingly large
shock to her. The woman was clearly unreal, but she responded to the pain of the
shocks, for example at one point she said she had never agreed to this and didn’t
want to continue.

Although the participants knew the woman was unreal, six of them chose to stop the
experiment before it was due to end on the woman’s 20th incorrect response. A
further 6 said it had occurred to them to stop early because they had negative
feelings about what was happening. By contrast, of eleven participants who
completed a control experiment in which they only interacted with the (unseen)
woman by text, just one chose to stop the experiment early, and no others said it
had occurred to them to stop.

There was further evidence that the participants who could see and hear the
computerised woman were affected by the experiment as if it were real. Their
stress responses were raised (as judged by sweating and heart rate) compared with
the 11 control participants. And on those trials in which the woman protested, the
participants tended to give her longer to answer before administering the shock.
Some participants emphasised the correct answer among the available choices, as if
trying to help the woman avoid a shock.

“Humans tend to respond realistically at subjective, physiological, and behavioural

levels in interaction with virtual characters notwithstanding their cognitive certainty
that they are not real”, the researchers said. The findings suggest immersive virtual
reality environments could be a vital tool for social psychologists, especially for
pursuing research of extreme social situations.

Slater, M., Antley, M., Davison, A., Swapp, D., Guger, C., Barker, C., Pistrang, N. &
Sanchez-Vives, M.V. (2006). A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience
Experiments. PLOS ONE, 1, e39 (open access).

Editor's note - published just a few days ago, this study is from the very first issue of open access
publisher PLOS' brand new general science journal PLOS ONE.