I was going to save this entry for a bit down the line, but the idea is there- so hey why not? It is strange though, to both oscillate and vacillate between ideas, and having ideas, or having an abundance of different ideas that contradict one another, and then having none at all and suddenly feeling completely uninspired. That’s a long, poorly structured sentence and I hope you had a lot of trouble reading it. I was terrible for long sentences in high-school and an awful speller, but I was good at English. Not great, good. Megan Johnstone was great, where ever she is now, with her radiant fire-red hair. I remember her eyelashes being almost translucent, which always seemed so exotic to me. But she was excellent at English, how could I forget with Mrs. Young continually singing out her praises? With Mrs. Young (the English teacher whom taught the hard English and was a hard marker) we did – what it’s called- with Piggy, the conch, “got the fruits” and the children that go feral? Oh that’s right, Lord of the Flies. I remember her saying Golding wrote it in response to The Coral Island where the children are basically Christian angels (or something) and live in an unrealistic harmony. Golding had issues though, I wish they taught us that in high-school.
More recently a story resurfaced of six Tongan children who did get stranded in on an island, the 2020 Guardian headline read: “The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months). The Tongan boys were discovered by Australian sailor Peter Warner in 1966, a good decade or so after the first publication of Lord of the Flies in 1954. The key take away from this was that the boys didn’t take their isolation from civilisation/community as the opportunity to descend into depravity -or as Golding would have you believe- show the true nature of humanity.
The Tongan boys worked together as a team and it was their ability to cooperate that allowed them to survive (read the Guardian article for details). Look if you haven’t read Lord of the Flies, this whole blog has inadvertently turned into a spoiler so- suck it up – or stop reading. Okay, so, in Golding’s universe kids love violence and love to kill (kinda). I remember being disturbed by the murder of Piggy and even how Mrs. Young’s dulcet voice carried across the classroom as she described the movement of the ocean after Piggy falls to his death:
Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and
pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy
was gone.
Golding had negatively shaped my teenage understanding of human nature, a sentiment echoed by the author of the Guardian article, Rutger Bregman. I planned to move on from talking about Golding and wax lyrical about some of other things we covered in English like:
Hamlet – The procrastinator.
Animal Farm – “Two legs bad, four legs good” and “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. /Maybe communism isn’t that bad?
The Piano – We studied movies too, great soundtrack by Michael Nyman- I learnt the first four bars of The Heart Asks Pleasure First.
The Lord of the Rings – Smallest person can make a difference.
The Great Gatsby – Before the DiCaprio film, a vague memory of Mrs. Young saying the colour yellow meant corruption.
And I was also going to make commentary about what gets accepted in curriculum, the politics, the cultural impacts and how formative high-school literature ended up being. But here we are stuck talking about Lord of the Flies, still. Actually this blog was going to be based on a Reddit thread about how English is not a super absorber like I claimed in my first entry (I’ll get back to that another time). Because when I re-read (skimmed) Bregman’s article two things had changed since I first encountered it: 1) I now have a little bit of knowledge of the history of psychology and 2) there are open acts of genocide currently being committed.
Bregman takes a more optimistic look at what it means to be human, which in 2020 perhaps was an optimism I was willing to share. He accounts some of the bleakness of Lord of the Flies coming out from the horrors of the Second World War and the inescapable question of that generation (to quote Bregman):
Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?
So we are kinda coming full circle with this, because how psychology is practiced today is based around this very same existential conundrum. The Boulder Conference, 1949 (taking place in Boulder, Colorado) was in reaction to the despondent soldiers returning from war (we now call this PTSD) and the once unimaginable horrors of Nazi Germany. How do we explain the cold-hearted precision, the blind obedience and the complete and perfect destruction of the understanding (or fallacy, conjecture really) that to be moral, is to be human?
Maybe the most important thing you need to know is that the Boulder Conference was the initiation of the Scientist-Practitioner model. This model operates under the central paradigm that the psychologist is both the scientist and the practitioner. The science part is mostly to do with stats, and funny little experiments.
A note on statistics:
As a prospective student I often heard things like “the statistics will get you” or “they weed them (vulnerable first years) out with stats”. Don’t get me wrong, I like stats, I even enjoyed coding in R. Heck, I think they should teach us more of the complex mathematical equations behind the statistics. Because it kind of feels like you’re baking a cake without recipe when you do stats in psych. But maybe we’ll get back to stats and the issues with psychologists using stats poorly (p-hacking, etc) and the subsequent replication crisis another time. God I wish I didn’t give up on studying math post high-school.
A note on the empirical method:
As a first year psych student you start off by learning the empirical method, the history of sciences and science theory. And this continues throughout your undergrad (at least this is true for The University of Adelaide). Maybe you’re interested to know the foundations of this methodology, maybe you’re not? It doesn’t matter much for now but I’ll list them below anyway:
Principles of the scientific method
1. Empiricism
2. Experimentation
3. Mathematisation
4. Mechanical philosophy
5. Institutionalisation
But does being a good scientist make you a good psychologist? There is issue with the Scientist-Practitioner model, the empirical method, its epistemology and its endeavor to find “universal truths”. One obvious reason being that, much like how semantics is situated firmly within cultural context, so is psychology.
My notes from the level III course Psychology, Science and Society (I think this is verbatim Dr. Peta Callaghan’s lecture on the archival turn of social psychology in the 1950/60s):
….Mainstream psychologists assumed that they could conduct experiments and provide universal insights into human behaviour. But in reality they were revealing very specific insights into north American culture.
Note: I guess I am predominately talking about this historical mainstream psychology. Psychology does have different approaches and methodologies. It has more recently been capable of soul searching, deep reflection (reflexivity) and cultural sensitivity. However from what I can observe much of the archaic ideology, like psychologist being a “godlike” observer conducting “impeccable” scientific experiments, is still deeply rooted in its practice. This is my experience from a student’s perspective, I am going to take a reflexive moment here and acknowledge that, perhaps this view is consequence of my education and the act of learning the history and theory of something without the practice of it (I don’t even see a psychologist!). How can my impression not be skewed? With this caveat in mind, lets move forward and onwards to talk about what we have to talk about the Milgram experiments.
Milgram’s obedience studies (1963, 1965, 1974), it is important to note, occurred at a time when adopting ethics into psychological research was a very loose practice. This is somewhat of a golden-era of research where you could do psychologically damaging experiments to try and uncover the truth about human nature (jokes)- see, Robbers Cave and the Standford Prison experiment. You have probably heard about these studies, they’re pretty famous and will undoubtedly remain so, as this is research that can never again be repeated (ethic codes have improved substantially). Milgram’s experiments were conducted in the aftermath of WII, the Nuremberg trails, and the defense that “I was just doing what my superior ordered me to do”.
A very quick summary of the obedience studies:
1. Naive participant ( the Teacher) was recruited to administer electric shocks to who they believed to be another naive participant.
2. The participant receiving the shocks (the Learner) was actually a confederate, pretending to be hurt (no actual electric shocks were administered).
3. The Teacher delivers shocks increasing by 15 volts every time the Learner produces an incorrect response (with voice recorded cries of pain and pleas to stop).
4. Researcher gives a series of scripted demands (standardised prods) to encourage the electrocution of the confederate, such as “the experiment requires you to continue” and “you have no other choice you must go on”.
Results
Milgram found that 66% of participants “obediently” administered the maximum and potentially fatal shocks of 450 volts.
From this he came up with the rudimentary theory about ‘Agentic State’, whereby there is an internal shift in the individual and the “person entering authority system no longer sees himself acting out of his own purpose but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person” (Milgram, 1974).
Issues
Why is this theory rudimentary? Well firstly, it kinda ignores the social, cultural and political influences of the time, e.g like brainwashing and propaganda. It also seems like a cop out. More pertinently there are issues with the experiments. Although we can’t repeat this research, what we are able to do is a retrospective discourse analysis. Okay, I wish I hadn’t gone over my notes because now I am basically reconstructing the course material here. But it is fascinating. Simply, what discourse analysis (see Michael Foucault) allows us to do is go over the archival data (transcripts of the experiments) and examine how in reality the Teachers were continually objecting to the commands of the researcher. From my notes:
– The discourse analysis countered the standard story of obedience to authority.
-Original research neglected to pay attention to language and social interaction in this experiment and psychology as whole (and the relationship between researcher and participant).
-Highlights the important role of qualitative methods, reevaluates previously taken-for-granted assumptions about how research should be done and the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from research findings.
Also I think I remember that participants were paid, and potentially homeless and mostly male? But I have to double-check that. Let’s get back to why we started talking about this. Does this research help us understand what it means to be human? More theoretical explanations for this behaviour is Nissani ‘s (1990) theory stating human’s have limited cognitive capabilities, i.e. cannot tell good from bad (people are dumb) and Russel (1990) banging on about autonomous denial, which surely must relate in some way to cognitive dissonance. What do I think? In truth I don’t know what to think anymore. Maybe people are just dumb. Or maybe we can’t ignore the context in which a phenomena occurs. Or maybe like the bystander effect, or a crowd mentality– people love to diffuse responsibility at any chance they get. Maybe Golding is bloody right. However, none of these answers make any of it justifiable.
What I can say is the idea of the superiority of quantitative research permeates much of psychological theories, and the value of qualitative methodologies is gaining traction.
PS. I actually should talk about Robbers Cave because that is pretty much the Lord of the Flies in action.
PPS. I am not going to re-name the blog
Limited Words 