Milgram and Kitty Genovese

The Milgram experiments, discredited or not, are still highly relevant in lectures about ethics, ethical design of experiments, and informed consent.

Not my field, but I believe that ‘The Bystander Effect’ inspired by the debunked Genovese case (according to the New Yorker link you’ve posted, there were indeed a couple of bystanders but the number was a far cry from thirty!) has also been replicated experimentally by psychologists.

… whereas I have always thought that the subjects’ belief (that the experimenters would surely not tell them to do something terrible) turned out to be true (nobody was hurt, even if they believed otherwise for a while), so the lesson might be that obeying a responsible authority is not too bad an idea after all.

There’s nothing at the Gina Perry link to suggest the Milgram experiment has been discredited…?

Maybe this is a better link, sorry. And maybe ‘debunking’ is the wrong word, I have to admit I am not sure what it means. Anyway — the point is that there were lots of methodological problems, that the 65% occurs in just one of many variations, that the subjects said they suspected what was going on, and that in over half the 24 variations of the script 60% disobeyed the instructions.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/10/02/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments/#.VCJKXxaf5YA

Even if both were completely debunked, that wouldn’t mean that the conclusions are untrue, and i know there’s good experimental evidence of bystander effect. What I am curious about is how teaching changes (and how fast) in response to this new knowledge — remember, the student rehearsed the original, clearly false, Genovese story for her test.

I do think it’s interesting that Aussie women are less obedient than Aussie men. There must be some way for me to profit from that information. Something to think on. Also I once saw a T.V. movie about Milgram’s experiment staring William Shatner.

I enjoy mentioning these results to my (Aussie) students. But they line up so neatly with national stereotypes that it’s hard not to be a little suspicious…

What Protogaras said. Numerous replications. Don’t throw around the word “discredited” lightly.

Interesting that Perry focuses on the level of variation in Milgram’s replications. There’s been some work recently, by Alex Haslam (U Queensland) and others, which lets Milgram’s reported levels of compliance stand but queries his interpretation, saying he understated the role of pro-social motivations such as the desire to co-operate generally.

But I’m quite suspicious of any claim that Milgram’s been capital-D Debunked, end of story, we don’t need to worry about him any more. I told an older & wiser friend of mine once how I’d read a paper* that called Milgram’s results into question on different grounds again, arguing that it wasn’t a scientific demonstration of obedience to authority so much as a demonstration of obedience to the authority of science, or words to that effect. She said she’d told students about the study many times over the years, and every class’s first reaction was to find a way to dismiss the results – not question or qualify**, but dismiss utterly as totally irrelevant to us here now. Because the thought that those results might be relevant to us here now… no.

*By the literary critic Steven Marcus, fwiw.
**Which to these eyes looks what Gina Perry has done. The book looks really interesting, but I think it’s being oversold.

I was hoping that Perry had debunked Milgram, but her critique seemed more discrediting than debunking.

Criminology textbooks, I’m happy to say, are a bit more cautious about “Broken Windows” – the totally discredited but still popular theory that environmental disorder leads (by a roundabout route) to higher crime. If you look at the original article, it was only ever a thought experiment – the authors presented it as a common-sensical account of the Kind of Thing that Happens – and it wasn’t so much debunked as prebunked. The authors float the idea that cleaning the place up may reduce crime, but withdraw it and settle for the idea that it will reduce fear of crime, which (they argue) is an objective worth pursuing even if the actual rate of crime increases. The association between environmental disorder and fear of crime, meanwhile, has been studied and has been debunked, multiple times. None of this stops students vectoring it back to me as if it were the results of an empirical study.

Since there are several cases like this that have become entrenched as tools to vividly exemplify a claim in academic education and research it would be very useful to have a website dedicated to them. I’m thinking of something like snopes.com but more rigorous and targeted at helping teachers with what the case, given the best available evidence now, can and cannot be used to exemplify. If a vivid study that purported to prove a mechanism X has been discredited, but the mechanism X has been verified elsewhere, then the site could suggest other ways to vividly exemplify the mechanism.

“I … comme Icare” – great film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_gnsEdUCg

All that stuff about the harm to Milgram’s career reminded me of this paragraph (and a similar ones) from a Salon article the other day:

“From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, led an experiment exposing 88 cancer patients, poor and mostly black, to whole body radiation, even though this sort of treatment had already been pretty well discredited for the types of cancer these patients had. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. They were simply told they would be getting a treatment that might help them. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation. Nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, loss of appetite, and mental confusion were the results. A report in 1972 indicated that as many as a quarter of the patients died of radiation poisoning. Dr. Saenger recently received a gold medal for “career achievements” from the Radiological Society of North America.”

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/04/10_of_the_most_evil_medical_experiments_in_history_partner/

Oh, I just thought of a snappy punchline! Too bad Milgram didn’t have the foresight to arrange a contract with the Pentagon like that guy! Or something.

Sorry for the redundancy as the Monster Study is listed in godoggo’s Salon article.

In a meeting recently, discussing how to get the press to report better on educational research, one very eminent scholar said “well, at least nobody knows anything about educational research, so we’re not in the position of the people doing research on diet — where the press reports that eggs are bad for you, and then they’re good for you, and then they’re bad for you, and you can’t have coffee with bacon but then you can have coffee with bacon and in the end the public are sensible enough not to believe anything they read”. Except… people still seem to believe what they read.

32: Nutrition journalism is totally worthless, hopefully the quality of the teaching in nutrition science programs is somewhat better.

Phil @ 18

Re. the chronology in your source: My husband was a psychology minor thirty years ago, and would be quite surprised to hear that at that time there was any need for Milgram’s “rehabilitation.”

Signing on with 34. There was a powerful racist and anti-urban political sentiment that the Genovese narrative reenforced, which was a big factor in how far and fast it spread and how persistent it’s been over the years.

I don’t think the Milgram experiment is quite analogous in that respect.

bianca – I haven’t actually read the paper, so I’m not taking any position on its veracity. But the abstract I quoted doesn’t say anything either way about Milgram’s standing thirty years ago.

We’re always revising our stories, and generational re-telling of stories is akin to a game of telephone or rumour.

The re-telling itself ought to be subject to narrative analysis and examination. The re-telling — particularly the age-old academic tradition of applying allegedly critical method to the de-bunking of the myth — is surely as motivated as the original impulse to make the legend fact, and print the legend.

The Milgram experiments, or the Kitty Genovese case, or any number of other legendary incidents, are important because they challenge us emotionally and philosophically, and precisely because they challenge us in our embrace of certain primitives, we divide ourselves in ambivalent reactions that make us want the story to accommodate our prejudices, and, at the same time, we want the story to conform to the dramatic conventions that make it memorable and meaningful to begin with.

We recently had a thread that turned on recalling the Nazi persecution and killing of Jews and other civilians during World War II, and the emotional impact that the confirmation of that activity — particularly the dramatic photographs of the concentration camps taken when the camps were overrun or discovered by Allied troops — had on the world, on Allied conceptions of their war aims, etc.

It was pointed out in that thread that the infamous photographs were of prisoners in “concentration camps”, which scholars distinguish from the “extermination camps”, where the industrialized mass killing took place (and which had been demolished before the end of the war.) The photographs — of emaciated prisoners and corpses piled up like cordwood — have a dramatic impact and “truth” to them. What is the point of introducing that distinction as a contradiction? “These aren’t the death camps — this isn’t the holocaust.” Is it to establish truth? Or, to escape it?

The OP was about a film made about the concentration camps at the end of WWII with the aim of confronting the German population with the gross inhumanity of their conduct as a body politic, forcing them to “see” the “truth”, and there was some back and forth in the thread about whether the Germans could be said to be “aware” of what was going on in the concentration camps before the end of the war, or of the extermination policies.

Denial is a basic human capacity — maybe so basic to politics that it could be termed a political instinct. Every story, whose dramatic elements make it memorable, emotionally resonant and morally meaningful necessarily packs a lot of detail away out of sight, and it can be unpacked in re-telling, the additional details — documented or merely imagined — teased out to suggest different, revised meaning to the audience, even as the re-telling, itself, builds a myth or erodes the emotional impact into ritual and cliché.

Narrators have purposes and motivations: they want to instruct their audience, I suppose, but they also want an audience. The spirit of “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” is the spirit that sells newspapers, but it reflects a demand that shapes the story as much as the motivations of the narrator.

The old joke about the classical scholar, who, after a decade of laboring in obscurity, mounted the podium at a conference to great anticipation, to announce that he had established beyond doubt that the Iliad had not been composed by the legendary Homer, but by another ionic Greek poet of the same name, suggests that revisionism is built into the enterprise, that the pursuit of trivial detail becomes an end in itself.

But, revisionism is also built into the ever-increasing distance we have to the past, and the ever-increasing volume of the past in relation to the present. Our stories multiply and we have to squeeze them down, crowd them out. The Milgram experiment had its initial impact in the shadow of the authoritarian politics that produced WWII and its horrors. The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno et alia, was still social science at its most ambitious. That generation had seen Armageddon; they could afford their realism.

Now, we are in the shadow of Dr Pangloss’ neoliberal nightmare, a brittle story of wilful optimism; the epitome of social science is an economics that is clearly wrong about everything and lies about the rest. Our weary cynicism weighs heavily, as we pretend that the costs of coping will be small, as we labor to avoid the Armageddon looming ahead; we cannot afford realism. (Did I just switch comment threads? Ooops!)

21: “Broken Windows” is another good example along the same lines. I also second 23:
“Since there are several cases like this that have become entrenched as tools to vividly exemplify a claim in academic education and research it would be very useful to have a website dedicated to them.”

Generally anybody teaching philosophy or sociology of science might want to spend some time discussing these cases.

If the Genovese case is still being taught as Rosenthal’s version, a full 38 people witnessing a gruesome crime and doing absolutely nothing because they didn’t want to get “involved” (the only version I knew, as passed on by Phil Ochs’s A Small Circle of Friends, until a few years ago), it does raise the question not much addressed here. Why? There has been a fair amount of press about the actual situation, as described persuasively in trial testimony and other evidence, that it makes the Genovese case hardly emblematic of anything. Some people did stuff to help (it is indisputable that Mosley was scared away by one, someone called an ambulance, one went to comfort her), some, of weaker disposition, did not. It seems unsupported that there were 38 witnesses.

In addition, the subsequent social research on when people will help others doesn’t suggest any general indifference among members of the public to help those in distress, but rather calculations made based on the apparent need for intervention and the dangers involved in it.

You’d think that a bunch of PhD’s could at least get the facts right. I think that the Genovese story was fundamentally an anti-urban tale — how impersonal the big city is. My guess is that the problem here is that that is the default view of most Americans. This stuff happens, but it wouldn’t in their little town. And professors are not immune to such simple-minded default schemes.

Milgram did not get the same result of 65% obedience in every experimental run. Milgram varied the experimental conditions, and then observed a varying rate of obedience. This seems to show that Milgram identified something like a mechanism of obedience. (The closer the subject was to the “victim” the lower the obedience rate.) The variation of the obedience rate is evidence in favor of Milgram’s account of obedience. It does not debunk Milgram.
Milgram’s deceptive manipulation of experimental subjects is hard to replicate today. If Milgram mistreated experimental subjects, this does not refute his results.

Phil,

I’m not sure what you’re saying. Does “over the past 20 years, there has been a gradual rehabilitation of Milgram’s work and reputation,” have a different interpretation than that around 1991, Milgram’s reputation was around its nadir, and probably had been low for a long time? Thirty years ago is 1984, only seven years before that. Maybe there’s documentation in the paper (which neither of us have access to) for the history. Or maybe it’s based on the consensus at the writer’s own university. Possibly “reputation” should be amended to “reputation in the UK” or wherever. But I see no way of sanely contending that the abstract doesn’t make claims about what qualified people believed in the years just before 1991 or so.

Incidentally, my memory of being taught/having read about this is that the argument relied on there being absolutely no browbeating of the subjects. “The experiment is flawed but it’s important to teach this lesson, even if anybody who reads about the experiment can see it doesn’t teach a clear lesson,” is odd, and this seems like an expensive way of going about teaching it.

bianca – I think the main thing I’m saying is that there’s no point arguing about the abstract of a paper neither of us has read. The paper may be completely wrong about Milgram’s reputation, or it may not. I just thought it was interesting that somebody writing in a journal seems to have cast doubt on Milgram’s debriefing practices.

Bruce:

It was pointed out in that thread that the infamous photographs were of prisoners in “concentration camps”, which scholars distinguish from the “extermination camps”, where the industrialized mass killing took place (and which had been demolished before the end of the war.) The photographs — of emaciated prisoners and corpses piled up like cordwood — have a dramatic impact and “truth” to them. What is the point of introducing that distinction as a contradiction? “These aren’t the death camps — this isn’t the holocaust.” Is it to establish truth? Or, to escape it?

I grew up with the vague impression that the Nazis had places called concentration camps in which they killed Jews, and that Dachau and Belsen were two examples. I’m sure lots of other people grew up with similar confused ideas. It’s a confusion that plays into the hands of Holocaust revisionists – who make great play of the fact that many of the best-known concentration camps weren’t death camps, using it to imply that the rest weren’t either. So yes, it’s very much to establish truth.

Saying that those pictures from the liberation of Belsen and other western camps – emaciated prisoners and corpses piled up like cordwood – weren’t part of the Holocaust doesn’t in any way lessen the reality of how bad they were. On the contrary, it says that the Nazis were guilty of these appalling crimes against humanity and of even worse things.

NOBODY has talked about the main question I asked — how quickly does teaching change in response to changes in the science.

Not quite true. In the case of one famous and influential argument in criminology (as I said above) it probably didn’t take more than a decade for textbooks to start pointing students to the debunkings – the better class of textbook, at least. There’s still a bit of “teach the controversy” going on, but that’s probably unavoidable in a discipline with one foot in public policy – “Broken Windows” has been insanely influential out there in the real world.

Phil, I didn’t realize that was the same study, but I see you’re right — the quote I posted above is from Haslam.

What I find most interesting about Haslam’s research is what it suggests — or serves to confirm — regarding the esteem in which people held science/the scientific, the belief that the advancement of scientific knowledge was a social good that trumped other concerns, etc.

“The old joke about the classical scholar, who, after a decade of laboring in obscurity, mounted the podium at a conference to great anticipation, to announce that he had established beyond doubt that the Iliad had not been composed by the legendary Homer, but by another ionic Greek poet of the same name”
I was about to confidently correct the writer by pointing out that this was a Woody Allen joke about Shakespeare, but a fortuitous check turned up proof that the quip dates from 1860, has been said about a number of writers, and was used by Twain, Chesterton, and Huxley, among others. A cautionary tale.

“But the majority of Americans no longer live in small towns, rather in cities and/or their suburbs and exurbs. The impersonality-of-the-big-city theme might have been a default view several decades ago, but I’m not sure it still is.”

Perceptions like that have sometimes tangential relationships to any reality. The majority of Americans, for example, live in suburbs – suburbs which they pretend to themselves are small towns. This is not a trivial perception for many Americans – if you suggest that what they prefer to perceive as their small independent town is really a suburb dependent on the nearby major city, do not be surprised if they vociferously object. This has a huge impact on American politics.

Keep your eyes peeled and observe how American suburbs are designed.

For another example, look at the hold the ideal of “the country” has in the English imagination. It’s been a very long time indeed since the majority of English citizens have really lived in truly rural areas (130-150 or more years at this point), but the “country” imagery still has an extremely powerful hold over huge swathes of English urban planning, architecture, fashions, education, policies around crime and so on.

Well, I see burritoboy had covered much the same territory I did, in #59 which I had not noticed when I wrote #60. I pretty much agree with him.

Come to think of it, they still teach psychoanalysis.

To expand this discussion beyond science and social science research, which focuses more or less on the present (whether eternal or ephemeral present)…. How about claims routinely made about past societies studied in the context of the humanities? Classicists (for instance) constantly hear or read mischaracterizations of ancient Mediterranean societies even by learned colleagues in other fields (and don’t get me started on the U.S. English AP tests, which promote readings of Aristotle’s Poetics from several centuries ago). Or, take the ongoing assumption that there are no Indians left in the eastern U.S (not true, of course). The list is obscenely long. Sometimes misinformation/misunderstanding persists due to simple, honest ignorance — none of us can keep up with all the expertise in all fields — but often it persists because of the ideological work it does. I had occasion once to challenge Edward Said about his treatment of Aeschylus’ Persians in Orientalism (a book I highly respect, on the whole, and Said was a man and a scholar whom I highly respect still). He was apologetic about using that play in a rhetorical strategy of “starting with the Greeks” (an old way of doing things, of course, and a problematic one — as he recognized). “The Greeks” as origin does a lot of ideological work quickly, efficiently. But our understanding of Greeks and the past, and thus of our present and potential futures, thereby also suffers.

David in NY, do you mean that Kitty G’s murder didn’t happen in a city because it happened in Queens (and not, e.g., in Manhattan) or because it happened in a neighborhood (which is, of course, how city-dwellers experience their lives, whether living in Queens or Manhattan)?

Reading Whorf’s wiki page is fascinating. What an interesting person. And his little brother directed the Beverley Hillbillies!

I found <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/cmns/courses/2012/801/1-Readings/Nicholson%20Shocking%20Masculinity%20Stanley%20Milgrim%20Obedience.pdf"this which is interesting especially because I was wondering last night how propensity to obey in the Milgram experiment might possibly correlate with the subject’s score on the Kohlberg “moral maturity” test, given the gender discrepancies in results. It’s possible to tell a story where men who score highly on the test are more moral–the official version–and so would ignore what the authority figure was saying to them. But if women, who generally score lower on the test, are more likely to ignore the authority figure, that would suggest Gilligan was right that the test wasn’t measuring what it was supposed to be, for women at least. Because it’s also possible that obeying authority is associated with the same traits that lead to a high score on the test. Obeying authority in an impersonal social structure is associated with maturity for men, in our society, after all, in something of the same way paying attention to the social group is associated with maturity for women.

I see there’s something here but the strong correlation between disobedience in the experiment, high scores on Kohlberg’s test, and participation in the 1964 Free Speech Movement might suggest something else is going on.

Meredith — apologize for lack of specificity, but JanieM interprets correctly — the “story” — 38 people ignoring a woman in mortal distress — didn’t happen at all. But, as I keep trying to point out, there must be some reason that story won’t die, or is dying very slowly even among people we consider well-informed. And my hypothesis is that there’s a general, underlying assumption among Americans that cities are really bad places, where you are alone among strangers who would not come to your aid if you needed it.

And if I’m right that these zombie stories keep coming back because they are in line with unstated assumptions about society generally, I confess I’m not sure about the Milgrim situation. While Milgrim’s work may have been discredited in some ways — primarily ethically, but maybe others — I’m not sure that it has a “story” like the Genovese story that has been discredited. The take-away from Milgrim that I got was the view that large numbers of well-meaning people are unwilling to question authority, even when authority tells us to do something obviously harmful to others. That is, we are all (or most of us) potentially concentration camp guards.

This story (my own derived from the popular press of several decades ago) is an extrapolation from the actual Milgrim experiments. The actual experiments (I gather, having not done significant reading about them) may better be read as raising more subtle questions about the kind of persuasion, short of military or totalitarian discipline, that are sufficient to convince people to commit acts that are obviously harmful to others. I guess my conclusion is that it’s not clear that Milgrim’s conclusions were wrong in the first place (as the Genovese story was) or that a discredited account of his work is being perpetuated in college classes, for example. Thus, unlike the Genovese case, I’m not sure that the Milgrim experiments really raise the question that Harry was interested in — why doesn’t false stuff get corrected faster?

LFC @ 74. Please. My view doesn’t depend on where people really live, in farms or in towns, suburbs, cities, whatever . It is, as I tried to explain, that there is a deep current of anti-urbanism in American society (certainly more present among those in rural areas or suburbs, but even present among urbanites — you should hear some New Yorkers complain about the city) , and that this underlying assumption facilitates the perpetuation of the Genovese myth.

I regret the “my little town” metaphor, intended ironically, and drawn from Paul Simon’s My Little Town:

In my little town I never meant nothing
I was just my father’s son
Saving my money
Dreamin of glory
Twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun

Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town …

I did wonder about one other possible reason for the perpuation of the Genovese myth, its potential appeal to the left, seeing the callousness of the 38 people as a symptom of the decay of bourgeois society. But the only evidence I have for this is a Phil Ochs song about the Genovese case, Outside of a Small Circle of Friends. See lyrics http://www.metrolyrics.com/outside-of-a-small-circle-of-friends-lyrics-phil-ochs.html. And although I wish Ochs’s views were powerful enough to still be affecting us, I really doubt it.

@77

I’ve no doubt the Genovese story appeals to a wide variety of people, though the New Yorker article linked above, with its focus on Rosenthal’s motives for promoting it, suggests on the contrary the neoconservative “mugged by reality” narrative, along the lines of John Podhoretz’s rants about the Upper West Side of his childhood years. (Until I read that article, I knew nothing about the event other than the bare facts you quoted–“38 people heard and saw the attack, which happened on the sidewalk in full view of everyone and lasted half an hour or more
(all those facts false), and the woman’s name.)

Peter Dorman @ 78. I’m not sure I buy your dichotomy, except that at least it would explain both Genovese and Milgrim situations. I guess I don’t really think many people are attracted to a “we’re all guilty” view, though. For example, it seemed to me that most people thought it really distressing that Milgrim had showed that so many of us might be guilty — that the Nazis might not have been just a historical anomaly. And in Genovese, it wasn’t all of us, but those city folks. But I’ve got nothing empirical on this.

David, you could be right — I’m just speculating. My experience with both stories is that they are framed as saying something unfortunate about “human nature”, or perhaps the dismal state to which we’ve fallen here in the USA. Perhaps the stories are given meaning by different people for different reasons.

I’m attuned to the “we are all guilty” meme from working on the environmental front, where it has quite a bit of salience in some quarters.

The disdain for, and fear of the city has been a constant of American culture at least since Jefferson. It could be though that it already “started with the Greeks” ;-)

But as somebody noted, the Genovese myth was started by the urban NYT.

Bianca Steele (@79),

Yes, Podhoretz’ “My Negro Problem – and Ours” was published the year before the Kitty Genovese murder. However, both these things can be viewed within a lens of the huge debate of the time concerning the American city – James Q. Wilson’s 1963 The American City, for just one other example out of many possible ones.

Note: “My Negro Problem – and Ours” is about Podhoretz’ childhood in Bed-Stuy, not the UWS.

burritoboy —

I didn’t know that Wilson wrote “The American City” and only read some of his later stuff on crime. Is it good? I’ll have to look at it in my upcoming leisure time. Am I right in remembering that he formulated something like the “Broken Windows” theory that others have mentioned as another in the discredited, zombie ideas, or am I wrong in connecting him to it?

burritoboy @85
Specifically on your question, though there’s some variation over the years, most American suburbs are designed to be reminiscent of what is viewed as a small town or rural area.

It’s possible we are using or defining “suburb” differently, but I’ve spent substantial chunks (though not all) of my life living in (what I would call) suburbs that have little resemblance to what you are describing. These are places that date from the immediate post-WW2 pd; how typical or atypical they are I’m not sure, but they do not esp. strike me as attempts to “reject the city and recreate small-town or rural life,” and I can assure you that not all American suburbs have Tudor-style architecture, mock-Gothic chapels (!), schools modeled on English public schools, etc. This will prob. be my last comment on this, since it’s OT the main topic of the thread, insofar as there is one. (Plus I really don’t care about the subject that much, tbh.)

LFC @ 91. Oh, thanks for noting that. I was beginning to feel that my ability to communicate was failing seriously.

David @90: yes, “Broken Windows” by Wilson & Kelling was where it all started. Have a look at it – it’s findable on the Net – and try and follow the argument through; it goes to some weird places.

About the “we are all potential camp guards” message from the Milgram study (I forget now whether Milgram drew anything like this inference or if it attached itself to his results later on). It’s really very odd. The process Milgram put his volunteers through certainly rings some very unpleasant bells – it’s analogous to some sort of nightmarish sadistic seduction or grooming process (“Now slap him. Good! Now slap him again. Harder this time. No, don’t stop now. You must continue”…). But did people imagine that this was how camp guards were recruited, or trained? It wouldn’t work – it wouldn’t scale, apart from anything else – unless the SS were some kind of warrior cult or S/M Theban Band. Which, perhaps fortunately for the world, they weren’t.

In reality, as far as I can tell, people were induced to commit atrocities through a combination of ideological commitment, esprit de corps, direct orders and constant background threat. If you wanted to step aside from firing squad duty, you could, this time, but next time you might be less fortunate; next time you might be a lot less fortunate.

Don’t mean to get weirdly OT. I think this is truly on-topic (of comments, if not of OP):
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119571/gabby-giffords-gun-control-ads-are-criticized-because-theyre-working

“This longing for “the country”, for agriculture, and its regional associations (e.g., “East” = city) needs lots more examination. Especially since agriculture is so f-ing hard. Really, what’s so wonderful about it?”

Hint: Jefferson didn’t do a lot of farming himself.

Wilson was not particularly impressed with criminological theory. Except for the notions of social disorganization that emanated from the 1920s and 1930s. And his ideas read like an update of social disorganzation The key difference is that sociologists were a bit more upbeat about the possibilities of ameliorating the mess. Wilson represented the frustrated who sought to return to an earlier criminology where good and bad were clearer.

“In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is – at least in its strong form – largely discredited but it is generally taken for granted by science fiction writers.”

Well it is worth noting that Whorf never endorsed the “strong form” of Sapir-Whorf nor on my reading did Sapir. Instead it was the result of a deliberate misreading of Whorf that amounted to a strawman.

Similarly the dismissal of Whorf as “an insurance adjuster” is part and parcel of the same strawman narrative. Instead Whorf was called in to do investigations that today would be labled as those of an “engineer” or an “forensic investigator”.

Whorf’s real crime was not to be some amateur pronouncing a theory of unintelligibility between languages. Because he wasn’t an amateur in any but the 19th century sense and never suggested that learners of say Hopi could never master the thought processes of English or vice versa (indeed Whorf in his papers attempted a “translation” that ‘Strong’ Sapir-Whorf would hold impossible). Instead Whorf’s work cast grave doubt on the fundamentals of Logical Positivism writ large and the belief almost universally held by both the practioners of the new field of Linguistics and the newish strains of philosophy of the Analytical Philosophers that you could approach capital R reality through the rigid application of language mediated by techniques of formal logic. Think Russell and the Early Wittgenstein and the Cambridge School. Or the supposedly contrasting work of the Ordinary Language Philosophers led by Austin at Oxford. If Whorf was correct then you would not be able to explicate reality just by listening to upper class Englishmen speaking their language out loud to each other in the Fellows’ Garden at some Oxford College. Nor would you be able to embrace later theories like Chomskite Generative Linguistics that assumed and asserted that there was a universal hard wired set of language rules shared by all human beings if you could only get deep enough in the rules that ultimately generated the superficially different languages actually extant.

The whole line of theory that infused academic Linguistics and much of Anglo-American analytical philosophy in the first half of the 20th century would have been undermined by taking Whorf’s work seriously. So it wasn’t.

Making Benjamin Whorf an honorary member of DeLongs Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill. Or maybe per Digby just another DFH. Someone not to be taken seriously by the ‘Sensible’ and the Mandarins. Something made easier by not actually reading anything he actually wrote.

Mr. Webb, are you sure that there is or ever was anyone who believes that you can “explicate reality just by listening to upper class Englishmen speaking their language out loud to each other in the Fellows’ Garden at some Oxford College”. I’ve never heard anyone claim this thesis. Certainly, as a scholar of recent working-class origin, it certainly is not why I am impressed by early analytical philosophy.

A lot of people at Crooked Timber seem very eager to cast analytical philosophy as the sole purview of minor nobles with nothing to do. For those of us coming from a practical, scientific background, analytical philosophy actually is quite resourceful, not just as theory, but on the ground. I have not read Whorf’s own work, and while it may place certain aspects of analytical philosophy and its offshoots into question, it is unlikely that would undermine all of the great resources accruing from analytical philosophy.