Milgram vs Portillo - a course in TV ethics

This evening I watched BBC2's Horizon - Michael Portillo on the subject of violence. He was asking himself and various 'experts' what makes people violent, is it inborn or taught, etc. Right from the beginning when he went to a remote south american village to watch the indians having their once-a-year fight festival I found the whole thing annoying - he didn't, for example, even wonder what the level of violence among the tribe was for the other 364 days a year - but in the second half of the programme he invited us to watch some social psychologists at work on an experiment.

Now when I was studying psychology we talked about ethics a lot. There were some experiments which had been done in the past which it was now realised had been unethical; we even discussed whether it was ethical to take the results of these experiments into account (yes, otherwise all that pain had been wasted) and whether it would be permissible to repeat any of these experiments (no, certainly not). As I understood it, anything which could potentially traumatise the subjects, human or animal, or an experiment was no longer permissible. Nor was any deception allowed, such as telling a subject that the purpose of the experiment was X when in fact it was Y.

So what does Portillo do? He repeats Milgram, that's what. The single most infamous experiment, the one which where people are encouraged to give other people more and more severe electric shocks in the interests of scientific study. The one which sparked off the entire ethics debate in the first place. The one which I was repeatedly told when I was studying would and could never be repeated in our modern enlightened times.

Basically a study of how obedient the average person is to authority, Milgram found that 65 percent of his subjects would administer what they believed to be a lethal shock to another if told to by a person in authority. As I understand it, several of his subjects were traumatised for life when they realised what they had done and how they had been duped into doing it. Portillo only had three refusals out of 12 subjects, which is a similar enough result to be acceptable, but why do it? Surely there must be ethics committees involved in television programmes? Well, perhaps not. I really do feel, however, that there was no good reason for repeating this.

Another wonderful conclusion he came to was that when someone has been deprived of sleep for three days their judgement is somewhat impaired and they are slightly more aggressive than usual. What a surprise!

This programme has made me slightly more aggressive than usual. And that is a surprise.