* kids grow to be rich because they accept delayed gratification
* alpha males are the leader of the pack and all other males are useless
* people accept violence if there is a higher authority which justifies it with a reason
How many people suffered or delivered suffering because of their beliefs in the above?
It can be reframed as cca discipline too, willingness to suffer a bit for later rewards. Can see this as massive success multiplier in many real world situations.
Almost every person I went to college with had this viewpoint. There's also something comforting knowing you and your friends are all doing the same thing. We all were dirt poor in college trying to support ourselves with crappy part-time jobs working delivering pizza, working in fast food joints, cleaning offices at night. The idea was we all believed we were working towards something better than our current situation. The suffering some how made you a better person, more resilient, made you understand what it was like to really earn something.
All of my close friends I had in college all went on to do successful things. Engineers, attorneys, stock brokers, software engineers, pharmacists. We all eventually got to where we wanted to be, but the suffering is what still binds us together to this day. Talking about some of the houses we lived in that should've been condemned. Having to work 60 hours a week, and still do well on that exam on Friday.
The willingness to suffer is eased when you have a shared experience with others around you.
Milgram decided to repeat his gross ethical violation 30 times(!), with dozens of test subjects each time. Overall, the majority of people actually disobeyed the orders to continue with higher voltages.
I think the only reason it's become so popular is because it makes for a shocking story, with grandiose implications. The specific "agentic state theory" Milgram invented is not backed up by his data, and personally, I find it philosophically dubious and psychologically concerning that he gravitated to it.
See:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095935431560539...
The delayed gratification thing in particular is correlation vs. causation. It was really more about trust. Forcing kids to delay gratification is meaningless or counterproductive.
You instead look at the claim and the data and the experiment methodology. It often says something far far less generalizable or significant than the conclusion section of the paper.
One of the researchers feels guilty from the apparent panic attack his subject appears to be going through, so he excuses himself from the experimental room and approaches the lead investigator who's watching on CCTV from outside:
“Professor, this subject is really suffering from their belief that they are electrocuting the learner. I believe this is unethical, can we stop please?”
The professor replies:
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
The reading of questions while the subject was screaming is acting in a way that seems like that it is a performative action of conforming to the pattern and that the failure of the pattern is caused by the answerer failing to conform to the pattern. That makes the shocks a punishment for failing to conform. The questioner has a facade of doing the right thing by going through the motions, even though they are breaking the rules by doing so, because if the other party were compliant that rule wouldn't have been broken. That the shocks were painful would feel appropriate to those who had a strong sense that nonconformity should be punished. It is less them following the rules and more them assuming the intent of the rules and permitting abuse because the intent was not their decision. It might make them less willing participants to the abuse and more 'not my problem' active participants.
Once you have an experiment that degenerates into just an event, a situation where the controls have failed, you come up with many potential conclusions but you've lost any science-specific-conclusion to the observations and you may as well look any series of events.
That said, I think experimental psychology just generally fails to establish enough controls to merit the scientific quality it aspires to.