Neurocam Is Not A Psychology Experiment

Although of course if it was, they would say that.

This post by Aaron Swartz relating an anecdote about Philip G. Zimbardo put me in mind of Zimbardo's infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, which has some Neurocamlike qualitites. Zimbardo himself maintains a creepily unrepentant site about this "classic" study of authoritarian and subservient behaviour in a controlled environment, which makes for quite interesting reading, especially in light of various recent scandals.

Elsewhere, "The Perils Of Obedience", an essay by Stanley Milgram, extracted from his 1983 book "Obedience To Authority", reflecting on his almost-but-not-quite-equally notorious experiments:

Before the experiments, I sought predictions about the outcome from various kinds of people ... With remarkable similarity, they predicted that virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrist, specifically, predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed. They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board.

These predictions were unequivocally wrong. Of the forty subjects in the first experiment, twenty-five obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, punishing the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the generator.