alt Hacker NewsIt really calls into questions the conclusions drawn from the last 50 years. Here's the ones disproven I remember:
* 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?
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On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp:
The first point, and I can see in my own life, is valid. Not properly rich by any means, but vastly surpassed any expectations and most of my peers from earlier life (which is rather easy when coming from poor eastern Europe but somehow most folks from back home didn't, too deep in their little comfort zones or fears of risks that were mostly made up).
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.
Making someone think they're an accomplice to torture is itself recognized as a form of psychological torture. Telling someone that they're helping to advance science proves nothing, except that people can be deceived, manipulated, and exploited by bad actors.
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...
I don't think experimental psychology ever validated those extremely simplistic conclusions. I'd rather these simplistic conclusions are a "folk summary"/mythical-version of a few experiments and they come from already existing cultural tropes, cultural tropes that were simplified and made more cruel and ruthless by various self-marketing consultants.
Alot of the problem with these “disproven” things is over broad scope or abused in the popular media beyond comprehension.
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.
Didn't the Dunedin study also find that childhood self-control and delayed gratification correlated with adult life outcomes?
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1571970023782.pdf