Participants go further for ‘hard’ science studies

Recent re-examinations of Stanley Milgram's classic studies into how far people will go when instructed to harm another person have led to a shift in ideas about the reasons for the results. Rather than being related to 'obedience to authority', it's been suggested that a participant's level of identification with the scientific cause in question could explain how willing they are to continue with a task that they believe is hurting someone else. 

If true, this 'engaged followership' theory would mean that scientific research has a potential dark side — the more that a participant believes that the work is important, the more willing they are to obey potentially harmful instructions. A recent paper in the British Journal of Social Psychology now provides evidence in support of this. 

Megan E. Birney at Staffordshire University and colleagues ran a series of studies to explore whether people who were told they were taking part in a 'hard' science experiment — purportedly run by a team of neuroscientists — would go further in a task that became increasingly unpleasant than participants who'd been told that the study was being run by a 'soft' social science team.

In fact, the task was the same in both cases: participants were shown a series of 30 photos of groups of people and had to pick a word from a list of negative adjectives to describe each one. These words included: deceitful, stupid, arrogant, and lazy. In the beginning, the photographs were of clearly unpleasant people — such as members of the Ku Klux Klan — but, as the task progressed, the people depicted became progressively less offensive and more pleasant, culminating in a family walking in a park. Participants didn't have to complete the full task, however. An earlier pilot study had confirmed that people found the task increasingly aversive, and the participants were allowed to stop whenever they wanted. 

Earlier work has found that people tend to regard neuroscience as being more scientific, and take it more seriously than social science. (The team notes that psychological research that is described with neuroscientific terms tends to be judged more favourably, even when those terms are completely irrelevant to the actual research.) So the team suspected that when the task was presented as being run by neuroscientists, participants would work their way through more photographs than when it was presented as being run by social scientists. 

Across two studies, this is precisely what they found, with the participants also reporting that they considered neuroscience 'more important' than social science. This provides evidence that neuroscience, compared with social science, evoked more followership, the team writes. A third study did not find these results. However, because this third study was run eight months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the team suspects that these participants may have placed a higher value on social science than the earlier groups did. They both rated social science as being as important as neuroscience, and went as far in the task for social scientists as for neuroscientists. 

In a fourth study using the same photo task, the team also explored how participants' perceptions of the seriousness of a scientific discipline related to other attitudes towards the researchers and the study. They found that those who perceived the study to be more serious also had more trust in the researchers, found the study more worthwhile, disliked the task less, and were happier to have taken part. They also felt they had made a wider contribution to society by participating, and completed more trials than those who didn't take the study seriously. 

"Together, these results provide support for a core tenet of the 'engaged followership model of obedience'," write the researchers. "Namely, that people's willingness to follow the instructions of an authority figure even when they find the task aversive is influenced by their beliefs about the cause they are supposedly advancing." 

In this particular study, the participants weren't asked to harm anyone else, and there are some limitations to the conclusions that can be drawn — especially as the third study did not get the same results as the first two. But the results do support the idea that the more that people believe that a cause — in this case, science — is worthy, the more willing they are to put any concerns aside. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12603