CG wrote:By "disproportionate", I mean that the gain in insight will make the participant's life worse rather than better; that is, have a disproportionately negative effect.
Psychology experiments aren't done for the sake of the experimentees; that'd be therapy. Would you have thrown out the later iterations of the (the puppies, the change in locale, the gender changes) Milgram experiment if the original crew said that they were 'very upset' by the experiment?
Secondly, the other half of it is that it's still preferable to letting someone go out and walk around in ignorance. If a group of people, like say, middle managers are going around praising themselves for their racial and gender inequality but are (unknowingly) rather racist and sexist how is it disproportionately 'good' for them to be unaware of their attitudes?
CG wrote:Since I doubt that you learned that you're no different from a Nazi in a traumatic fashion, the infliction of insight was most likely a good thing despite the most likely negligible effect that it's had on your life.
Maybe it's because I learned it because someone else learned it in a more traumatic fashion? How are you supposed to get the benefits of the research without actually doing the research?
CG wrote:]If they already know what you're going to tell them, the only value of the insight is that it comes from a (hopefully) trusted professional.
I admit, I put off responding to this post for about four months because I didn't really have an answer to this, but several new pieces of information that came to me--specifically, the Dunning Krueger effect--has led me to think that it's pretty much rarely the case. Unless it's blatantly obvious, like an ugly/overweight person being those things, many people
don't know what you're going to tell them or show them.
As unscientific and free-wheeling as Cracked is, that website has like twenty articles pointing out problems with human self-evaluation and common sense. They did yet another one last week even. Sure, experimenters can just obtain their results about social and psychological problems and not really tell them what went on, but again who does that benefit in the long run?
