At the end of March, I finally deleted my Facebook account — not deactivated, but full-on deleted. I’d been preparing to do so for a while. The last straw was the news that Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was suspected of having stolen the idea for Facebook and hacked into others’ accounts. Zuckerberg didn’t exactly admit to these transgressions, but Facebook did settle out of court to the tune of $65 million. These alleged ethical (and legal) transgressions were too much for me, and I began the process of leaving.
Facebook itself has no way of exporting contacts, so I was in the process of writing down the list of e-mail addresses and IM identities of all my friends. The day my husband told me how to import my Facebook contacts into Windows Live or Yahoo! Mail was the day I left.
The situation continues to devolve, with continual erosions to their users’ privacy, apps mysteriously installed without users’ knowledge and consent, and multiple accidental leaks of private data.
This morning, I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be funny if at some point we learned that Facebook’s erosion of privacy was just some massive social psychology experiment?
Enter Stanley Milgram. In the early 1960′s, inspired by the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann as a war criminal, Milgram began conducting a series of experiments designed to examine obedience to authority. The experiment was clever, though by today’s standards considered highly unethical.
The subjects, initially all men, showed up for what they were told was an experiment on learning. There were three participants. The first was the experimenter, who wore a white lab coat. The second was the subject himself, who was always “randomly” assigned to the role of teacher. The third, a confederate of the experimenter pretending to be a subject, was “randomly” assigned the role of learner and taken to another room.
The conditions of the experiments vary, but in each condition, the teacher was asked by the experimenter to read pairs of words to the learner and then test him on his ability to complete the pair. Each time the learner supplied a wrong answer, the teacher was to give him an electrical shock that escalated in voltage with each wrong answer. The shocks began at 15 volts and increased in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. Some of the shocks were also labelled: 75-120 volts as Moderate, 135-180 as Strong, 375-420 as Danger: Severe Shock, and 435 and 450 as XXX.
Of course, the learners never received these shocks. The shocks triggered a tape recorder that transmitted through the intercom. At 75 volts, the learner began to groan in pain. At 120 volts, the learner told the teacher, “Hey, this really hurts.” At 150 volts, “Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.” The learners’ pleas continued to escalate, until at 345 volts, there was silence.
If the subject protested or questioned whether he should continue, the experimenter told the subject, “Please continue,” then “The experiment requires that you continue,” then, “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” then, “You have no other choice, you must go on.” If the subject continued to protest, the experiment ended.
The experiment also ended after the teacher administered 450 volts three times.
In the initial experiment, all subjects went to 300 volts, and a remarkable 65% reached 375 volts, a voltage at which the learner had already stopped responding and which was marked as Danger: Severe Shock. Many were visibly distressed, even as they continued to administer greater and greater shocks.
What does this have to do with Facebook?
Very few of Milgram’s subjects would have agreed to administer the highest level of shocks had they been asked to do so at the outset. They’d have probably said to the experimenter, “Are you nuts? No way!” Likewise, few of us would have agreed to give up this much privacy at the outset if Facebook had asked for it. Instead, like a frog being brought to a boil, we’ve given it up, bit by bit. Our privacy is only dead because we’ve been led, 15 volts at a time, to administer the lethal shock.
Those 15 initial volts were the foot-in-the-door. Asked to comply with one small request, we become more willing to comply with later, greater requests. There’s another principle, that of sunk costs, that describes a similar phenomenon. The more we invest in something, the less likely we are to abandon it, even if to do so is in our best interests.
The most interesting condition of the many variations of the Milgram experiment was the one that gained the most compliance. When the subject was simply the one who read the list of words and another subject (actually a confederate of the experimenter) administered the shocks, compliance jumped to over 90%. The subjects, able to displace responsibility onto the person administering the shocks, absolved themselves of the responsibility of taking part. How many of us blame our friends for keeping us on Facebook?
The good news in all of this is that simply being aware of these social psychology principles inoculates us from continuing to make these errors. Think about it: If Facebook had started out asking this much of you, would you have complied?