Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-2016
Publication Title
Research Ethics
Abstract
When the public outcry concerning the ‘Facebook experiment’ began, many commentators drew parallels to controversial social science experiments from a prior era. The infamous Milgram (1963) and Zimbardo (1973) experiments concerning the social psychology of obedience and aggression seemed in some ways obvious analogs to the Facebook experiment, at least inasmuch as all three violated norms about the treatment of human subjects in research. But besides that, what do they really have in common? In fact, a close reading of Milgram, Zimbardo, and the Facebook experiment reveals something about the way power—both as a subject of scholarly inquiry and as an element wielded by researchers—is conceptualized today. Although all three experiments were, in essence, measuring the researchers’ ability to induce an emotional or behavioral change in subjects, the Facebook experiment did much more than the others to hide such considerations and naturalize the exercise of power at work in that study. This paper thus argues that the invisibility of power in the discourse of the Facebook experiment demonstrates, in miniature, the more insidious elements of big data as a whole.
Keywords
algorithms, big data, emotion, experiment, Facebook, power
Volume
12
Issue
1
First Page
44
Last Page
54
DOI
10.1177/1747016115579533
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2015
Recommended Citation
Recuber, Timothy, "From Obedience to Contagion: Discourses of Power in Milgram, Zimbardo, and the Facebook Experiment" (2016). Sociology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/soc_facpubs/7
Comments
Archived as published.
Open access paper.