Keith N Hampton

A small group of reporters form the New York Times recently replicated Stanley Milgram\’s subway seat experiment. Experimenters entered the New York City subway and very simply asked fellow riders to give up their seat. Well, maybe not so simply, as it was back in Milgram\’s day a majority of subway riders did vacate their seats for seemly no reason when asked to do so, but as with the original experiment one of the most interesting aspects of the study was the anxiety experimenters experienced as a result of making the request. My research assistants and I experienced similar anxiety in 2001 when we replicated the lost letter study, \”loosing\” a letter in a store was surprisingly difficult, we all felt like \”reverse shoplifters.\” Article