THE dedication..
and an excerpt of a particularly interesting part..
FIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT PROVE HUMANITY IS
DOOMED
YOU have to be careful when you go poking around the human
mind, because you can’t be sure what you’ll find there. A number of
psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions,
not about the occasional psychopath, but about you.
5. THE GOOD SAMARITAN EXPERIMENT
(1973)
The setup
Naming their study after the
biblical story in which a Samaritan helps an enemy in need, psychologists John Darley
and C. Daniel Batson wanted to test if religion has any effect on helpful
behavior. So they gathered a group of seminary students and asked half of them
to deliver a sermon about the Good Samaritan in another building. The other
half were told to give a speech about job opportunities, and members of both
groups were given varying amounts of time to prepare and get
across campus to deliver their sermons, ensuring some students
were in more of a hurry when heading to deliver the good news. On the way to
give their speech, the subjects would pass a person slumped in an alleyway, who
looked to be in need of help.
The people who had been studying
the Good Samaritan story did not stop any more often than the ones preparing a
speech on job opportunities. The only factor that made a difference was how
much of a hurry the students were in.
If pressed for time, only 10
percent would stop to give any aid, even when they were on their way to give a
sermon about how awesome it is to stop and give aid.
What this says about you
As much as we like to make fun of
anti-gay congressmen who get caught gaying it up in a men’s bathroom, the truth
is that we’re just as likely to be hypocrites. After all, it’s much easier to
talk to a room full of people about helping strangers than, say, to actually
touch a bleeding homeless man.
And in case you thought these
results were restricted to seminary students, in 2004 a BBC article reported on
some disturbing footage captured by the camera of a parked public bus. In the
tape, an injured twenty-five-year-old woman lies bleeding profusely in a London
road, while dozens of passing motorists swerve to avoid her, without stopping. To
be fair, the report doesn’t mention if there was anything good on TV that
night, so they might have had somewhere really important to be.
4. THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
(1971)
The setup
You may have heard of the
Stanford Prison Experiment, in which psychologist Philip Zimbardo transformed
the Stanford Psychology Department’s basement into a mock prison. But you
probably didn’t know just how ashamed it should make you to be a human being.
Seventy young men responded to a
newspaper ad soliciting volunteers for an experiment. Zimbardo then gave each
volunteer a test to evaluate their health and mental stability, and divided the
most stable men arbitrarily into twelve guards and twelve prisoners. Zimbardo
wanted to test how captivity affects subjects put in positions of authority and
submission. The simulation was planned to run for two weeks.
The result
It took less than one day for
every subject to go crazier than a shit-house rat. On day two, prisoners staged
a riot and barricaded their cells with their beds. The guards saw this as a
pretty good excuse to start squirting fire extinguishers at the insurgents
because, hey, why not? The Stanford prison continued to ricochet around in hell
for a while. Guards began forcing inmates to sleep naked on the concrete,
restricting bathroom use, making prisoners do humiliating exercises and clean toilets
with their bare hands. Incredibly, it never occurred to participants to simply
ask to be let out of the damned experiment, even though they had absolutely no
legal reason to be imprisoned.
Over fifty outsiders stopped to
observe the simulation, but the morality of the trial was never questioned
until Zimbardo’s girlfriend, Christina Maslach, strongly objected. After six
days, Zimbardo put a halt to the experiment.
What this says about you
Ever been harassed by a cop who
acted like a complete douche bag for no reason? The Stanford Prison Experiment
indicates that if the roles were reversed, you’d likely act the same way.
As it turns out, it’s usually fear of repercussion
that keeps us from torturing our fellow human beings. Give us absolute power
and a blank check from our superiors, and Abu Ghraib- style naked pyramids are sure
to follow. If it can happen to the sanest 35 percent of a group of hippie
college students, it sure as hell could happen to you.
3. BYSTANDER APATHY EXPERIMENT
(1968)
The setup
When a woman was murdered in
1964, the New York Times reported that thirty-eight people had heard or seen
the attack but did nothing. John Darley and Bibb Latane wanted to know if the
fact that these people were in a large group played any role in the reluctance to
come to the victim’s aid.
The psychologists invited a group
of volunteers to an “extremely personal” discussion and separated them into
different rooms with intercoms, purportedly to protect anonymity.
During the conversation, one of
the members would fake an epileptic seizure. We’re not sure how they conveyed,
via intercom, that what was happening was a seizure, but we’re assuming the
words, “Wow this is quite an epileptic seizure I’m having,” were uttered.
The result
When subjects believed that they
were the only other person in the discussion, 85 percent were heroic enough to
leave the room and seek help once the seizure started. This makes sense. Having
an extremely personal conversation is difficult enough, but being forced to
continue to carry on the conversation alone is just sad.
However, when the experiment was
altered so that subjects believed four other people were in the discussion,
only 31 percent went to look for help once the seizure began. The rest assumed
someone else would take care of it.
What this says about you
Obviously if there’s an emergency
and you’re the only one around, the pressure to help increases massively since
you feel 100 percent responsible. But when you’re with ten other people, you
feel approximately 10 percent as responsible. Problem: so does everybody else.
This sheds some light on our
previous examples. Maybe the drivers who swerved around the injured woman in
the road would have stopped if they’d been alone on a deserted highway. Then
again, maybe they’d be even more likely to abandon her since nobody was watching.
We just need the slightest excuse
to do nothing.
2. THE ASCH CONFORMITY EXPERIMENT
(1953)
The setup
Solomon Asch wanted to run
studies to document the power of conformity, for the purpose of depressing everyone
who would ever read the results. Subjects were told they’d be taking part in a
vision test. They were shown a line, and then several lines of varying sizes to
the right of the first line. All they had to do was say which line on the right
matched the original. The answer was objectively obvious.
The
catch was that everybody in the room other than one subject had been instructed
to give the same obviously wrong answer. Would the subject go against the crowd
when the
crowd was clearly wrong?
The result
If three others in the classroom
gave the same wrong answer, even when the line was plainly off by several inches,
one in three subjects would follow the group right off the proverbial cliff.
What this says about you
Imagine how much that figure
inflates when the answers are less black and white. We all laugh with the group
even when we don’t get the joke or doubt our opinion when we realize it’s
unpopular.
“Well, it’s a good thing I’m a
rebellious nonconformist,” you might say. Of course, once you
decide to be a nonconformist the next step is to find
out what the other nonconformists are doing and make sure you’re nonconforming
correctly.
1. MILGRAM (1961) AND MILGRAM 2 (1972): ELECTRICBOOGALOO
The setup
At the Nuremberg trials, many of
the Nazis tried to excuse their behavior by claiming they were just following
orders. So in 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the
infamous Milgram Experiment, testing subjects’ willingness to obey an authority
figure.
Each subject was told they were a
“teacher” and that their job was to give a memory test to a man (actually an
actor) located in another room. Subjects were told that whenever the other guy
gave an incorrect answer, they were to press a button that would give him an electric
shock.
As far as the subjects knew, the
shocks were real, starting at 45 volts and increasing with every wrong answer.
Each time they pushed the button, the actor would scream and beg for the
subject to stop.
The result
Many subjects began to feel
uncomfortable after a certain point and questioned continuing the experiment. However,
each time a guy in a lab coat encouraged them to continue, most subjects
followed orders, delivering shocks of higher and higher voltage despite the
victims’ screams.
Eventually, the actor would start
banging on the wall that separated him from the subject, pleading about his heart
condition. After further shocks, all sounds from the victim’s room would cease,
indicating he was dead or unconscious. Take a guess, what percentage of the subjects
kept delivering shocks after that point?
Between 61 and 66 percent of
subjects continued the experiment until it reached the maximum voltage of 450,
continuing to deliver shocks after the victim had, for all they knew, been
zapped into unconsciousness or the afterlife.
Most subjects wouldn’t begin to
object until after 300-volt shocks. Exactly zero asked to stop the experiment
before that point (pro tip in case you’re ever faced with a similar dilemma:
Under the right circumstances 110-230 volts is enough to kill a man).
The
Milgram Experiment immediately became famous for what it implied about humanity’s
capacity for evil. But by 1972, some of his colleagues decided that Milgram’s
subjects must have known the actor was faking. In an attempt to disprove his
findings, Charles Sheridan and Richard King took the experiment a step further,
asking subjects to shock a puppy every time it disobeyed an order. Unlike
Milgram’s experiment, this shock was real. Exactly twenty out of twenty-six subjects
went to the highest voltage.
What this says about you
Almost 80 percent. Think about
that when you’re at the mall: Eight out of ten of the people you see would torture
the shit out of a puppy if a dude in a lab coat asked them to. And there’s a
good chance you would too.
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