Nov 29, 2011 22:24
I have this urge to read about psychology. A psych textbook like in high school would be good. There's this new show, Curiosity on the Discovery channel. It's a pretty cool show, it explores a different topic each week. I just watched one about how evil are you, very interesting. They can actually do brain scans to see how your brain reacts to different images. So doctors can actually see which parts of the brain respond to violent images and how. They can do DNA tests to see is you are pre-disposed to psychopathy. They re-created the Milgrim experiment, which was originally done in the '60s.
The Milgrim experiment was suppose to prove that people learn faster or better or whatever if they received a negative reinforcement when they were wrong. So they would bring the learner into one room, strap him down, and hook him up to a machine. The teacher would then go into the next room and ask the learner questions, some kind of word association thing, and every time he got it wrong the teacher would give him a shock.
The people would do this with no problem at first, and the higher the voltage got the more noise the learner would make. 150 volts was the turning point of the experiment; the learner would say he wanted to stop. So the teacher would stop and tell the experimenter who said, "it's essential for the experiment that you continue.' AND THEY WOULD! Even though it was clear that they didn't want to go further they would because they were told to.
Of course no one was actually being shocked, it was an experiment to see how far people would go. The results, Milgrim found, were that people were capable of anything and they feel like they have to follow the rules. Someone in authority told them to shock another human being with 150 volts and they did it. 40 years or so ago, Milgrim found that if something were to happen in the United State, such as the Holocaust, those people could very easily find the people to run everything and undoubtedly listen to their authorities.
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