You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [78]
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 douchebag 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