You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [79]
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): ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
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.
THE FIVE CREEPIEST URBAN LEGENDS THAT HAPPEN TO BE TRUE
THE best creepy campfire stories are always the ones that end with the words, “It’s all true, and I have the documentation here to prove it!”
In that spirit, we’ve tracked down five of the creepiest tales and urban legends that really happened to real people, proving once and for all that nothing is more terrifying than everyday life.