Man Screams For Mercy As French TV Show Contestants Willingly Electrocute Him To Death...

Human nature hasn't changed much in the past few decades. We still have to be watchful against the perversions that Milgram's study showed are all too enticing, or too fearfully addictive. On the positive side, we can use persuasive techniques studied a century ago to help us benefit others by selling what they are happy to own. The core principles of psychology, sociology and so on change much slower than our latest use of technology.

In my psych class recently, we studied the Milgram experiments in-depth. Shocking examples of what humanity will do simply because an authority told them to do. And not just "other people", but average everyday people who wouldn't have believed they would fatally shock someone.

Another interesting experiment to look up is the Asch conformity study where he put a participant in the room with several confederates whom the participant thought were fellow participants. (How many more times can I use that word in the sentence? ) They answered questions about the lengths of lines, and the confederates all answered correctly for several questions. Then, every single confederate answered one question in a manner that was clearly wrong. With no obvious pressure to conform and no reward or punishment for getting answers wrong or right, conforming or non-conforming, 66% of people chose the wrong answer just to conform with the others. Now throw in coercion, reward and punishment, and you have the answer to many of humanity's atrocities.

All right, that's my heavy thinking for the night. Back to looking at cute pictures of kittens to cheer myself up.

Fairly depressing stuff.

I will not go into the details but, I know how the police coerced a confession out of someone that was total BS.
WWII has plenty of stories to show have Fn evil people can be. All they need it a little push.

I know and studied with some of the experimenters of the 5 Psychological Studies. There is a tiny grain of truth in their work. But don't get too worked up. Almost all these studies were done with college undergrads who had to 'volunteer' to get class credit. There's a high factor of boredom and unreality among college student 'volunteers.' Do the same studies with other people with other motivations and things turn out different. You can get a study published if you get results, but if you do a study and get no results no one published your study and the world never learns when things don't work.