I AM AFRAID.

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RPGlitch wrote:

I don't know where to begin with this. Your overgeneralizing complex issues and making huge assumptions on what people are thinking. aka, you have heavily ingrained beliefs, regardless of any factual reporting.

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CanHasPants wrote:

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

Reminds me of a psychology experiment a professor brought up years ago. I may be getting details wrong, but its the concept that matters.

I believe this is what you are referring to.

The color of a light sounds familiar too, though, so perhaps there is another experiment? On the other hand, I was conditioned from a young age to believe there are four lights, so maybe it’s that..

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erdelyii wrote:

But the person never believed the group. The experiment was about outward conformity.

Group Size: Asch found that group size influenced whether subjects conformed. The bigger the group, the more people conformed, up to a certain point. After group size reached a certain limit, conformity didn’t increase any further.

Group Unanimity: Asch also found that subjects were much more likely to conform when a group agreed unanimously. If even one other person in the group disagreed with the group, a subject was much less likely to conform. This was true even when the other dissenter disagreed with the subject as well as the group.

The classic 1984 experiment by Quattrone & Tversky into self deception might be more to the point for you.

short article here

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

Yeah, I do believe it was conformity. I think at the time we were discussing war atrocities and the psychological aspect of blame - basically if my government ordered me to kill all these people, I am not morally wrong in doing so because my superiors made me do it.

With the way folks are so "passionate" about politics today, it seemed relevant.

I did have to take a day or two, and kill shaper for the first time to avoid the potential gut-reaction emotional response. While seemingly unrelated, watching Dr Who yesterday evening reminded me that despite the animosity today, we've still made progress as a civilization. At least now its public protests and people clashing mostly over words instead of mass murder.

I can't imagine a third world war where we don't manage to obliterate our species in the process.

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The chilling Milgram experiments have been replicated, and yet again, 9 out of 10 are willing to inflict electric shocks and pain on another person. In these infamous experiments the power of a white lab coat was enough to get more than half the participants (26 out of 40) to deliver a fatal shock (the participants didn’t realize the shock was faked, and the victim an actor).

This willingness to obey authority is both a great strength of humanity when authority is worthy and yet leads to the darkest abyss when it is not.

By nature, we are largely empathetic creatures: most people really don’t want to cause pain, they get quite upset themselves in the process. Yet many people will override this inbuilt ethical wiring if a person in a position of authority insist they do. It’s time we talked about ways to train people to resist. There is hope as outlined below in a different study from last year....

The good news from a study last year: Matthew Hollander listened to all the Millgram recordings again, and there were about 800 in the full set. He found that even among obedient people there were signs of resistance as the experiment got more painful. They had ways of slowing the experiment, tried to talk their way out of it, and talk to the victim too. The difference was that the disobedient people were more aggressive about slowing things down, they started to resist earlier, and had more options to resist. It would seem likely that if we train people better, a lot more people will stand up to authority.

“Before examining these recordings, I [Hollander] was imagining some really aggressive ways of stopping the experiment — trying to open the door where the ‘learner’ is locked in, yelling at the experimenter, trying to leave,” Hollander says. “What I found was there are many ways to try to stop the experiment, but they’re less aggressive.”

Most often, stop tries involved some variation on, “I can’t do this anymore,” or “I won’t do this anymore,” and were employed by 98 percent of the disobedient Milgram subjects studied by Hollander. That’s compared to fewer than 20 percent of the obedient subjects.

Interestingly, all six of the resistive actions were put to use by obedient and disobedient participants.

“What this shows is that even those who were ultimately compliant or obedient had practices for resisting the invocation of the experimenter’s authority,” says Douglas Maynard, a UW-Madison sociology professor who leads the Garfinkel Laboratory for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. “It wasn’t like they automatically caved in. They really worked to counter what was coming at them. It wasn’t a blind kind of obedience.”

If people could be trained to tap practices for resistance like those outlined in Hollander’s analysis, they may be better equipped to stand up to an illegal, unethical or inappropriate order from a superior. And not just in extreme situations, according to Maynard.

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

You seem like you don't have a realistic picture of what humans are like. There's a LOT of ugly sides to any person, no matter how good they seem to be.