This is a transcript from one of my old radio shows:
Emerson wrote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and I've always been fascinated by how this quintiscentially human trait can be exploited towards nefarious ends. How do normal, intelligent people get sucked into cults and fascist dictatorships? Two things -- conformity and deference to authority.
If you think the night shift at Abu Ghraib prison was made up of some anomolous group of monsters, you need to hear about Stanley Milgram's famous Obedience Experiments which initially took place in 1961. The experimenter starts by explaining to two subjects that the experiment will look into the role of punishment in learning, and that one will be the "teacher" and the other will be the "learner." Actually, one of these subjects, who always ends up being the learner, is an actor -- unbeknownst to the "teacher." You'll understand why in just a second. The "learner" is strapped into a chair rigged up with an electrode on his arm. The real subject, the "teacher", goes to an adjoining room with a generator in it. The generator has 30 switches labeled with a voltage ranging from 15 to 450 volts. Each switch also has a rating, ranging from "slight shock" to "danger: severe shock". The final two switches are ominously labeled "XXX". The "teacher" reads off a list of word pairs, and if the learner gets one of them wrong, the teacher is instructed to shock him, and automatically increase the shock each time the "learner" misses a word in the list.
What percentage of the subjects do you suppose would be monstrous enough to continue shocking the subject to increasing howls of pain, until they finally passed out and the "teacher" reached the switches marked "XXX???" Try two-thirds. Many worried "teachers" questioned the experimenter, asking who was responsible for any harmful effects that might result from the shocks, but after being assured the experimenter assumed full responsibility, many teachers continued the shocking, though some were obviously extremely uncomfortable in doing so.
Here's another experiment I'm sure you've heard of but probably don't know what happened next, which is quite striking in and of itself. Pavlov was pretty much the father of behaviourism, showing that a dog, conditioned to being fed at the ring of a bell, will salivate whenever he hears that bell regardless of whether you have a bowl of food to give him. What most people don't know is that there was a flood and Pavlov's poor dog got trapped in a house for days with no food. This experience was so traumatic for the pooch that it erased its previous conditioning. It was from this event that we grasp some of the basic tenents of brainwashing -- number one being that if you go through a significantly traumatic and discordant experience, your previous conditioning and basic understanding of the world can be wiped away, leaving room for *new* programming. Something to consider if we ever find ourselves in the midst of another 9-11.
Lastly, I want to talk about an experiment that pretty much proves Orwell right in saying that we can be made to believe that 2+2=5. In 1951, Solomon Asch assembled some students in a classroom for a vision test. Actually only one student was being experimented on, the others were confederates. The students were told to give their judgment of the length of several lines drawn on a series of displays. They were asked which line was longer than the other, which were the same length, etc. The answers were obvious to anyone who could see, but the confederates had been prearranged to all give a wrong answer.
Many subjects showed discomfort, but most conformed to the majority view of the others in the room, even when the majority said that two lines different in length by several inches were the same length. Even participants that did not conform, felt strong social pressure to do so. One exclaimed, 'I always disagree -- darn it!', and upon being debriefed, said 'I do not deny that at times I had the feeling "to heck with it, I'll go along with the rest"'.
Out of 123 naive participants tested, 75% conformed at least once. But there was a variation to this experiment that I find very heartening. When Asch provided just one person who agreed with the naive subject's estimates, conformity dropped to 5.5%. So one person -- the equivalent of the child crying out "the emperor has no clothes" has the power to make an enormous difference. That's why I put out these commentaries, you know, I don't get paid for it. And I hope that you take this experiment to heart and elect to be that one ally who calls things like they see it -- because in fictitious times like these, such an ally can make all the difference in the world. When things aren't right, sometimes it's dangerous to just go along with the rest. I'm Jody Paulson, and I just thought you should know.
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