I remember in school we studied a topic on Pol Pots regime and on Hitler... I was shocked to realise that a man like pol pot was alive even in my lifetime. I couldn't understand how "modern" people could be so disgustingly stupid to let something like that happen. I felt I could never be a naive citizen under a fascist regime and ignorantly wondered how the whole populations could have been so dumb...
an experiment we studied in psychology done by stanley milgram in the aftermath on Hitler's regime shed a bit more light on in for me.I've pasted some brief notes on the experiment below...it is a very scary look at human nature
in quick summary they found 65% of people would administer a 450 volt shock to another human being just because they were told to by a man in a lab coat.
The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[3]
The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience....
an add was placed in the news paper for people to paricipate in what they were told was an experiment on learning for which they'd be paid for participation.
basically ordinary people were recrutited to take part in an experiment in which there was a "teacher" and a "learner" straws were drawn for which participant would be a "teacher" and which a "learner"
however the draw was rigged. the "learner" was a confederate in the experiment (an actor hired by the pschologists). the "teacher" was required to administer electric shocks to the learner. each time the learner got a question wrong the "teacher" was required to turn up the voltage which was labeled at certain points were voltage became increasingly lethal. untill it reached 450volts (in reality of course there were no shocks as the learner was an actor)
the idea of the experiment was to see how far ordinary people in the "teacher" role would turn up the voltage.
when the "learner" was put in a different room it was observed whether the "teacher" would continue to turn up the voltage even when they could hear banging and screams of pain from the "learner"
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:[1]Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on. If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.
people showed phsical sign of distress at having to turn up the voltage
65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.[1]
the trials were replicated with professionals as the "teacher" and the same results were found
Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period".[12] Indeed, that was one of the explicitly-stated goals of the experiments. Quoting from the preface of Milgram's book, Obedience to Authority: "The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch".
It doesn't say alot for human nature but for me stresses the importance of institutions which constently act as watch dogs
Another experiment which shows us a lot about human nature is one which was done in the UK, in which a woman was in an alleyway being "attacked" and was screaming for help. This experiment was also done with a child standing in the middle of a street, alone and crying. Basically the results of the experiment showed that the more people who were around, the less likely they were to respond or try to help. So in light of this, when we look at regimes such as Pol Pot's and wonder how it could have been allowed to happen... A lot of the time it seems possible that one person's reluctance to speak out against such a regime leads to an entire population's reluctance to speak out. Of course, the threat of punishment for being "anti-regime" is obviously a large factor in this too, but it just goes to show how dictators, or non-democratic regime leaders, get to be so powerful.
ReplyDeleteTo again illustrate this theory, the 1964 case of Kitty Genovese shows another example of the "reluctance of people to speak out", identified as the bystander effect.
ReplyDeleteGenovese was a young woman who was stabbed and raped before dying outside her home, within the time period of approximately half an hour.
A number of witnesses were in nearby apartments and although the victim called for help noone actively sought to assist Genovese.
Social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané coined this behaviour as the bystander effect; the more observers present, the less likely it is for individuals to step forward.
It is interesting that human behaviour avoids confrontation and individual initiative, therefore more likely to follow a strong leader who will guide them.