Post by Laurasia on Dec 23, 2011 15:39:49 GMT -5
Hello everyone.
While scanning through the TV channels the other night I came across a very interesting documentary by Eli Roth called "How Evil Are You?" In it the ran tests to see just how far people were willing to comply with orders from an authority figure when what they were doing was causing someone else physical pain. For the test they "hired people" to help with a behavioral test to see if a participants' memory worked better after being electrically shocked for not remembering something correctly. The shock doses started small & gradually became stronger with each wrong answer. The "hired people" administered these shocks to the participants (who were actually workers for the documentary & were NOT actually being shocked) via a machine from a neighboring room. Incredibly about 77% followed orders, even if they were uncomfortable with doing so & regardless of the participants pleading for the experiment to stop. They were not threatened into continuing to administer the shocks in any way. They were simply told repeatedly, by what they thought was an authority figure, that it was necessary for them to continue on with the experiment.
Later in the program the ran the same test again (with different subjects of course), but in a slightly different way. In this case the person worked alongside someone else who was "administering the shocks". They did not know it but the person "administering the shocks" was actually an actor. They were led to believe that this was simply a fellow employee. After the shocks got to a high enough level the actor suddenly decides to refuse to continue on, leaving the test subject responsible for administering the shocks. In all cases, when someone else refused to follow orders & was not punished for doing so, they also refused to carry on with the experiment.
There was also a portion in the middle of the program where they did brain wave scans of Eli Roth as he looked at various types of scenes. Some were neutral or pleasant while others (such as scenes of Nazi death camps) were explicitly violent & disturbing. They showed Eli an image of his brain wave activity while he was looking at pleasant or neutral imagery & explained where the empathetic sections of the brain were fired up, as they should be. Eli then pointed to a brain scan in which those empathetic areas of the brain were completely inactive & asked what that was. The scientist explained that that scan was the brain scan of a psychopath......but that it was also Eli's. That particular brain scan had been taken while Eli was being inundated with extremely violent &/or horrific images. Though he is a perfectly normal & healthy human being, the empathetic sections of his brain had stopped firing after being exposed to such images for a time. It makes one wonder about what it would do to a person being literally surrounded by such things constantly.
While the documentary was not specifically geared towards the Holocaust & how it was able to happen at all, I could not help but constantly think of it. It was a really great documentary & I would encourage everyone to see it at least once. It just proves that, yes, otherwise "normal people" can be influenced to do &/or tolerate some very heinous things.
Sincerely,
Laurasia
While scanning through the TV channels the other night I came across a very interesting documentary by Eli Roth called "How Evil Are You?" In it the ran tests to see just how far people were willing to comply with orders from an authority figure when what they were doing was causing someone else physical pain. For the test they "hired people" to help with a behavioral test to see if a participants' memory worked better after being electrically shocked for not remembering something correctly. The shock doses started small & gradually became stronger with each wrong answer. The "hired people" administered these shocks to the participants (who were actually workers for the documentary & were NOT actually being shocked) via a machine from a neighboring room. Incredibly about 77% followed orders, even if they were uncomfortable with doing so & regardless of the participants pleading for the experiment to stop. They were not threatened into continuing to administer the shocks in any way. They were simply told repeatedly, by what they thought was an authority figure, that it was necessary for them to continue on with the experiment.
Later in the program the ran the same test again (with different subjects of course), but in a slightly different way. In this case the person worked alongside someone else who was "administering the shocks". They did not know it but the person "administering the shocks" was actually an actor. They were led to believe that this was simply a fellow employee. After the shocks got to a high enough level the actor suddenly decides to refuse to continue on, leaving the test subject responsible for administering the shocks. In all cases, when someone else refused to follow orders & was not punished for doing so, they also refused to carry on with the experiment.
There was also a portion in the middle of the program where they did brain wave scans of Eli Roth as he looked at various types of scenes. Some were neutral or pleasant while others (such as scenes of Nazi death camps) were explicitly violent & disturbing. They showed Eli an image of his brain wave activity while he was looking at pleasant or neutral imagery & explained where the empathetic sections of the brain were fired up, as they should be. Eli then pointed to a brain scan in which those empathetic areas of the brain were completely inactive & asked what that was. The scientist explained that that scan was the brain scan of a psychopath......but that it was also Eli's. That particular brain scan had been taken while Eli was being inundated with extremely violent &/or horrific images. Though he is a perfectly normal & healthy human being, the empathetic sections of his brain had stopped firing after being exposed to such images for a time. It makes one wonder about what it would do to a person being literally surrounded by such things constantly.
While the documentary was not specifically geared towards the Holocaust & how it was able to happen at all, I could not help but constantly think of it. It was a really great documentary & I would encourage everyone to see it at least once. It just proves that, yes, otherwise "normal people" can be influenced to do &/or tolerate some very heinous things.
Sincerely,
Laurasia
