Psychological / social experiments and their impact

Some brief info:

> The Third Wave
In a Palo Alto highschool in 1967 a history teacher tried explaining his class how the regular German population accepted the actions of the Nazi regime during WWII. While teaching about Nazi Germany, he conducted a series of exercises in his class emphassizing discipline and a feeling of community, calling this "The Third Wave". He told his students that the aim was to eliminate democracy, as it worked the undesired quality of individuality in hand. He even added slogans, like "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride."

During this five day experiment he himself acted as an authority figure, dramatically increasing efficiency in class by seating arrangements and drilling techniques. He strenghthened a sense of community by creating a special gesture as a greeting, and ordered his students to even use this salutation amongst themselves outside the classroom. Soon, students from outside the class were recruited. Member cards were created, as was a designated "Third Wave" banner, while stopping non-members from entering the classroom.

The teacher soon decided to put a halt to his experiment as most students were taking the movement very seriously, and he felt the experiment was slipping out of his control. Academic prestations improved and their was a new sense of discipline, community and loyalty. At the fifth day he gathered his Third Wave moment to a rally to witness an announcement. Instead of an anticipated message from their leader, the students were presented an empty channel. After a few minutes he explained that they had all been a part of an experiment and that most of them willingly followed him as their new fascist leader, strengthened by a feeling of new superiority and pride, just like the majority of citizens did during Nazi Germany. He then played a film about the Nazi regime to conclude his experiment.

>>2420270

The teacher (Ron Jones) wrote an account on the experiment 9 years later as little was documented during the time of the experiment itself.

His experiment got more attention when the novel by another author, called "The Wave" was published. The 45 minute film "The Wave" (1981) can be viewed on Youtube. In 2005, "Die Welle" came out, also based on the experiment. Ron Jones later stated he was disappointed that the dramatization of his experiment included a couple in love which dismantled his experiment, on which he didn't agree: "It didn't happen that way! Love didn't stop The Wave and it sure didn't stop the Holocaust!"

"The Wave" (1981) on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPTsVjnGNZ8

From wikipedia:

> The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was an attempt to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison guards. It was conducted at Stanford University on August 14–20, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using college students.

Zimbardo and his team aimed to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. Participants were recruited and told they would participate in a two-week prison simulation. The team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy

Some participants developed their roles as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, by the guards' request, actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it. Zimbardo, in his role as the superintendent, allowed abuse to continue.

Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating (and later married), objected to the conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more than 50 people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks' duration, the experiment was discontinued.

From wikipedia:

> The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience; the experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, albeit unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress.

The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[3] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[4] The experiments have been repeated many times in the following years with consistent results within differing societies, although not with the same percentages around the globe.

>>2420390

Own description of the actual experiment:

Three people would participate in an experiment where one was strapped to an electric chair (an actor), one was dealing out the shocks (an unknowing volunteer) and one overseeing the experiment.

By drawing slips their roles were assigned. The actor's slip always read "learner", ending up in the electric chair. The two others had slips called "teacher", ensuring the volunteer would always be the one dealing out the shocks.

The "teachers" and the "learner" were placed in different rooms. The volunteer "teacher" was told to teach the actor in the electric chair a series of word pairs. The actor in the chair had to indicate his response through a button. If it was wrong, the volunteer was told to shock the "learner", where as the voltage was slowly increased.

>>2420394

Cont.

Now there were a few conditions to the experiment. First off, the electric chair wasn't hooked to any power; no actual shocks were dealt out. Naturally, the volunteer didn't know that. Also, before starting the experiment, the overseer would state that the "learner" in the chair had a heart condition.

After a number of supposed voltage increases, the actor would bang on the wall. He would loudly complain about his heart condition. After the experiment was continued, he would sit back in the chair. After a while all responses from the man in the chair would stop.

Only some volunteers wanted to stop the experiment (object to the authority figure, the overseer of the experiment) after a supposed increase of 135 volts. Most continued after being assured they would not be held responsible if anything would happen to the man in the chair.

Let me remind you that the overseer only showed his authority verbally by stating the following:

1: Please continue.
2: The experiment requires that you continue.
3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4: You have no other choice, you must go on.

Only if the volunteer wished to stop after all four successive sentences. the experiment was halted. If not, the experiment was only stopped after give the maximum of 3 shocks of 450 volt.

>>2420270

> people looking for social belonging become mindless circlejerkers of discrimination and supremacy

> /pol/

> Does anyone have any other examples of experiments like this?
> What are your opinions about doing these sort of experiments?
> Do you feel you would beat the experiment, or "fail" like the majority does?
> How does that make you feel?

One of my teachers threw my highschool class through a similar, but less drastic experiment. Will tell/greentext the story if anyone's interested in the topic. Honestly, it still haunts me to this day and I wonder if any of my other classmates feel the same. I don't dare asking any of them because I'm afraid what it would do to them if they realized how we were all scaled on a spectrum of good and evil, sane or insane, winner or loser, freedom fighter or nazi right there and then in our teens.

File: IMG_0261.png (20KB, 270x282px) Image search: [Google]

20KB, 270x282px

>mfw the Eternal Neurotypical will continue his atrocities until the end of history, purely on the perceived needs and ideals of the group to which he feels a sense of belonging

mass autism is the only way out

>>2420437

If this is true I'll gladly move to /pol/, and then we let this thread autosage

>>2420456
Do tell, anon.

>>2420437

I just visited /pol/ (which I never frequent) and am more than a little discouraged by the often mindless, one-shot topics, as opposed to /his/. As this board also welcomes other "humanities" like philosophy and anthropology, I feel my topic might best be stalled here, if there's interested in the subject.

>>2420212
>The Rosenhan Experiment
Made to expose the flawed methods of diagnose and also the subjective nature of psychological interpretation.

Google it, I can't be arsed to explain it in detail nor would I do it the justice it deserves.

>>2420568

This is truly disturbing, probably especially for anyone who's ever been in touch with a professional to get mental help.

>>2420477

We got subjected to a small "the wave" / authoritarian experiment in social studies class in highschool. We all knew this teacher was a bit of a nutjob, but we liked him nonetheless. He was really straightforward, open about controversial topics, and really had a heart for whatever he was teaching (from subjects from drugs to warcrimes).

Before the experiment, he actually showed us "The Wave" (that movie from 1981). It was sort of a side road from a very bland topic in our textbook, bullying or something, which he (as usual) spiced up with some of his own knowledge and snippets. We were all baffled that something like what happened in the movie could occur so easily, all heavily convinced this would never happen to us. Being European we all knew WWII up close from our grandparents and the fascism behind it seemed another era, something impossible at this day and age. I even vaguely remember our teacher asking the class how we would respond if someone would test us like in the movie, but we were all dead confident we'd pass without effort.

About a month later we were working on another topic and nobody even thought about his detour from bullying to The Third Wave anymore (in fact, by that time he showed us 14 year olds his assorted footage of war gore, a VHS where among other things, people in vietnam were being shot in the face). We went to class as usual.

John Money's experiment on the Reimer twins

>>2420645

(cont.)

We all got a testpaper in front of us with 10 fairly to really easy questions. He presented it as an IQ test and we all set to work. We were ready within 10 minutes, and then the teacher was going to talk us through the right answers.

At some point we came to a question which was easiest of all: "Measure this line on the paper". We all got our rulers and measured it, because how on earth could you mess that up? But one boy, a popular one at that (being very nice, sociable and good looking) did get it wrong. All of us measured the line to be 9cm, but he said he measured 8cm.

Another boy (also rather popular, but also known to be a bit of a bully and annoying at times) started laughing at him. "You idiot, how could you get that wrong? You can measure, can't you?"

The teacher actually jumped in, making funny faces at people personally to encourage them to laugh at the boy. The "bully" kept mocking the guy who got the answer wrong, and even started rowing up the class. The teacher did nothing to stop him, he even started calling the boy names. Who all took it, I might add, as a sport.

I got to admit, I still take great pride in that I loudly exclaimed we should act normal to the guy who had the wrong answer, and it was stupid to make such a problem about something like that. In the meanwhile the whole class were acting like monkeys, jumping on chairs, calling this guy a mongoloid, acting like total assholes while being encouraged by our teacher, while I was trying to get the boy's ruler to see if he wasn't accidentally measuring in decimeters or inches or something.

Then the teacher calmed the class down and checked the rest of our answers, still snickering about the question with the ruler.

>>2420719

(cont.)

When all answers were checked, we all got a perfect 10 for answering the questions, except for the guy who measured that 8cm line. And then he also added he did a little experiment on us. He let the two guys explain what they had done:

He asked both the popular guy and the "bully" to come to class early. He then told them we'd all get a test, but that the popular guy would get a different score sheet, with one question which answer would differ from the rest of the class (in this case, he had an 8cm line to measure, while the rest had a 9cm line on their test papers). The bully was simply encouraged to make a complete scene out of it.

The teacher added he wanted to "see how bullying and peer pressure would affect the class". Everyone was a little taken back by this experiment, but everyone swore that they never really meant anything malicious by it when they were calling him names and acting like idiots. And that was that. I only then understood why the teacher was giving me interested and meaningful looks while I was yelling we should check the guy's ruler.

And I seemed the only one to remember that fucking "The Wave" movie afterwards. I was pretty baffled and knew I wasn't getting something, or that my classmates weren't getting something; I just knew something serious had just gone on. Class ended a few minutes later and I rushed to a couple of seniors I usually hung out with during break. I told them about what had happened in class, and one of them immediately said, "oh yeah that experiment, yeah dude that was seriously fucked up, but at least I passed". Appareantly this teacher didn't conduct the experiment in all his classes; I guess only the ones he felt were suitable in some way.

>>2420790

(cont.) It took me years to finally realize that what had happened, was pretty dang unethical. First I took pride in that "I passed" like my senior friend had stated so proudly, but that meant that the rest of my classmates (which included my friends) didn't pass. And concerning my "passing of the test", how great did I really do? In my naitivity, I was still thinking this boy's ruler must have been broken; I feel I should have made more of an effort to make sure the class would stop picking on the him instead. I was trying to prove he must have been right in the end, rather than defending him unconditionally.

We're more than a decade ahead and I'm still bothered that I've been experimented on involuntarily, in such a casual way, in fact in such a similar way as in some of the world's most controversial psychological tests which point out human weaknesses. I feel this teacher has rubbed all our faces into the facts and although this was simplified test, it doesn't differ so much from the other experiments I mentioned in this thread.

And this is how conflicted I feel, even though I did "well". I sincerely hope my classmates forgot all about this experiment and it's actual context, because how would you live with yourself knowing you failed the test miserably? Better yet, how do the volunteers in the Milgram Experiment manage to live with themselves, knowing they could have given 450V shock therapy to a heart patient, only because some guy told them to?