"The ability to disobey toxic orders is a skill that can be learned like any other—all a person needs to learn is what to say"
"Others continued shocking even as the victim pled for mercy, yelled a warning about his heart condition—and then fell alarmingly silent."
I've been remembering this study often lately. I took a course on human behavior one semester and there was no mention of this study (or Stockholm syndrome, either now that i think about it). It is interesting what the curriculum omits....Or perhaps they just don't find it that important.
For anyone unfamiliar...essentially they hired people to for a social experiment...paid them $75 bucks to push a buzzer that would shock the "patient". They were told to keep pushing it until they were told not to (by the authority figure). These patients would begin to cry out in pain...and they'd still continue pushing the buzzer, anyway. It turns out that the ones pushing the buzzer were the real test subjects...The "patients" were actors. They wanted to see how people responded to order following vs. compassion, I guess. The results were disturbing, though not surprising...to me.
Here's a great song based on this experiment "Buzzer" Dar Williams
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