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It should look suspicious, but the fact that they weren't suspicious further demonstrates the power of authority figures.



Maybe they were suspicious but saying something would have jeopardized whatever they were getting paid for their participation.


[rolls eyes]

You've never heard of that experiment before? It's your canonical "How easily can we turn people into Nazis test". If people tortured others for a research fee, then that would be a very interesting finding, but typically they continue because of dog-like obedience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e02xGc-K0c

Real life example of similar phenomena:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_Search_Prank_Call_Scam

Anyway, I prefered the puppy-torture case. Quite interesting that women are more willing to torture puppies than men. I wish they had used larger samples.


Yes, I have heard of it. I'm just pointing out that it is strange for the experimenter to ask for help doing something that he could have easily done himself. So it looks suspicious.

Perhaps a better experiment would involve two people playing a game with shocks given whenever a bad move is made. Mild shocks would be given to the participant early on while the other player would intentionally play poorly later to receive (fake) severe shocks.


...someone familiar with pyschological testing would have questioned a lot of things, yes. But if you watch the video above, you'll see that person was very ordinary. Probably most of the subjects were the same.




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