Three experiments

There are three experiments in social psychology that have horrified and intrigued me ever since I first read about them. These are - The Stanley Milgram Experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and The Solomon Asch Experiment.

(*There are plenty of other websites other than the one that I've highlighted, which deal with these three experiments.)

The first experiment looked into the problem of 'obedience', and how far people would go to obey orders coming from someone (a 'scientist') working in a respectable university.

The second looked into roles and their 'power' over individuals - even when the roles adopted were essentially 'fake'.

The third of the lot seems on the surface to be rather staid in comparison to the other two, since it wasn't ostensibly looking into the underlying aspects of cruelty and abuse but was simply investigating the aspect of conformity and how far people would conform to what a group (of people) was saying even though the individual had all the reason to believe that the group as a whole was dotty, blind or had at the very least severe visual deficiencies. There's one very short video clip available on youtube here, and there is something grimly humorous about it.

Each of the experiments raised many contentions and later on ethical concerns as well, and of course some people may say that the 'samples' were not large enough. There may be some seven hundred and seventy-seven other problems with all three of the studies. That's all fine.

Yet there is enough in the world to show us that the experiments were not completely off the mark. Yet while the aspects of obedience, roles, and conformity do provide clues as to how and why humans act the way they do - what still remains a mystery to me is why/how some people choose not to engage in barbaric, cruel, and inhumane behaviour no matter what. What accounts for this difference? It's all very well for sociologists and social psychologists to be looking into environmental factors in order to explain why people act in horrible ways, and to say that good people can be bad because of external factors. But that's precisely it. Good people - really good people do not go and torture human beings. That's what being good means. Not being a goody-goody two-shoes but being really good. And being really good takes an enormous amount of courage. Standing apart from the crowd takes some doing.

I could keep writing but I'll end this post for now. The next couple of posts (at least) will break off from this path.