Slashdot Mirror

Treat people like law enforcement, and what do they behave like?

It was already done in 1971, called Stanford Prison Experiment. You can even buy the video for it.

Are you claiming that the Nazis were normal people except the part about rounding up Jewish people???

Yes. Milgram Experiment. Stanford Prison Experiment.

This was perhaps best summed up by Lord Acton: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If you did not yet hear about or read these sites :

Read how a Baghdad citizen felt about the preparations and during the war Salam Pax - Where is Raed ?.

Read about an Iraqi girl who lost her job and her hope for the future Riverbend - Baghdad Burning.

Read what an Iraqi female engineer tells about what's happening in Bagdad now A Family in Baghdad.

Read what an Iraqi architect has to say Raed in the Middle.

And in a slightly related note :

The Stanford Prison Experiment documents an experiment that had to be aborted after only 6 days, because of abuses.

most importantly, had you or the person you responded to been living in nazi germany, you would've probably done the same. Just see the Milgram experiments ...

Phil Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment is more directly applicable.

PSYCHOLOGY: Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities." [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.

Philip Zimbardo made an earlier contribution to ignoble research with his notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. From the page: "Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress." Harrowing reading.

The prison experiment is very insteresting b/c is shows just how much the environment can affect actions and attitude. A quick google shows a whole site devoted to it here.

You mean people have a natural propensity to do what their told, even flying in the face of reason?
Even seemingly flying in the face of "humanity"?
Looks like Milgran and the Stanford Prison Experiment were on the money...

It was all a pile of bullshit. Had I been raised with less attentive parents who had guns around, I could easily have snapped and tried killing them... I sure fantasized about it (and certainly about beating them up) a lot. There was a point in jr. high where I started trying to fight everyone, and that didn't work because I was an underdeveloped wuss in addition to being a dweeby loser who wore hand-me down bellbottoms and had poor personal hygiene. Everyone who's been really abused in school knows that it's never "all in fun". "Making fun" is the wrong phrase; it's "Verbal/emotional/physical abuse", and it's perceived of as "normal" and kids "just being kids". And that's all fine, until someone puts an eye out.

You can't tell me for one second that Klebold and Harris deserve 100% of the blame. Obviously they crossed the line, but sucking down years of abuse at the hands of callous and uncaring people (jocks or otherwise) will turn anyone into a bitter, angry, and confused animal. I don't believe the kids they killed deserved to die, but I think it's disgusting how that community continues to scapegoat Doom and Marylin Manson and others, wave their little crosses around and look to Gawd for inspiration in these troubled times... and NO ONE will address the major factors: that their parents were utterly negligent, and that the Lord of the Flies style society that forms in EVERY school in this COUNTRY created two people who were wired just right to snap.

Parental intattention created the opportunity in Klebold and Harris, and years of brutalization created the motivation. subtract either, and chances are that the Columbine massacre doesn't happen. Why, then, is it so hard for these people to see past their own noses? They hide behind Christianity and absolutely refuse to look for the root of the problem. And they call Klebold and Harris PSYCHOPATHS because that's the easiest thing to do. Every reaction to this tragedy has been the authorities taking the easy path. You all read it in the "Hellmouth" series. It's all bullshit. Until someone prominent steps out and says "where were the parents? And where were the teachers? Why is this school functioning like a prison?", the authorities will keep on making the same mistakes. And labeling Klebold and Harris as PSYCHOPATHS because they couldn't take being fucked with for another year is stupid, narrow-minded and hateful.

I'm not a professional in the field either, but there is an interesting aspect in the psychological side of being in power.
There was an interesting article in the "Spiegel" news magazine about how people in charge tend to consider themselves as smarter than their employees/team members.
I've seen this myself in a former colleague: from the time he went from "normal" team member to team leader, he also became increasingly arrogant.
In many cases, the newly promoted bosses also act more agressively. An extreme example is described in
The Stanford Prison Experiment.
In this experiment, a group of 24 students was split at random into guards and prisoners. The guards soon turned into HUGE assholes...

>Anybody with the ability to create this kind of system must be able to see the terrible implications of its use. Who, being of sound mind and technological intellect would voluntarily work to the potential end that this paper has predicted? Maybe I can say this as a mere undergrad not yet out in the workforce, but there must be some sort of job consiousness in everybody. Am I completely wrong?
There will be no Nuremberg trial for these brave, bold innovators of technology, and apparently you also forgot about the Stanford Prison Experiment. But it's OK, we all have brainfarts from time to time.
That analogue too much for you to pull? See also: Milgram's experiments in obedience done around the time of the aforementioned Nuremberg trials.
If you're having an ADD day, let me sum up: otherwise good, rational people can do otherwise inexplicably horrific, evil things because someone told them to do it.
Lack of authority and the desire to keep your family fed are powerfully motivating forces; even if they can't find anyone over here to do the engineering for them (they can) then they can always look overseas and import smart, cheap labor. You can thank the US government for quietly and markedly increasing immigration visas from places like India and Russia while decrying the GREAT MEXICAN EVIL later.

Also check out the stanford prison experiment: www.prisonexp.org
The ability of people, experimenters included, to get caught up in games of control is chilling.