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Electric Shock Study Suggests We'd Rather Hurt Ourselves Than Others
sciencehabit writes: If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do you think you'd be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to anonymous victims when asked by a scientist. But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other people's well-being than their own. It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.
Shocking.
My guess is these were all volunteers participating in the study "for science?"
My guess is that introduces a selection bias towards altruism. Test any of the several thousand people I've worked for, with, or very near over the past 20 years and I would guess that most of them wouldn't hesitate to shock the other person as much as was allowed, especially if they could be relatively certain the other person could not shock them back as a direct response.
“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”
The article has a bit more info.
Spoiler alert: the shock is calibrated to each person to be "painful but not intolerable", and it's about 30 cents a shock for yourself or 60 cents a shock to others.
There may be an initial threshold -- my understanding is that the question would be something like:
"Would you rather be shocked 10 times and get $7 or shocked 20 times and get $9", or "Would you rather be shocked 5 times for $5 or have this chick get shocked 3 times for $4", not necessarily giving a 0 shocks = $0 option.