Quote:
Originally Posted by Egregious Philbin
Everyone, get on to ARS and keep posting this story.
The scilons are out in force, trying to hide the story and get their stats.
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There's a great story of social psych research that all scientologists in ARS should be aware of.
In the 60's, a woman named Kitty Genovese was walking home in new york city. In her apartment courtyard, she was attacked. She screamed for help, and 30-some people went to their windows and saw the crime.
None of them called the cops.
Her attacker (who had stabbed her by this point) ran away, frightened by the attention her screams brought. A few minutes later, when he realized nobody called the cops, he returned to finish her off.
A lot of people speculated that 'city life makes you hard', and figured everyone involved was an asshole. But one social scientist decided to replicate the scenario in small towns. When that many people witness something like that, they seem to do some interesting things.
First, they want to look like they know what they're doing, like they're not confused or frightened. So they put on a brave face and act confident. The next thing they do is look to others for social cues. They see everyone else putting on a brave face, acting confident, and doing nothing, and immediately think 'Good, I made the right choice.'
Odd thing is, if, instead of calling out for 'anybody' to help you, you point to a single bystander and say 'you sir, could you please help me?', the spell is broken. The bystander effect doesn't work if you single someone out.
But another researcher decided to change the experiment a little bit. He put 8 people in a room to take a 'personality test.' Of those 8 people, 7 were secretly confederates, working with the experimenter. They were told what would happen and how to act. The last person was the subject of the experiment.
As they were taking the tests, smoke began pouring under the door. The 7 confederates were instructed to ignore it, and keep taking the test. So the experimental subject did the same.
This is just one small example of how social pressures work - I won't use the word 'brainwashing', because that implies clockwork-orange, Manchurian-candidate-style
drugging and conditioning. Without using any of those methods, without depriving the subject of sleep or salt to screw up his thinking abilities, without hypnosis, the researcher successfully put the subject in a situation where they effectively committed suicide because of social pressure (obviously the smoke was non-hazardous, and the experiment was concluded without anybody getting hurt).