WOW, that's going to come in handy when some government decides to weaponize it.
Even considering the underreporting with young, high school athletes, a large number of young football players in the US have suffered concussions[1] at a very young age when their brains are developing, and that's with equipment that we can reasonably assume is designed with safety in mind. If a nefarious government were to try to promote a sport, which had rules and equipment that lead to a higher risk of brain injury, and cultivated an image/environment that elevates "toughness"(not complaining when you feel you've been injured; a significant fraction (~16%) of high school football players continue to play even after being hit hard enough to lose consciousness, so that attitude is there, just need to bump the number up), that might get you close.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussions_in_American_footba...
I don't seriously think the gov't is out to do this, but there are possibly ways to do it without leaving outward physical traces.
I have no doubt that some people in the mental health care industry have entertained thoughts about how some mental health care medications can be used to make people more docile and obedient.
I'm not saying that is the intent. But the fact that such people have that kind of power without necessarily having all the checks and balances in place needed to ensure such scenarios do not occur, is concerning. At the very least, there should be ways to provide easy and accessible ways victims of such circumstance may challenge such treatment.
There often aren't ways, because once you are labeled crazy, most people in the mental health care industry think they know what is better for you than you do.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Meaning, it's easy to exploit a power dynamic when society assumes one side is good, and one side is bad.
I'm trying to be very delicate in my phrasing, because this is not a conspiracy theory. People can and do exploit such circumstance and pad it over with good intentions. And challenging these types of situations requires extensive care, rigor, and transparency - and a willingness to look at oneself from all perspectives.
And that's often a very difficult thing to do, for anyone.
When people are forced to examine themselves from sides that only tell them everything negative about them, the individual ego fights to survive. This is the case for anyone who has experienced stigma and discrimination. The choice is always, obey or be punished. And that's not fair, because the judgements that lead to these decisions are often collected from a one sided perspective.
It's a hard problem, but it needs to be discussed. I personally hate having this problem bottled up in my head. Because I know, how easy it is, to sway it back to good intent. Intentions are garbage if people keep judging you and placing you beneath them. Actions matter. Even if those actions are as simple as, judging less.
Honestly, I think most conspiracy theories stem from people's real life experiences, but because of judgement, disbelief, and stigma - the truth mutates. The moral of the story is retained, but the person dissociates from the trauma of not being believed and being mistreated, over and over again.
People can easily become convinced that they have little recourse or options left. It's not always brain damage. Sometimes it's just getting stuck in a pattern of perpetually perceiving judgement from everyone around them. I personally don't know if having to think that way changes the structure of the brain. Furthemore, I don't know if having the brain restructured in such a way indicates anything defective. It may just be different.
The BBC is at one level all about free speech, uniquely funded and good for you. At another level it is deeply tied into the military establishment in the UK. Since the beginning job applicants have had to pass the Room 101 test and that is a real thing - any socialist types simply did not get employed. They would not be blacklisted and unable to work in the industry, however, the commercial channels (ITV) did not pay for training, you had to get that from the BBC and then you could work elsewhere thanks to that experience.
To quote Napoleon (the old enemy) "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." The BBC has approximately four TV channels that shape the minds of the British public. Consequently people in the UK are highly invested in a set of ideas that cannot be thrown out on a wholesale basis.
From time to time there will be high profile events that get reported by the BBC in a way that is not consistent with facts on the ground. Yet people will attend such an event, go home and, despite seeing events with their own eyes, decide that they must have understood the situation incorrectly to believe what 'Auntie BBC' said, to then take that on as the 'correct' interpretation of events.
To think otherwise, i.e. to 'believe' one's own eyes requires a subversive mindset or, as is more likely to be the case, a conspiracy minded mindset where everything from moon landings to flouride is up for reinterpretation. We have all met those types of people - 'nutters' - so those that did see something different to the reported story learn not to say what they saw with their own eyes. To do so would cast them out of the herd and in with the 'nutter herd'. We are social animals and being outcast like that is worse than death.
If someone who happens to be sane does relate 'what they saw with their own eyes' to the rest of the herd then it is unlikely that members of the wider herd are going to believe them even if they do not come along with 'moon landings/contrails/whatever' baggage. This is because they are highly invested in the BBC world view and the latitude that it allows. The spectrum will range from Hillary to Trump but not as far as Bernie. Bernie is mainstream, but you get the idea. It is a fixed stage, outside this allowed latitude there will be terrorists and the KKK. The voice of protest will be allowed in this Overton Window with people such as Russell Brand or, in times gone past, Tony Benn. These folk don't have to be 'covert CIA operatives acting as gatekeepers', they just operate within the same Overton Window as everyone else, playing their role quite naturally, the sponges for dissenting voices that don't go along with whomever is in Number 10.
The implications of going with the BBC world view are generally good. You can go on anti-Trump protests posting your pics onto Instagram so everyone knows you are solidly against racism and whatever else it is easy to object to. There is no danger of being cast outside the herd.
The BBC has a veritable 'full spectrum dominance' with radio all around the world, the web as well as their mainstay 'free to air, advert free' television. Britain might not rule the waves any more but the airwaves are doing nicely.
I have not given any incident of where reality and BBC reality differ, however, people that suffered at Hillsborough, people that lived through the miner's strike, people that were there at Bloody Sunday, people that were abused by BBC 'disc jockeys' have had this problem to live with. Due to injustice they have had to 'rebel'. Nobody could speak out about the 'disc jockey' whose name we do not speak of until he died and was buried under six foot of concrete (he knew that his grave would not lay undisturbed). Yet everyone in the BBC knew. And in the wider press. And he was only a 'disc jockey' without any nuclear weapons or henchmen.
Hence, in the UK at least, the BBC is how the government has weaponised 'mind control' and made questioning authority not something one does. People just do not have the mindset to do so as they have been encultured to be British.
It's a pretty sloppy to assume that they believed this because of an authority figure.
Even non-conformists conform. It's just a blind spot because you don't know how to actually see that you are continuously behaving in a particular way, that rigorously adheres to some behavior that has yet to be described or defined. I can be a non-conformist by always doing the opposite of what everyone I observe does. I'm still conforming to a pattern, that's capable of being studied, followed, predicted, and eventually, that pattern will have to change too, to remain true to some spirit of non-conformity, if that's my highest value.
Thankfully it's not. But authority, conformity, group think, individuality. There's more than one way to see it. Psychology is a sloppy science because people can always change these things. Just have to analyze it enough, detect the pattern of being detected, and override it.
People being able to be individuals without an all seeing eye of meticulous study is important to me. That can be mentally fatiguing for plenty of people. I don't know if it matters how important their belief in the study is, if the means contradicts the intention. Life is ridiculous.
Asking a person to assign negative terms to photos is as consequential as asking them to whistle or drum their fingers on a desk. It is meaningless and utterly amoral in content. We're not talking about even applying the terms to actual people, but to images. And they're not being monitored or published. There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and totally meaningless.
> There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and totally meaningless.
There are a million subtle ways to influence behavior and thinking. It's very likely that the scientists aren't able to properly measure the effects (because it's hard to isolate the control variables), but the resulting knowledge won't be zero. I agree with you that many scientists overestimate their understanding of the underlying mechanisms - IMO it's still too much hand-waving - in reality our knowledge about social psychology is very limited.
The discomfort is partly because you can make yourself like or hate people you don't know personally and trying to come up with bad/good things to say about them is one approach how to do it. You start process insulting them and you can see yourself starting to feel differently and some might feel good about the process and where it leads.
You know how people close themselves into bubbles that says only bad things about some outside group and then become to genuinely hate that outside group? It is the same, but is small scale, temporary limited and easier to detect.
For instance, why are most schools so regimented and rule-rich? For efficiency, certainly, but not all school rules increased efficiency. I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.
If it existed, it seems like there would be evidence of this, in the literatures of educational research, training, and school management. I doubt there is conspiracy of school principals.
Schools are bureaucracies, and like every bureaucracy they have rules, often rules that seem nonsensical to people who haven't had to manage one. People feel like companies and other organizations are overly regimented too.
School doesn’t have a singular purpose because there’s no one out there who designed it but learning definitely isn’t in the top five things it does. The people who did design the progenitor of modern school systems designed it to get people to sit down, shut up and do as they were told, and to love the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.ht...
Whereas I thought anxiety (or lack of) was first order predictor someone's behavior (eg conservative vs liberal), I now think the root is someone's fear response.
Reformulated: fear -> anxiety -> (submission to) authority
> To be successful in pretty much anything requires discipline and some level of regimented behaviour.
There's no evidence to confirm this statement, even though it may sound like common sense.
And this post reads odd. The current school model is very old. If schools exist to instill discipline, and discipline is required for success, I'd expect everyone to be super successful right now.
Nonsense. Sure everything stems from chemical processes in our bodies, including the brain -- of course. But they breed the bravery, courage, confidence and stubbornness. I don't see why we must contrast these two things. They have a one-directional causation link between them.
I mean it's not like a deferrence to authority allows human beings to coordinate and work together efficiently. Hierarchies are totally inefficient ways to work together and get things done.
/s
EDIT: A paper that is very much worth reading: https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy
The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and 'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and denigrate any attempts to change it.
This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about oneself and ones' own values.
So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high expectations won't help us, anyway.
- - -
I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can happen pretty fast.
b) The Stanford Prison Experiment has always been under a ton of scrutiny, and is a good example of flashy events heavily covered in intro psych courses that are viewed with a lot more skepticism in the professional community (so I have read, anyway).
c) More info recently came out about it recently, actually: https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-sciences/new-evidence-show...
d) Repetition of scientific findings is one of the main pillars of science. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
But more relevantly, this experiment was not attempting to "demonstrate" the effect. It was attempting to better understand the effect. That, in particular, is research that we badly need.
(PS: I'm defending the idea of performing this sort of experiment, not the specific experimental protocol followed. In particular, I question whether applying negative judgements to people is actually a valid proxy for causing harm.)
You also cant assume that 1933 Germans would react the same way to the authority then 2018 Dutch.
"hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large proportion if not all humans. That's why we've had so many wars in the history, bullys at school and abuse in generally ANY UNREGULATED ENVIRONEMENT (chrisitan schools in the 50s in france for example, prisons and in some way even the weinstein compagny). That's also why a lot of us love watching MMA, boxing, and why many people love, even secretly because society doesn't acknowledge this feeling, going at war [1].
We can argue all day whether it stems from a domination instinct, a fear of our own weakness or how this instincs have to be channeled into a more constructive force / healthy contribution for society but the point is that this instinct exists... probably in most persons.
At some point i suspect most participants in milgram experiment switched from the "this is horrible" voice in their head to the "my feelings tells me it's not horrible I feel in power it's cool I almost like it plus there's authority so i wont get punished so it's fine". It's not so much of a big deal.
[1] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-lo...
> "hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large proportion if not all humans.
Many societies convince themselves that they are civilized and others are not.
