Saturday, September 30, 2006

Torture and The Human Behaviour Experiments

HI, my name is Candy and welcome to Mister Anchovy's blog. I am going to blog sit while he and Tuffy P are away from blogland. Sorry to start out with such a heavy topic, but the following is in response to the tome of Mister Anchovy's last post.

Coincidently, regarding Mister Anchovy's last post about the RCMP not supporting the rescue from Syrian torture of a Canadian citizen, Stagg and I watched The Human Behaviour Experiments. The documentary focued on a couple of famous experiemnts done in university Psychology course in the 1970's. One of these experiemnts was conducted by Stanley Milgram, and chances are, if you have taken any psych courses in school, you would have seen film on this project. People were directed to ask another person questions, and when that person answered incorrectly, the interogator was to give the an electronic jolt. Of course, the interviewee was an actor, with a hideen tape recorder playing terrible grunts and then screams and protestations that accelerated during the interogation. Meanwhile, a supervisor encouraged and demanded that the interviewer remaiin focused on punishing the interviewee.

The movie also interviews a Standford professor, his former girlfriend and participants of a prison system experiment in contemporary timeframe.. The footage is incredible. A dozen or more, volunteer paid students are divied into prison guards and inmates. The situation within hours is disturbingly familiar. Abu Garaib.

The link above will allow you to see two little clips from this documentary. the filmakers also have made the documentary "Enron".

One of the conclusions of this movie and the interviews seem to find that under orders and certain rules people will be so polite, or submissive they will not step up and refuse to participate. A group mentality and fear of standign up or breaking group dynamic is shown that people will even sit with smoke and fire coming under a door while filling out paperwork. If the person is alone, they will seek help. But in a group, they seem to wait for someone else to step in.

Here is Karen's review of the movie too!

6 comments:

Karen said...

Oooh! What a surprise! Howdy Candy (and Stagg). I recently watched the "Human Behaviour Experiments" on CBC and posted about it too. I just checked out my post and you commented there...sheesh, I'm so not with it today. Glad that you were finally able to see it. What did you think of it?

Candy Minx said...

Hi Karen, I tried to find your poston this movie, but couldn't. Can you give me the link? Please? I want to read it again...I thought this was a good movie. I think everyone would get something out of it.

Karen said...

Here you go...I hope this works:

http://canuckhockeygirl.blogspot.com/2006/09/human-behavior-experiments.html

Radmila said...

I heard the expose on CBC radio earlier this month.
It's too bad that Stanley never got the money to study those people who refused.

Candy Minx said...

Radmilla, that is an excellent point. I agree, studying the people who wouldn't participate would be now, much more interesting. In this doc, the researchers said, being a hero is very very rare in the population. Most people go for the group dynamic. And refusing to participate, while believing they were hurting people, is rare.

Karen said...

As Candy said, that's an excellent point Radmilla. I wondered how many of the participants had refused but in the docu they never seemed to mention them.

Candy, thanks for the link! WOo hoo!