You think government and corporate corruption is depressing? The economic meltdown? Rick Warren?
Well, check this out:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some things never change. Scientists said on Friday they had replicated an experiment in which people obediently delivered painful shocks to others if encouraged to do so by authority figures.
Seventy percent of volunteers continued to administer electrical shocks -- or at least they believed they were doing so -- even after an actor claimed they were painful, Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University in California found.
The study replicated the infamous Milgram Experiment of 1961, which studied people's willingness to inflict severe pain on others when ordered to do so by authority figures. The pretext for punishment was deliberately minimal - those who answered a quiz question incorrectly were given electric shocks.
Milgram found that, after hearing an actor cry out in pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks, most to the maximum 450 volts.
That was 1961, an era, presumably, of greater conformity, fear of/respect for authority and blindness to basic human rights - we hadn't even passed the Civil Rights Act yet. One might expect that people today, with the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo still fresh in their minds, would be less inclined to torture a fellow human being for something as innocuous as answering a question incorrectly.
No such luck.
In Burger's modified experiment, 70 percent of the volunteers were willing to give shocks greater than 150 volts.
I don't know about you guys, but this blows my fucking mind. And get this - even when they brought in a volunteer who'd been instructed to vociferously refuse to deliver further shocks, 63 percent of the participants continued administering shocks past 150 volts.
Burger found no differences among his volunteers, aged 20 to 81, and carefully screened them to be average representatives of the U.S. public.
"That was surprising and disappointing," Burger said.
Now if that's not the understatement of the millennium, I don't know what is. One datum I'd really like to have is how many of these people would have said, prior to submitting to the experiment, that they would never torture anyone? I absolutely know I wouldn't, not even if they threatened me with torture. I wonder though, how many among that 70% would have said the same thing?
Anyway, a holiday toast: Here's to believing that if the test were administered to Kossacks, those horrible numbers would drop to 0% where they belong.