Good stuff. Imagine what people in power can do when they can employ teams of experts to use this knowledge against the rest of us.

The best way to defend yourself against this is to know it yourself.

It's kind of like in Jungian psychology, we become actualized individuals when we recognize our 'shadow' the ego's inverted twin--those naughty, perverse, wicked parts of ourselves and become at peace with them, incorporating them into our being.

In the same way an individual go through this, I really think human kind will do this same process when it will reach a critical point.

So yes, a lot of pain, hatred will come out of it.

I'm afraid I must agree with this citation I see a lot which apear to be from Einstein, something about WW4 will be fought with sticks and rocks.

But yeah, great time after that.

Cosigned. Humanity will eventually start reaching enlightenment and engineered humans 2.0 will start being born one day after A.I. tech reverse engineers human genetics. Think super IQ's, health, height, strength, etc.

Also I believe we will figure out Matrix technology for the brain and will be able to download Enlightenment directly, and this is what will be the ultimate last battle: The Enlightened Ones vs. The 1%'er war mongers

OK so the first two are very interesting and sort of form a foundation for the rest of your post.

For the first one, the Milgram Experiments have a lot of interesting information with the actual experiments. For one, he left out a lot of qualitative information about the experiment. From his conclusions, we are led to believe that people just obeyed, but reality is quite a bit more nuanced. But most importantly of all, knowledge of the Milgram Experiments conveys a high degree of immunity to authoritarian direction. I am having some trouble finding the replications that showed this effect, but this replication in 2009 had to specifically exclude people who had taken psychology courses or who indicated knowledge of the Milgram experiment.

So. Teach people about the obedience bias exposed by the Milgram experiments and they gain an ability to compensate for that bias. Pretty freaking cool, if you ask me.

The second one is a little more interesting. I don't know if anyone has really dug down into why the Stanford Prison Experiment went so badly wrong. However, in the last few years, I've been watching a steady stream of articles on the "psychology of power" and this seems to potentially explain what we saw. In essence, when you give someone power over others, it removes their ability to empathize and turns them into a sociopath. For the people without power, it generates depression and anxiety, and actually reduces their level of brain activity. This applies to any power relationship, whether romantic, business, or political. Here's a quote from an article about power dynamics in personal relationships from Psychology Today:

The possession of power changes powerholders—usually in ways invisible to them—by triggering activation of the behavioral approach system, based in the left frontal cortex and fueled by the neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s automatic. Nevertheless, it makes powerful people quick to act on appetites, to detect opportunities for material and social rewards such as food, money, attention, sex, and approval. They think about sex more and flirt more flagrantly. Poorly attuned to others, they pay little attention to others’ feelings and assess their attitudes, interests, and needs inaccurately. Politeness be damned, they act rudely, indulging their own whims. “Having power,” Keltner reports, “makes people more likely to act as sociopaths.”

And for the other side of power:

The biological obverse marks the powerless. Their lack of power activates the brain’s inhibitory system, centered in the right frontal cortex, which directs attention to threat and punishment and sets in motion avoidant behavior. It also ushers in negative feelings, notably anxiety and depression, virtually hallmark emotions of those denied power. If the thwarting of identity isn’t distressing enough, add in the lack of partner responsiveness.

Doesn't that explain a lot about what we see going on in the world today? To me, it also explains a lot of what we saw in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

So I think there's actually a lot of hope. Yes, if you just look at the Milgram and Stanford experiments, things look pretty shitty. But if you read further, it may be possible to compensate for these tendencies and behaviors and rise above them, not through willpower but through knowledge.

Great post. Lots to think about here. We have to be aware of the ways the masses are emotionally manipulated through schools and the media. This knowledge will set us free.

Some other relevant experiments you might find interesting:

Asch Conformity experiment: showed that people will adjust their perceptions - or at least what they state about them - (in this case their judgement of the relative lengths of lines) to match the unified consensus of their peers (who were "disinfo" agents, and in on the experiment).

Darley/Latane and the Bystander Effect: showed that the larger the group, the slower people are to help others in distress: "diffusion of responsibility".

Calhoun's Rat Utopia Experiment: given a near-ideal (closed) environment with no predators and unlimited food and water, a rat population would not reach the mathematical carrying capacity of the space; it would instead plateau well below it, social structures would fragment, and behaviour would become increasingly abberant and violent, resulting in a population crash.

Prisoner's Dilemma competition (Hofstadter): Not really an experiment, but it showed that the winning strategy for the iterated Prisoner's dilemma in computer game theory was incredibly simple: cooperate on the first move, and then play "Tit-For-Tat".

Robbers Cave Experiment (Sharif): Boys in summer camp were separated into groups and then induced to compete. Hostile and aggressive attitudes toward an outgroup arise when groups compete in a zero-sum paradigm. Contact with an outgroup is insufficient, by itself, to reduce negative attitudes. Friction between groups can be reduced only in the presence of superordinate goals that promote united, cooperative action.

Rosenzweig's experiment on environment and brain development: Rats raised in "enriched environments" had a larger, thicker cerebral cortex and higher cortex activity, compared with rats subjected to "impoverished conditions".

Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment in dogs is iconic, but Watson and Raynor, in the "Little Albert" experiment in 1920, showed that in humans, conditioned emotional responses could be induced.

BF Skinner and Pigeon Superstition: Pigeons will learn and rehearse whatever random behaviours precede reinforcement (food), behaving as though they believe they are influencing their own reward.

Rosenthal's Teachers expectations: children achieve higher IQ scores when their teachers praise them and expect them to. Similar is the Monster Study in which children with speech impediments were given either positive or negative reinforcement. Those positively reinforced were more likely to overcome their impediment, those negatively reinforced more likely to retain the impediments for life.

Bandura's Transmission of Aggression: Aggressive behaviour can be learned through imitation of those around us (poor Bobo the clown).

Halo Effect (Nisbett and Wilson): people who are perceived to be physically attractive are also perceived to have other positive characteristics such as intelligence, friendliness, and good judgment.

Loftus' Eyewitness/leading question experiment: showed that between the time that you witness an account and the time you recount it to someone else, your memory of the event may change drastically. The way questions are phrased can influence the answer of the person being questioned.

Selective Attention: "gorilla amongst basketball players" - this is a recent one. It shows that when we are given a task that requires focus - in this case counting passes of a ball - we can completely miss obvious intrusions into our field of perception. We have limited information-processing ability.

Subway Violin Experiment (context and appreciation of beauty): Joshua Bell, playing a 3.5 million dollar violin in the DC metro, did not garner much of an audience or money, despite having sold out expensive concerts.

...then we ask ourselves how these interact with the findings of the Double Slit and Ganzfeld Experiments...

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You neglected to mention in-group/out-group studies, which is one of the biggest specializations in social psych. Extreme in-group/out-group aggression can lead to genocide. I don't know how it relates to groupthink, like academically, but I am guessing groupthink helps develop the biases within an in-group and facing out to the out-group.

Great post. Very frightening when you realize that many problems are utterly manufactured by humans' irrational minds and behaviors.

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Cool keep us updated!

Cool.

Check out some material on marketing and neuro-marketing. Shit can get positively diabolical and also hilariously banal and absurd when you realize the monumental effort invested in convincing other people to give the marketers actually worthless bits of paper and bytes that everyone has collectively convinced themselves means something.

Direct response stuff—the most overt and needy kind of marketing— always plays on the target's insecurities. The goal of a letter is to make the target feel like shit, convince them that the letter writer/salesman/marketer is the only person that can help them and can help them right now!, convince them that the ridiculous amount they're going to pay for this shitty product is actually a steal of a deal and wow aren't you special/my friend/my best customer that you have the opportunity to get this deal!. Most of these products are never even used by the people after they buy them; that's the not-so-secret-secret everyone who's ever bought an $2 Chinese abcrunch at 3am for $100 already knows. Here's a dude talking about the tricks he uses in this kind of marketing.

Keep in mind a lot of these studies have aged (Milgram 1963, Stanford 1971) and are subjected ideas connected to those time periods. Reproducibility is not that high in most of these original studies, last year there was a massive study done about the reproducibility of these 'older' views we take for granted in social psychology. Nevertheless, it's a good thing to be aware of these biases no matter how hard it is to fight them.

Source: studied social psychology. And an article about this Reproducibility Project if you're interested :)

Thanks for the link! Read Authoritarian Sociopathy: Toward a Renegade Psychological Experiment if you get a chance. It's not very long, and can be found in audio form somewhere online as well.

It's hard to reproduce the Milgram and Stanford studies from an ethical point of view, no commission would allow it. I'm just saying you could take these older studies with a grain of salt, they're very iconic in social psychology but come with a disclaimer.

How is the Miligram study unethical? The subject only believes they are harming a person when in actuality it's just someone acting as if they are being shocked.

This kind of deception leading to such a stressful situation is seen as unethical and there is no proof the authority figures gave them the openness and right to withdraw (they had to continue). He did fully debrief them though, which speaks for Milgram, because the stressful situation should last for a short period of time. Although I think these kinds of experiments would be extremely useful for understanding human behavior, you wouldn't get an experiment like this past any ethical commission today. I had to explain a lot when I made an (10 minute) online survey with a very small, and to the participant unimportant, deception.

Interesting, thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware. I'd be interested in hearing about your survey.

No problem, thanks for replying! My survey was fun, but I had too little participants to draw real conclusions (as every MA thesis). It was about the influence of online social support (via comments) on the motivation to take action against moral stances. I showed them a news article about angora rabbits being severely harmed for their fur and added mostly positive/negative/neutral comments (3 conditions). With a pre and post survey I measured their moral conviction and motivation to take action against it. I found some small effects but no big significant revelations.

Good idea for a thesis, it definitely seems that people are swayed by reading comments instead of using their own moral compass. Especially since we now have proof of JTRIG's manipulation of online discourse. Strange times we're living in!

60% of psych research can't be replicated, so take these with a grain of salt. Stanford prison is the first that comes to mind.

No. You are altogether wrong, bit at least you can learn from it.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studies-and-fewer-half-got-same-results-180956426/

What I'm getting at is that if your aim is to discredit something inherently subjective, then surely you'll succeed because in science just like in literature or even math and rhetoric, you can make anything say what you want.

Which is exactly what you've done.