fascinating.
i wonder how you'd design an experiment to see how fast it takes for a group of guys to totally devolve into a pack of Lord of the Flies-ish anti-semitic, misogynist racists with rape fantasies.
i mean, does the transformation from clean cut ordinary dude to spittle-covered savage take an average of 24 hours? two weeks? a year? or, is it just something that occurs instantaneously whenever a bunch of them gather on an anonymous chat board?
Bitch Ph.D. writes about it here. (and, yes, i'm totally late reading about this!)
and if any of my law grad friends are out there, have you even heard of this board? what's up with that?!
3 comments:
I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. One psychological study gathered normal, well-adjusted young men and placed them in a fake prison setting. Some subjects were guards while the rest were prisoners. Things got crazy so fast, the study was ended in six days (rather than the two weeks planned). The "guards" became brutal sadists (making Abu Ghraib seem like an obvious outcome) while the "prisoners" felt stripped of their identity.
Gladwell posits that environmental factors are a huge influence on human behavior. If "everybody else is doing it," it's so easy to ignore one's good upbringing and go straight to baser instincts.
i know about that study. do you know if it was ever replicated with women? i don't know if it would take women a longer time to regress to 'baser instincts' but it makes me wonder.
Hmm...
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