I like horror stories (as a genre). Sure, I like Freddy Krueger, too, but I tend to lean more toward horror stories with a hero. And not just any hero, either. An action hero. The kind with bad guys that are scary as fuck, but have a protagonist capable of opening up such an over-pressurized can of Whoopass that, by the end, there's damn-near no one left standing to look at the hero, hold up a beer, and scream, "Hellz Yeah!"
Think Army of Darkness or Monster Hunter International. Yeah. That.
So, it was with no relation to the aforementioned preferences that I was led to learning about the Stanford Prison Experiment by Breda's post relating it to some recent atrocities. I had no prior knowledge of said experiment, but I had heard that name somewhere before so I decided to read the Wiki entry. Besides, it was from Breda! What could go wrong?
Well, I made it through the general description of the experiment, got through the basic logistics, and even the overview of its failure. It wasn't until I got to the tail end of the "Results" section that I remembered why I was reading it, which occurred because I started to see the parallels that I'm assuming led to Breda's having made the association in the first place.
I stopped reading the article.
tweaker
Psychology is filled with this sort of thing:
ReplyDeletehttp://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm
I remember it coming to mind years ago when the police started on the paramilitary path. I was in college at the time, and I remember quite a few of us feeling a chill when reading the results.
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