[tips] Re: Madonna & Zimbardo? (was Re: TV alert: Human Behaviour Experiments (HBE)

[Christopher D. Green]

Mike Palij wrote: If there were no laws or consequences, would we *necessarily* humilate and abuse our students? Given enough time, a circumstance would arise in which treating people (in ways that in our current situation we consider to be) unethically would lead to one's benefit, and with no external reason not to, most people would do so. (I invite anyone who believes that they are above such behavior to consider whether they would have believed that, say, slavery is immoral if they had been born and raised in, say, Ancient Greece.) What is more, those who did not behave in such a way would, in all likelihood, not survive the situation long. Only by banding together under a set of rules of behavior that are collectively rigorously enforced upon all individuals within the collective are we able to evade the war of all against all (we call this arrangement "civilization") Do nurses and doctors always torture their patients when they know that won't get caught? What would make them believe that they wouldn't get caught? Given no oversight and no enforced code of conduct, I have no doubt that people in such positions of power would use that power to their advantage when such a situation arose. You don't really think that people would behave well toward each other if there WEREN'T laws, police, courts, prisons, etc., do you? When did Canada become such a dog-eat-dog anti-cooperative anti-altruistic country? :-) It didn't. It has a set of rigorously enforced, collectively accepted rules of behavior of which I spoke above. Most unRomantically, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo ============================= --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english