Transcription
How can a normal person be talked into committing murder in less than an hour? What would it take to get somebody to completely deny every single instinct of survival and social behavior and cause the death of another person?
What I'm about to show you is terrifying. It's the darkest side of psychology. And I'm going to show you what all of the experts completely missed.
In 1961, Dr. Mgrim did something that would change the world of psychology forever. And this quote of his about this experiment has stuck in my mind since the day that I read it. And he said, "I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes, he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point, he pushed his fist into his forehead and he muttered, "Oh, God, let's stop it." And yet, he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and he obeyed until the end."
That hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it. Anybody that you ask is going to say that could never be talked into such things. But I think you'll be surprised. So, what causes a human to go from zero to killer? And if some of us are willing to kill because a stranger in a lab coat tells us to, should we worry?
So what if just like we have visual blind spots, we have behavioral blind spots like maybe a small hole that allows a person to reach into our mind and start pulling some levers that they probably shouldn't have access to. None of us would really like to believe that we're vulnerable or this vulnerable to the world around us. And I think most of us tend to go through our lives just firmly believing that our minds are somewhat of a fortress and the only things that really get in there are things that we're allowing to come in. This belief is called the fortress illusion. And not only is it incorrect, it's dangerous to believe.
So let's talk about a behavioral loophole really quick. I define a behavioral loophole as an inborn quality of the human brain that has its roots in protecting us from harm. So these automatic responses to specific types of stimuli create a loophole in our behavior where we can instantly shift from processing information and cognitive reasoning to reacting to information and impulse reaction. So since these loopholes are universal in human behavior, they can be pretty reliably exploited, allowing an operator to basically predict an outcome and use that loophole to obtain some kind of desired impulse response such as focus, excitement, or a strong desire to feel a connection with the other person.
So why and how can a person hijack a human's brain, their normal rational decision-making centers? So inside the Mgrim experiment, the learner is in one room, the teacher, which is you are in the other room shocking this person because the person in the lab coat's telling you next to. With every incorrect answer, as the voltage increased, the teacher was told the microphone was just one-way communication tool to the other room, but he could hear the protests. He could hear screaming and pleas for help from the other side of the wall and the sounds of the learner in pain. They were coming from a record player actually in real life with pre-recorded screams and all that kind of stuff. He even says he has a heart condition. He wants to stop the experiment. All kinds of stuff is going on and this guy in the lab coat is continually telling them to increase the voltage with every wrong answer. So you can imagine participating in something like this could be pretty damn stressful. That's why we don't have experiments like this anymore. But they continued shocking the other person.
So initially these scientists got together. They predicted that 99% of people would outright refute. They argued the only people who would go all the way through with this were psychopaths or sadists. And they predicted only 0.1% of people would go all the way. But in fact, 65% of people about went all the way to maximum voltage. 250 volts can kill you. How many people do you think went all the way up to 250 volts? Surprisingly and sadly, it was 100%.
So, of course, if somebody interviewed you and asked, "Would you go all the way up to 450 volts?" You'd bet anything that you own, you would never do anything like that. And you'd be able to resist the experimenter. I would walk out of the room. The experiment has been replicated dozens if not hundreds of times with about the same results. Most people go all the way. Everybody obeys to some extent all the time. So why then do people obey? The experimenter didn't issue orders. He didn't shout. He didn't scream. He didn't make demands. He didn't have some secret persuasion technique. There was no hypnosis being used. They just listened.
Another experiment that in my opinion is even scarier. A person volunteered to take a survey. They show up in a room. There's several other people who are already sitting down taking the same survey and they're not knowing these other people in the room are all actors. Smoke starts billowing from a nearby door. They see the smoke and they look around at the other volunteers, which are the actors in this one, and they seem not to care at all. So, the actors have been told simply, "Do nothing." So, now smoke is starting to fill the room. Smoke detectors are going off and beeping like crazy. It's starting to look even more like there's a genuine emergency here. So, the actors see the smoke, then they casually go back to filling out this survey. In this experiment, 100% of people sat in the room. And if the fire had been real, 100% would have died.
So, could this happen in real life, though? It actually did. In May of 1979, a cab driver reports a fire coming from a Woolworth's department store in Manchester. They found some bodies, but they found most of the bodies in the restaurant. And it turns out people hadn't left because they wanted to pay their bill. They're operating on this social script that's just written in their mind. Nobody wanted to deviate from the group and nobody wanted to be the first to really stand out from the rest of the crowd.
This video is about what the hell these experiments missed. So, let me show you right now. So, I want you to imagine you're a volunteer in the Mgrim experiment that we just talked about. You see the ad in the paper. You drive to a building that you've never been to before. You walk upstairs you never walked down into a hallway you've never been to to meet people that you've never met before. You see a machine on the desk you've never seen before that's supposed to shock a human being which you've never done before. There's a brand new room you've never been in. There's new smells. There's new sounds. There's a new test. There's a brand new experience. New words that are unusual from the experimenter. This is what they miss and it's called novelty.
I want to show you how powerful this is. And my goal here is to persuade you to completely change whatever you thought was going on with these experiments. So when something unexpected happens or something new is occurring, our brains ramp up our level of focus, which makes us more suggestible. Focus kept our ancestors alive. Therefore, they passed down this instantaneous focus switch to us to do the same. And when something is unexpected or new, we become focused on it instantaneously. This is not one of the things that we can just turn off. It's built into our brain stem. So from award-winning speeches to TV shows we can't stop watching, the injection of novelty is the fastest entry point into the human mind.
And I'd like you just to imagine the Mgrim experiment again without any of the novelty. The guy in the lab coat is the volunteer's roommate and the experiment is taking place in a familiar place like maybe the volunteer's apartment. So it's in his own house. The person in the lab coat's the roommate. Boom. Authority goes to zero. Even if you replace the person in the lab coat with the professor, authority goes to zero. The novelty is not high enough to produce a tremendous amount of focus. So in order to leverage any authority, focus has to be present first. And the fastest pathway to focus is novelty. Something new is happening. So no matter how confident you are, no matter how much authority you have, if focus isn't there, you're getting nothing in return.
We've inherited a lot from our ancestors. It's all built in there to help us survive. But sometimes these inherited traits make loopholes in us that can be hacked by somebody with training or skill. And in other situations, it can be leveraged to help a person, to maybe stop somebody from a negative behavior or change somebody's life entirely. The ethics live in you, not the technique.