from The Daily Sheeple:
Has modern psychology has become the science of disempowerment?
You no longer have to be a bona fide psychiatrist to prescribe mood and mind-altering pharmaceuticals to patients young and old, as any general practitioner is now allowed to experiment on their patients in this regard. This helps to explain why some 78 million Americans are presently taking psychiatric pharmaceutical drugs, roughly 25% of the U.S. population. Which came first the diagnosis or the pill?
Psychology is the study of behavior and the mind, but the role it plays in mass producing obedient sheeple is increasingly apparent.
In 1961, well after the advent of lithium and thorazine, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted what is now one of the world’s most famous psychological experiments. So critical it is supposed to be to our understanding of human nature that it is taught in nearly every psychology class.
The Miligram experiment, as it’s known, is hailed as a milestone in our understanding of how people’s ethics can drastically change when responsibility for their actions is deferred on to an authority figure, such as an ‘expert’ or a leader. Intrigued by the role of Nazi military personnel in concentration camps during WWII, Milgram wanted to know how much coercion people needed in order to willingly inflict harm on another person.
“He asked volunteers to deliver an electric shock to a stranger. Unbeknownst to the volunteers, there was no shock—and the people they were shocking were actors pretending to be terribly hurt, even feigning heart attacks. Milgram found that most people would keep delivering the shocks when ordered by a person in a lab coat, even when they believed that person was gravely injured. Only a tiny percentage of people refused.”
The suggested conclusion is that people are inherently unable to think for themselves when given a subordinate role in some authoritarian hierarchy, such as the role of the people in a state-controlled world.
The results have become accepted knowledge in our understanding of how ordinary people can inflict extraordinary harm on others, but discussion of this experiment rarely speaks to the fact that many people resisted the experiment, focusing instead on reinforcing the darker, more helpless side of human nature. Subsequent examination of the Milgram study, however, reveals a number of flaws both practical and ethical that pretty much discredit the entire experiment, yet this particular example is cited over and over again as fact about human nature, when it is anything but.
In my view, the dissenters are more worthy of publicity than the conformists.
Building on the ideas set forth by Milgram, a recent study conducted at University College of London by neuroscientist Patrick Haggard and his colleagues was recently released and promoted with the headline ‘It’s Actually Easy to Force People to be Evil.”
This new approach to confirming the bias to follow orders looks at this aspect of behavior from the perspective of neuroscience, aiming to define the different physiological processes that occur, further distancing us from individuality, free will and human conscience.
“Milgram’s and other studies relied on dissembling and on explicit measures of agency, which are known to be biased by social norms.
“In two experiments, an experimenter ordered a volunteer to make a key-press action that caused either financial penalty or demonstrably painful electric shock to their co-participant, thereby increasing their own financial gain. Coercion increased the perceived interval between action and outcome, relative to a situation where participants freely chose to inflict the same harms. Interestingly, coercion also reduced the neural processing of the outcomes of one’s own action. Thus, people who obey orders may subjectively experience their actions as closer to passive movements than fully voluntary actions. Our results highlight the complex relation between the brain mechanisms that generate the subjective experience of voluntary actions and social constructs, such as responsibility.
“When we take action because we’ve been ordered to, we feel less in control of the outcome. We feel less responsible. The experience is so profoundly different that our brains actually process it differently.”
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