Sunday, November 11, 2012

Opening Skinner's Box: Chapters 5 and 6


Chapter 5

One of the most intriguing examples of cognitive dissonance I think is the mass suicide of Jonestown, which surprisingly is only mentioned in passing in this chapter. In it 909 people, that is all except for two in the extreme cult, committed suicide after the leader gathered the entire congregation and essentially asked for everyone to kill themselves as per their "destiny" so to speak.

I think back into this massively high number of people and I find a very similar correlation with the studies on peer pressure in Obedience to Authority. Perhaps Cognitive Dissonance isn't even all that much different from the effect observed of crowds implicitly "forcing" people to behave a certain way. I mean, we have already explored the loophole in human psychology that is exploited in Obedience to Authority. That is, we already know that a person in a perceived position of power can successfully command otherwise normal people into doing anything said people wouldn't do on their own volition, and committing suicide most often is something to that effect.

There is, of course, the reality that the people who were already attending these congregations were already "convinced" to some degree. That is, the people living in Jonestown had already been convinced, they were genuinely believing in these lies. But I maintain that the similarities are all too striking. How many people committed suicide that night simply because everyone else they knew and loved did already? The entire congregation was doing it extremely publicly. Perhaps some did it mostly because they did not want to find the consequences of dissenting. After all, we have no idea (for obvious reasons) if every single one of the 909 people who killed themselves did it completely out of their own decision. Maybe many of these deaths weren't a result of cognitive dissonance so much as it was extreme implicit peer pressure.

Chapter 6

One large focus of this chapter, aside from the obvious "monkey business", is the raising of the questions of "morality" in the context of scientific experiments. Exactly what is moral in the experimentation of animals and what are lines that should not be crossed? And if they are crossed, is it prudent to disregard the morality so long as there's enough significant knowledge extracted on it to warrant such experiments?

The last question is especially pressing. The Obedience to Authority experiments have been criticized heavily for causing severe distress on the subjects, as did the Skinner box experiments, as did the Harlow experiments. In fact, every one of the scientists Slater explores in detail follows the same pattern. Slightly errant psychology on the part of the scientists themselves, slightly unhinged experiments drawing as much ire as they do knowledge, troubling developments in the scientists' personal life, and the combination of both eventually becoming their undoing. Either Slater is Stephen King-ing her narrative or the patterns are too blatant to ignore.

Back on the topic of morality in experiments, I keep going back to a remark specifying that during the extremely cruel medical experiments of the Jewish during the Nazi regime, a lot of significant scientific information was derived. Medical and psychological advancements jumped ahead by decades in exchange for horrifically inhumane experiments. If we advocate ends-justifying-means rationale, how does one respond to the Nazi experiments? On the other hand, are we to slow down progress in medical advancements? These advancements will be made, of course, they'd simply just have to wait for an experimenter to slowly increment the cruelty of their experiments to "ease in" to the most important parts. Which one of the two is better?

There honestly isn't an answer, at least one that can be objectively derived, and one that could fit each case. Slater leaves the question just as open-endedly, but in all honestly I don't think she's too worried about it.

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