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

[Christopher D. Green]

Mike Palij wrote: On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:44:20 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: 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. Again, I am somewhat confused by this perspective: are you saying that a generally ethical teacher, doctor, police officer, day care worker, and so on would (a) make a lapse into some form of unethical behavior on a single/couple of occasions or (b) would systematically engage in unethical behavior because of the nature of having power over other people if there is no continuous supervision of their behavior? I'm not really very interested in pursuing this topic much further into longer and longer postings that fewer and fewer people read. But I will make a couple of very short comments. Your very use of the phrases "generally ethical" person, and "systematically engage in unethical behavior" here demonstrates, I think, how far we're msunderstanding each other here. The scope of "ethical" behavior has been so various in different places and times that I don't see how our current view of it would remain the same for long if our methods of oversight and punishment changed radically. And, yes, I think if the regime of oversight and punishment changed radically (esp. if it were eliminated), that the behavior of people would change as well. For some (the "True Believers"in the system under which they were raised), it would change more gradually than for others. For the next generation, however, it would change massively. Given that most people have no idea what daily life was like in Ancient Greece, it is unrealistic to ask what a person might believe or how they might behave in such a place. A more realistic example is whether people would support or oppose slavery in the U.S. during the 19th century. Quite to the contrary, I chose Ancient Greece rather than US slavery PRECISELY because it is so much more alien to our way of thinking. Whereas opposing slavery on moral grounds was quite common in the 19th-century US (not least because slavery had already been abolished in Upper Canada way back in the 1790s, and in the British Empire as a whole in the 1830s, so there were lots of nearby, well-known examples to follow). By contrast, in Ancient Greece there was NO constituency against slavery *as an institution* (Although, of course, the slaves themselves weren't very happy about their condition, and occasionally rebelled to gain their own freedom, no one of any note said that slavery, per se, was immoral. It was simply regarded as the natural "spoils of war" in much the same way that some people now shrug at war deaths as being "perhaps unfortunate, but unavoidable" in war.) If  the problem is simply that people don't know enough about Ancient Greece, then they'll have to find out if they want to understand the example. Of course, a more germaine situation would be whether one would have been a dutiful and obedient Nazi in Hilter's Germany, a point directly relevant to HBE. And who would have actively or passively opposed the regime in power? Criminals? Again, with alternative models to follow (indeed, WWII -- in Western Europe, at least -- was EXACTLY a war between two such political models:  democracy vs. fascism), the point is lost. In order to show how maliable one's ideas of right and wrong are, one must envision being raised in a society where one's CURRENT beliefs are not even a live option. Regards, -- 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