The mob is the most dangerous thing in the world! You just cannot make sense on how a mob can act the way it does!
In the novel to KILL A MOCKINGBIRD; the mob would have simply lynched everyone if not for the innocence of the child who AWOKE the humanity of the mob and made them HUMAN again!
Then again you must wonder how HUMANS as a MOB can do acts of violence which can shock everyone to the core!
One such EXPERIMENT to study how a human can become inhuman was the
Milgram Obedience Experiment!
This was a series of famous psychological studies conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram starting in 1961.
The experiment aimed to measure how far ordinary individuals would go in obeying instructions from an authority figure, even when those actions conflicted with their personal conscience.
Milgram was deeply motivated by the Holocaust, wanting to understand how millions of ordinary citizens could participate in the atrocities committed during World War II under the guise of “just following orders.”
The Setup & Deception involved recruiting 40 male participants through a newspaper advertisement, telling them they were participating in a study about “memory and learning.”
The experiment involved three key roles; this was very important since there was a danger to life!
The Experimenter: An authority figure dressed in a stern, grey lab coat.
The Teacher: The actual volunteer participant.
And finally the Learner: A hired actor named Mr. Wallace, who pretended to be another volunteer! But remember that the volunteer who is being tested does not know that this is an actor!
The participant (“Teacher”) and the actor (“Learner”) drew slips of paper to determine their roles, but the draw was rigged so the participant always became the Teacher.
The ‘Teacher’ then watched the Learner get strapped into a chair with electrodes!
Now comes the brutal part!
The Teacher was then taken to an adjacent room and seated before a massive shock generator.
The generator had 30 switches, ranging from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 450 volts (Danger: Severe Shock and “XXX”). I hope you understood where this is going!?
How the Experiment Worked and this is the scary part!
The ‘Teacher’ was instructed to read pairs of words to the ‘Learner’.
If the Learner answered incorrectly, the Teacher had to administer an electric shock, increasing the voltage by 15 volts for every wrong answer!
Ok here you must know a couple of things!
No real shocks were actually delivered, but the participant believed they were 100% real!
So the participant does not know that the shock is not real! What you think would have happened!? Well that is the shocker!
As the voltage climbed, the Learner (the actor) began to scream, pound on the wall, complain of a heart condition, and eventually fall dead silent…
When participants hesitated or asked to stop, the Experimenter calmly gave them a series of standard, firm commands (prods):
“Please continue.”
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
“You have no other choice, you must go on.”
What the participants did? Well that is for tomorrow! Just know that it was not predictable! The inhumanity of humans is actually undpredictable!
Then again the plots of Amish Tripathi novels are predictable since they are based on ithihasa but his treatment is different and interesting! Plus he has so much material unlike Dan Brown who needs history!
Wait for part two but sleep on time!
Shubh ratri…
