You are so gullible!

Derren Brown: Netflix special (2018)
Push, Sacrifice

Darren Brown calls himself a psychological illusionist. He devises elaborate scams with his team of actors, engineers, stuntmen and others to influence his subjects to willingly perform heinous crimes or sometimes unthinkable sacrifices. He does all these with just suggestions as if the subjects are doing it at their own free will. 

In an episode named 'Push', four people are shortlisted from a pool of applicants to help out in a charity event. He used the famous test where applicants stand up at the ring of a bell without any rhyme or reason to pick his choice. This is a classical experiment done by psychologists to illustrate that humans are mere unthinking conformists. To cut the long story short, three out of the four candidates that Brown selected could be coaxed to push a man off the edge of the roof at the order of a person in authority. This result is comparable to the Milgram Experiment in 1963 to illustrate our utter obedience to people in authority. This experiment followed the Eichmann trial in 1961. The world could not fathom how a simple looking civil servant could systemically send prisoners into the gas chamber as if it was a banal thing to do.

In the "Sacrifice' episode, an American man with very fixed negative views on the rise of immigrants in the USA is manipulated, in an elaborate scam that spanned both sides of the Atlantic, to make him take a bullet to protect an illegal Mexican immigrant.

It just goes to illustrate how Man can be manipulated for better or worse. The lessons learnt from these shows are nothing new but may give a new perspective to younger viewers.

The thing often not considered in this type of shows is what happens to the participants after the show. Is knowing that they have dark evil tendencies lurking within them, like pushing a person from the edge of a building going to leave an indelible mark on their future prospect of employment or mental state? Is meddling with the participants' inner crypts of their psyche going to unleash the inner dark thoughts or scar them forever? 

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Don't blame me, I am just following orders!

Experimenter (2015)

Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps.

The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart.

Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to show that most people would perform immoral things if ordered to do so by an authoritative figure. Not many would stand up against the majority to fight for what he feels is just. He went on to show this in other planned experiments. We are followers and can be easily triggered to go into an agentic state where we behave like an agent of the people in authority without taking any responsibility for the consequence of our actions. We blindly follow the order of someone in authority.

Many of his social experiments made it to the telly as seen in 'Candid Camera' series. The movie ends by saying that we are just puppets but with perception and awareness. Perhaps we can achieve liberation if we are aware of the strings that tie us down!

In order to get things running in an orderly fashion, the society needs to have appendages that ease administration. It cannot have all its officers having a mind of their own and doing things their way. Pandemonium would be the order of the day. Unfortunately, people is power may abuse this privilege to fulfil their own self-agendas. Herein lies the danger as seen around us. Charismatic sweet talking politicians and wayward theologian have a way to the heart of the followers to turn them into automatons to perform their dirty job. Philip Zimbardo's notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Study showed findings of the same effect. In that experiment, it was the situation rather than their individual personality that determines the participants' behaviour.

Good people do bad things through omission, coercion, with the desire to conform to society and not rock the boat!

All kinds of everything...

Back in medical school, we had the honour of having the first-hand experience of listening to a learned man of stature croak cockamamie. The deputy director of Health then officiated some function. The gist of the speech that left an everlasting impression on me was his stand on allocations of funds for research.

From the podcast: Bigger than Bacon, Radiolab.

He lamented the idea of students complaining about the lack of grants for research. He insisted that of one is genuinely interested in doing research, he can even do it under the coconut tree! I am sure many findings can be cooked up under the tree - with the help of coconut oil, coconut milk and coconut toddy!

Somehow, this thought came to me when I was listening to a podcast recently. 

Apparently, the first thing they teach you in underwater surveillance studies is to identify a crackling sound which is not the noise of a advancing naval fleet but a particular type of shrimps. These single clawed crustaceans were correspondingly snapper shrimps. They actually mask the passage of a submarine or ocean liner in the World War! Nice to know but the scientists were not satisfied with just knowing that. What did they do? Using ultra fast speed photography and acoustic measurements with various state of the art equipment, they discovered that the snapping sounds were not due to physical contact of the claws in the some kind of territorial ritual but actually caused by the popping of a bubble. The scientists managed to show that sudden movement of the claw created a vacuum and release a vacuole of air bubble that pops giving the characteristic rustic crackling sound!

What does it matter? How is it useful for humankind? Believe it or not, this knowledge has helped passage of certain medicines through the blood brain barrier.

This was the same scenario before the smartphones came to the scene. Many of the technologies used in smartphones were invented by people who did not know the use of their invention. They just discovered it and patented it, waiting for someone like Steve Jobs to come along and assimilate it into his product.

So, who said research is a waste of resources? It paves the path others in the future to have a blueprint upon which they can improve and hopefully use it in a meaningful for the benefit of the human race as a whole.