For those people interested in this sociological situation which has been proven that even though altruism is a mathematical genetic trait, has the capacity to turn any of us evil, nat geo has a special called the science of evil, there is a TED Talks where the head of the Stanford prison experience talks about the syndrome, really the discoverer of it, and the person who named it, lastly through the wormhole has an episode called will we ever destroy evil....each has its own good points and problems, we spend so much of our lives telling ourselves who we are, and yet things change all the time altering our personality and the process we use for decision making constantly. I've found it important to learn and understand how we make decisions. To often it's been discovered our very memories can be modified by our perceived perceptions of our peers, so how can we ever know what we believe, what we've experienced was true. Most of us rely on our memories, yet the more research that's done shows they are incredibly unreliable.
We can create memories based on stories we've heard, and begin believing they are our memories even if we wearnt there. What's more frightening is the choices we make based on information from "trusted" sources with out any validation. A experiment done in the 60's was done, where a group of people were told they where doing a learning experiment, one group were the teachers, the other the learners, the teachers asked questions, and each time the learners got a question wrong they got a electrical charge. The teacher controlled the strength of the charge, choosing a setting from 1-10. They were informed that anything over five would be extremely painful and the full charge might cause permenent nerve damage. The majority of the followed the protocols to the letter using the charges at the maximum setting if a question was missed to many times.
Frighteningly these people where choosing to possibly injure people for the sake of a test, while a small group of people refused to use settings over 5. Strangly the learners reported the shocks being so painful they quit the test, but there was never any shocks at all given, the learners were told they would be shocked, so they felt shocks, increasing in intensity.
A similar test was done a few years later, based on a similar setup, except thier where two groups, one group was allowed to hear from what they believed was a assistant to to the scientist that the group of learners were rude, uncouth, and generally unpleasant people, the second group of teachers were allowed to over hear what a nice clean cut group of kids the learners were. The first group where nearly brutal on the level of shocks they gave to the learners, while the second group rarely gave a shock to what they believed were nice young kids. Neither group even had learners, they based the level of pain inflicted not based simply on if the answer givens correctness but based on the opinion they overheard from someone they perceived as in authority.
Anyway just some interesting information from some of my recent studies I thought was interesting, I could go into the memory modification tests more recently done using PET scans and observed images, when people where told what they remembered seeing was not what others had seen, they could actually observe the memories changing, when reasked they believed the new memories where the true ones, only about ten percent of the testers did not alter thier memories based on what they where told was true based on thier peers answers, if your interested in this experiment let me know but I'm sure I've bored everyone to death.
I just thought it was important to realize if we can't know who we are, trust our memories, or trust the basis upon which we make our decisions how can we do what's right in the world, how can we even know what's right?
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