Electric Shock Study Suggests We'd Rather Hurt Ourselves Than Others 123
sciencehabit writes: If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do you think you'd be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to anonymous victims when asked by a scientist. But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other people's well-being than their own. It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.
This study is... (Score:5, Funny)
Shocking.
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Hand me the button, I'll shock them for money till they tell me to stop or that they won't give me any more money.
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Be careful! Slashdot is home to many misanthropes. You may find your 'funny' comment modded 'insightful' instead!
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Heck, I'll keep pressing the button even if they stop paying me.
People who feels empty inside ... (Score:2)
A lot of lonely empty people in this world, and they are so afraid of being feeling left alone they would _anything_ to attract attention
In fact, many of those who committed suicide are did what they did, in the vain hope that their death would attract some attention
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Less shocking if you consider it as getting paid to attack someone, vs getting paid to do something painful. Even a sociopath wouldn't attack people for a few cents.
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Even a sociopath wouldn't attack people for a few cents.
And yet Slashdot "Editors" continue to promote Bennett Haselton articles to the front page for no apparent reason.
Where does that fit into your benevolent cheapskate psychopaths theory?
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Some do it for no economic benefit at all. See serial killers as an example.
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The irony here is that penguinoid is empathically projecting a common human sense of empathy onto a group whose most defining characteristic is the lack of it.
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Not necessarily. If you attack people for insignificant reasons, such as a few pennies, you'll end up in prison or dead pretty soon. Whether you refrain due to empathy, cold calculation of risks and benefits, or some abstract philosophical principles is irrelevant.
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The irony here is that penguinoid is empathically projecting a common human sense of empathy onto a group whose most defining characteristic is the lack of it.
Quite the opposite, I was pointing out that even people with no empathy at all could easily make the choice, in their own self-interest, which the study declares proof of altruism. Even if they remain anonymous to their victim, they may feel the loss of reputation in the eyes of the researchers is worth more than a few cents.
This is not entirely idle speculation, either. I took a game theory class, and everyone thumbed their noses at the "proper self-interested actions" recommended by game theory when their
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It's yet another damned fool trying to claim we're "better", but we're not. We're apex predators with all that which that entails. And I'd be more than happy to entertain myself at their expense if they're willing to keep deluding themselves and lying to others about this.
Thanks for the warning...
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Those studies proving we're willing to hurt others for gain don't disprove that we may be MORE willing to hurt ourselves, as the previous studies didn't offer the choice of WHO to hurt.
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Probably emotionally neutral strangers. If it were a Hitler or Stalin character results might vary.
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I meant "the person himself" vs. "a stranger" rather than a choice between specific people.
Most people would probably pay to have the ability to shock a specific person.
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Studies like this can be highly culturally dependent. Other psychological studies have found Americans, and to a slightly lesser degree, Europeans, willing to help anonymous strangers. But when the same results were run on people form tribal societies, the results were wildly different. Here is one example [psmag.com].
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Thank you.
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Wow! What a bad pun!
I'm stunned.
How much money ? (Score:2)
Really I am not going to shock some for fifteen cents. There's also no way I can take 15$ as worthwhile for being shocked.
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You wouldn't take a static electricity jolt for $15?
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If the alternative is to give someone else one and cash in on it...
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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What can I say, I'm a product of my time and upbringing.
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I'd probably take the first one, telling myself "Hey, I'm getting paid for it. I might as well 'earn' it."
It'll be followed by the second one, "Damn, that HURT. I'll transfer to upper management and shock him instead."
Re:How much money ? (Score:5, Informative)
The article has a bit more info.
Spoiler alert: the shock is calibrated to each person to be "painful but not intolerable", and it's about 30 cents a shock for yourself or 60 cents a shock to others.
There may be an initial threshold -- my understanding is that the question would be something like:
"Would you rather be shocked 10 times and get $7 or shocked 20 times and get $9", or "Would you rather be shocked 5 times for $5 or have this chick get shocked 3 times for $4", not necessarily giving a 0 shocks = $0 option.
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To low of a payout. For 30 cents less, the benefit of shocking someone else is very low. Shocking someone who don't know me and never know me for $15 is not worth it. But if you said shock yourself for $10 or shock someone else for $100, well, i would do that. The $90 is worth it to me to shock someone else.
It is the same for those who go on a killing rampage, they see the benefit of doing that outweighs the cost. (and I don't mean money benefit)
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The prices you are quoting are what they would give up. There was only one choice, "Would you get shocked X times for $Y"or "Would you let your partner get shocked X times for you to get $Y." People would let themselves be shocked for a lower price than they would let their partners be shocked for.
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I'd pay to have the opportunity to grade my resistance to shocks in controlled conditions.
It would be a straightforward way to train willpower.
Needs larger sample set. (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is these were all volunteers participating in the study "for science?"
My guess is that introduces a selection bias towards altruism. Test any of the several thousand people I've worked for, with, or very near over the past 20 years and I would guess that most of them wouldn't hesitate to shock the other person as much as was allowed, especially if they could be relatively certain the other person could not shock them back as a direct response.
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Just skimmed the associated paper. This isn't my area of expertise, but the data is not all that convincing to me. Most of the samples were near the break-even point (neither selfish nor altruistic). It passes a p-test, but the sample set is pretty small, and systematic errors could easily sway the result.
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Test any of the several thousand people I've worked for, with, or very near over the past 20 years and I would guess that most of them wouldn't hesitate to shock the other person as much as was allowed, especially if they could be relatively certain the other person could not shock them back as a direct response.
You have my true sympathies. I can't think of anything worse than to have to work among people that you could not trust to be honest and generally benevolent. I consider myself fortunate that amon
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Re:Needs larger sample set. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I've worked for all sorts of organizations, from large to small.
It's not that people are all saints, but I've found that overwhelmingly, people want to do good, especially if it isn't going to cost them deeply.
I have seen (didn't work at, but visited) companies that squished that tendency by making it quite costly to help one's fellow employee, and they were miserable places for the workers, but even there people tended to hate the company for making being helpful costly, rather than their coworkers for not helping (although I'll admit it did leak a little bit. Very sad place.)
In any place I've worked at, I've gone out of my way to be helpful to others, and every one else has gone out of their way to be helpful to me.
Perhaps I've just been very fortunate. Maybe I tend to see the best in people. But I will say that my observations on people's basic helpfulness have been borne out time and time again over the last 40+ years. I still take delight in the random acts of kindness and helpfulness that I see time and time again at work, the community and on buses and subways.
I'm still in awe of observing how it took perhaps a total of 30 seconds for a random women to notice on the subway when a young girl got separated from her grandmother and panicked when the doors closed too quickly, call for volunteers, and then organize four of them to go to the previous station, authorities, etc. (turning away 2 or 3 others including myself) before the subway reached the next stop.
Another example: My older teen-age son got into a verbal altercation on a bus because a young man started loudly swearing at my younger son when the my youngest accidentally hit the fellow with the backpack he was wearing. The older son verbally stepped in to redirect the ire onto himself to prevent his brother from being alarmed by the man's behaviour.
A month later, my son, waiting for a bus in the same neighborhood (which is a bit downscale) was approached by the same young man. The young man came up and apologized. He'd had a bad day when my youngest backpack bounced against him. He then praised my oldest for intervening to protect his younger brother.
That sort of good-heartedness is all around. Yeah, there are a few jerks. But there are a lot of people, who despite the occasional bad behaviour, are generally good. (I've always been grateful for the gentleman in the above example who apologized. It taught may son that people who are behaving badly aren't "bad to the bone", but are probably just having a bad day, same as the rest of us. A *critical* truth for bringing out the best in people.)
Yeah, I've lost a few bucks to a fraudulent "help me", but such incidents have been outweighed by orders of magnitude (literally) by the fact that almost no-one wants to be a jerk, and given the opportunity, most people are decent.
Again, you have my sympathies for living in a section of the world where that isn't true.
And sorry for the length of the post, but your vision of humanity was so horrifying that I felt I needed to point out the sentiment is far from universal.
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Agreed, but it takes a hell of a lot money for most people to give up their self-respect. There's lots of cases of people dying for it.
Choosing to shock someone else for a few bucks, is, as the article suggests, so detrimental to one's self-respect, that it is relatively rare.
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Judging from the people I worked with during my years, a good deal of them would shock others for free.
An even bigger portion would pay YOU to let them.
Is that why we are so full of regret? (Score:2)
Oh! woe is me. You're such a jerk for being my victim.
Simpsons Knew Better (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_No_Disgrace_Like_Home
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Despite capitalist pop-philosophy, humans are not inherently selfish. Nor are they inherently altriustic.
Some are selfish, some are not. It also depends on the situation and the stakes / risks.
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The problem is defining and measuring "selfishness" or "altruism". The words sound solid, but these aren't things you can measure directly like height or weight, but these are fuzzy, abstract qualities we can only infer indirectly from behavior. So we create scenarios -- in the lab if we are research psychologists, in our imagination if we are philosophers -- that try to put people in one category or another.
The problem with these reductive scenarios is that they ARE reductive. Real situations are multi-f
Peter Venkman (Score:1)
Did Peter Venkman come up with this test?
Missing Option (Score:2)
If they'd included the option to zap Bennett Haselton, I'm sure it would have swamped all the other possibilities.
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I assume (RTFA? Pfft!) that the idea was that I was offered the choice of zapping someone else or zapping myself and getting money (ie, if I chose to zap someone else, I merely got the satisfaction/revulsion of zapping them but if I zapped myself, cha-ching!)
So it now becomes a question of how much money does it take for me to not inflict pain on another person. Did they actually know who the other person was? I don't necessarily mean names, but could they see the other person and see them getting shocke
Who did they study? (Score:2)
Unattractive hipster girls?
You always ... (Score:2)
Similar experiment (Score:3)
Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death) [wikipedia.org]
Can confirm (Score:1)
I think I saw a similar electric shock experiment on PornHub.
obvious (Score:1)
The old woman said: (Score:5, Interesting)
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Did they miss these? (Score:1)
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people shock themselves because they dont want to be viewed as someone who would shock someone else... its an attempt to save face and acquire resources by pretending to be nice, which can have the same results as being nice, as long as the facade is kept.
The ways you modify your behavior because of what other people will think is still part of who you are. In fact I think it's a major part of your personality.
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For context: (Score:2)
This isn't a secret (Score:3)
1) Compose your team entirely of specialists who are focused on one small piece of the puzzle
2) Find a psychopath who will make ethical compromises in the name of efficiency that well adjusted people would consider morally reprehensible to coordinate your team
3) Keep your team from seeing the big picture so they don't revolt
4) Keep outsiders from realizing how your efficiency is achieved so they don't shun you
5) Profit!
You get bonus points for setting all this up, making yourself the recipient of the inevitable rewards, keeping yourself ignorant of the particulars and sleeping like a baby.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739-40 (Score:2)
"`Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
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It takes 1 person out of 500 to cover a restroom in urine. If you check how many different people's urine are covering it compared to the number of people who pass through the restroom, you would likely find that an overwhelming majority of people are considerate... and most of the rest are under the influence of drugs.
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Study says less about altruism, more about fairnes (Score:2)
The study, in case you don't want to read the article, paired people off (so they didn't see each other but knew the other person was there), then one was offered a choice of various "shock bundles" (like 10 for 7$, or 15 for 10$ or the like) along with the choice who should get the shocks while this "decider" always got the money, no matter who he dealt the shocks.
People now taking shocks for the money they take doesn't say anything about altruism. It says something about what people perceive as fair. I ge
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In that case the choice should be to either shock someone and get money for it or refuse to do it and let the other person get the money instead (while nobody gets a shock). THAT would be a test of altruism vs. selfishness. What's easier for you, cause someone pain to get money or letting the money go, knowing that the person you didn't put into pain gets it instead.
Also an interesting tidbit that isn't quite clear is whether the person had only the choice to give himself or the other person the shocks, or
In other news - water wet (Score:1)
"It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics."
Altruism is one of those things that, according to how strongly you define it - weakly, merely something with no obvious reward, or strongly, as something that has genuinely no benefit - either MUST, or CANNOT (as a general trait), exist.
The bottom line is that man has evolved as a social species. In that word "social" is the numb of the whole thing, because it describes a type of behaviour in which individ
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Our brute nature is evident (Score:2)
But the other thing that comes out of both studies is that the vast majority of us will follow those we believe are in authority. Then there are people like me who think authority is stupid.
I must be a sadist, then (Score:2)
A better experiment... (Score:2)
A better experiment would be to have participants choose to shock themselves or shock other people "for the greater good".
People are primed for all kinds of oppressive behavior as long as it doesn't hit them and if it makes them feel morally superior: true or false? Let's find out.
Flawed study population? (Score:2)
Obviously the study didn't include cops.
It would be interesting ... (Score:3)
Then explain... (Score:1)
Why most of you drive like complete assholes ricking others lives by tailgating or generally driving as if you own the road?
The research needs to be done two ways for reality. 1 - face to face where you have to face the person you are wronging, 2- secret. Bet that people will knowingly hurt others for trivial gains if they can get away with it anonymously.
I wonder what happens if you add anonymity? (Score:1)
School Bully (Score:2)
Mine was kind enough to help me punch myself before giving him my lunch money.
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Mine was kind enough to accept my fist in his belly... well, there was a second one who got a boot in his balls. Lession learned: Never try to bully a guy you don't know in the middle of the winter when everybody wears boots.
Message for wanabee bullys: When a new guy comes to school, first ensure he is bully-able and at least half your size XD
Where do I have to sign up? (Score:2)
Just gimme a cattle prod and an opportunity to shock the fuck out of people without legal consequences!