Another assignment down, with no pain involved...

I've had a pretty fantastic weekend, which was topped off tonight with the completion of my latest Open Uni assignment. That made me feel SO good! It was the same old story; once I got going I enjoyed putting the report together, chopping and changing it loads of times and, finally, hitting the 'submit' button. It was an interesting subject, all about Stanley Milgram's work - have you heard of him? He's the American psychologist who carried out a bucket load of research on obedience behaviour and he might be familiar because of the nature of his experiments; he duped volunteers into believing they were helping to investigate the effect of punishment on learning. In actual fact, what they were doing was taking part in an experiment to investigate how much pain they'd be willing to inflict just because someone in authority told them to.

The unsuspecting volunteer sat in a room in Yale with this important-looking man in a white coat , and was told to give electric shocks to an out-of-sight actor (who was pretending to be another volunteer) if he answered a question incorrectly. It was incredible how far folk would go; all of the volunteers pulled the levers to administer shocks right up to 300 volts. Now, bearing in mind that the standard voltage in my house is 240 volts, that's a pretty big zap. Worse still, many of the volunteers went right to the end of the scale - 450 volts!! I can't remember how that lever was labelled, but it was along the lines of  'pull this and the guy might die'! And, to top it off, the volunteer could hear shouts of, "Let me out! I don't want to do this anymore! GET ME OUT OF HERE!" Did that make them stop? Did it hell - they even carried on zapping when the protests stopped altogether and there was just an eerie silence coming from the other room. The guy could've been dead but the man in the white coat told the volunteers to continue - "You must carry on sir" - and so they did.

Nowadays, Milgram's experiment wouldn't be allowed for ethical reasons; although nobody was actually given a shock, the volunteers weren't properly informed and some of them were pretty stressed out by the end of the experience (considering they thought they might have just killed a guy, I'm not surprised!)

I wonder if I would've gone all the way. I like to think I would've stopped as soon as the guy in the other room protested, but that's what most folk think. Milgram did a survey before he carried out his experiment and most of those asked said that they didn't think anybody would inflict that kind of pain on someone just because a bod in a white coat told them to. How wrong they were. Scary really.

Anyway, as I said, I'm feeling good about finishing the assignment tonight so I'm off to enjoy a few glasses of wine and, now that I come to think of it, inflict some pain. Trashy TV beckons after today's hard work and that is pretty painful for Alex and the boys...!