Unsought Input

An interesting article over at Cracked (yes, I know this is a comedy type site but they have good interesting articles, for real!) recently talked about Psychological Experiments done on people that have gone horribly wrong. You never would have guessed, would you? Either way, I thought it was a pretty interesting article and that I would share it with anyone who cared. I assume you care if you are still reading.

Either way, the article talks about five main experiments that Cracked thinks proves humanity is doomed. I find this interesting because if these are traits humans have had for years, why aren’t we extinct yet? There has to be some benefit (or at least it’s a habit/trait that doesn’t kill us) or else we would all be goners and something else would be here in our place.

For example, they talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment which if you haven’t heard of it you can watch this nice little clip that informs you of it. It was a college experiment that went horribly wrong, as you can assume would happen.

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I was reading something on Slashdot about HP dumping Board member George Keyworth for leaking things to the press. The issue wasn’t that he was dumped, it was that pretexting was used to get his phone records.

This being Slashdot, the idea that all CEOs and politicians are sociopaths quickly came up. This is how it supposedly works: no normal human being would be willing to cut jobs, sell out their colleagues, keep saying what people want to hear with no guilt from lying, and otherwise do the things that lands you on top of the corporate ladder or in Congress. In order to be successful at those things, you have to lack empathy with others – hence, you’re a sociopath. Very intelligent sociopaths can be surprisingly charismatic – they learn can learn, and exploit, social graces even if they don’t feel bound to them.

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