Wednesday, April 15, 2015

How real can it be?

Deindividuation? Alright, the foundation makes sense, but is it a real thing? To which extent does it transpire in real life? Like every other social theory, there is no definite answer. However, there have been instances when controlled experiments were carried out to test the validity of this theory.

THE DECISION TO BELIEVE IN THIS THEORY IS COMPLETELY YOURS.

I. Stanley Milgram's Shock Experiment


II. Ed Diener's Halloween Study
"In a clever [Halloween study] conducted years ago by Ed Diener and colleagues, researchers unobtrusively observed over 1,000 kids trick-or-treating. The children were instructed that they could take one–and only one–piece of candy from a bowl inside a house. The researchers surreptitiously watched and recorded what happened next.

As you might expect, free candy is hard to resist. And visiting kids were all too eager to follow the lead of the costumed gluttons who preceded them: 83% took extra candy when the first kid in their group did likewise.

However, under some circumstances, the kids were less likely to break the rules. Namely, when the adult at the door had previously asked the children their names and what street they lived on–stripping them of their anonymity and reminding them of their individuality–candy-theft conformity dropped to 67%."

More information on the experiment

III. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

4 comments:

  1. Okay. There's this experiment (very famous by the way) in which researchers put marshmallow in a table in front of a kid. The kids were told that if they did not eat the candy and waited 15 minutes, they would get another one. It is very interesting and I'm sure you can find many of them online. The kids really struggle to resist temptation and most of them really can't. It's more to test how anxious we are (I'd say we are a lot these day with all these new technologies).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Coming along very nicely. I especially like the choice of a Roman Colosseum as the background, I feel that this ties your theme together nicely.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Ian. It does tie in with the theme of deindividuation, especially the way crowds advocated for extreme violence. Only thing is this is an American history class!!!

      Delete