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Equally amazing are some of the insights you can get into human social behaviour, by putting people into artificial situations and observing their behaviour. The classic examples of this approach are two experiments in social psychology from the US. In one, the subjects were told by the researchers that they were participating in an experiment on human learning. A rigged draw was conducted to divide the experimental subjects into instructors and students. The students (who were all actors) were to be trained in some simple task using the technique of negative reinforcement: each time a mistake was made the instructor was to administer an electric shock. The more mistakes the higher the voltage. None of this was real: what was being tested was just how far people would go in obeying authority or exercising power over someone else. The second experiment involved setting up a simulated prison in the basement of a campus building: it had to be stopped after 24 hours because the warders were getting a little too enthusiastic and the prisoners a little too oppressed.

Neither of these experiments would get past a university ethics committee these days: they're used, in the teaching of research ethics, as classic examples of what not to do (at least they are according to my social researcher pals). But that hasn't stopped this idea being used by television producers - it's the whole basis of reality TV shows, such as the egregious Temptation Island which pretty convincingly demonstrated that when you take people out of their normal social environment, with the unrecognised supports and constraints which make their relationship work, most men will start thinking with their dicks and most women will start thinking with the female equivalent. Especially if they have the encouragement of a sleazy presenter showing them carefully selected video footage intended to convey the impression that their partner's brain has already flown south into their underwear.

All of which makes me skeptically curious about this article (link via John Ray) based on an experimental study with results which suggest that people will accept impoverishment themselves if they are given the chance to impoverish others. Here's the first paragraph:

The countless individuals who are at the receiving end of irrational malice from their lessers will agree with me that an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature. [my emphasis]

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