(IN): Real difference between a man and any animal

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Real difference between a man and any animalBy: Maneka Gandhi

Article published on 7/6/2009 11:52:37 PM IST

What is the real difference between a man and any animal or insect? Let this

article explain to you; A book called Elephants on Acid, Bizarre Experiments

by Alex Boise is a collection of experiments which the writer finds weird.

While most of them are very sad – killing hundreds of dogs to see whether

any dog can live with two heads, two of the experiments should open your

eyes to the nature of the human being.

What causes the human to be either good or evil? What causes man to become

aggressive, rude, antisocial and cruel? It is not chemical imbalance. Or

vitamin deficiency. Scientists show that all it needs is to place the person

in the right situation. According to Philip Zimbardo “Any deed that any

human being has ever done, however horrible, is possible for any of us to do

– under the right or wrong situational pressures”

Are you capable of killing someone on the command of a stranger. Of course

not, you say. But experiments done at Yale University in the early 1960s

show that anyone can and will do terrible things especially if they believe

that the order is in the interests of “science” or that someone else is

going to take responsibility for their act.

The researcher Stanley Milgram, wanted to find out whether Americans would

kill thousands of people in the way Germans had killed Jews. So he set up an

experiment in which randomly chosen ordinary people, postal workers,

teachers, salesman, factory hands, were asked to commit acts of cruelty by

an authority figure. No one would force them. They could leave when they

wanted. Only verbal commands like “please go on … please continue with the

experiment…” would be given. They would not be paid or pushed in any way.

The ad asked for volunteers in an experiment to study “memory and learning”.

The volunteer was met by an actor playing the role of a white coated

“researcher” and another who pretended to be the “learner”.

The volunteer was told that the experiment was designed to examine the

effect of punishment on learning. As teacher, he would read out words to the

learner and then ask him to repeat them. Each time the learner gave a wrong

answer, the teacher had to press a button on a machine to give him an

electric shock. The shocks would increase in intensity. The researcher

pretended to strap the learner into an electric chair and the supposedly

nervous learner told the researcher that he had a heart condition. The

teacher was taken into another room where he could not see the learner again

and given the voltage switch.

The first few times the learner got the words right but as he made mistakes,

the teacher pressed the switch. When he passed the 75 volt level, the

learner started moaning. At 120 the learner shouted and by 150 volts he

started screaming. (All this was actually being done from a tape recorder.)

The teachers, in most cases, began to sweat and tremble and all of them

looked at the researcher for guidance. All he would ask was for them to go

on for the sake of the experiment.

Milgram had forecast that no one would proceed beyond this point. But none

of the volunteers backed off. They kept pressing the switch as the voltage

got higher and higher and the agonized screams got louder and louder– all

the way upto 450 volts when the screams fell silent as the learner was

either unconscious or dead.

Milgram conceded “I would say , on the basis of having observed a thousand

people in the experiment that if a system of death camps were set up in the

United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany one would be able to

find sufficient personnel for those camps in any American town.”

Milgram tried out hundreds of variations of the experiment and found that as

long as the volunteer did not see or hear from the victim, he was totally

obedient no matter what the cruelty level was. Even if he saw and heard the

pain, it was still 65%. And when he had to physically press the victim’s

hand on a metal plate to give him a shock, 30% still did it. Women were just

as pliable as men.

This experiment has been duplicated hundreds of times in different

countries. The result is always the same.

Another experiment done by Charles Sheridan and Richard King used a puppy in

a box. The researcher was told to shock the puppy if it stood in the wrong

place – as it was being trained. In fact there was no right place. The

volunteers kept shocking the puppy till it howled and jumped up and down and

then collapsed. The volunteers cried, they hyperventilated, they screamed -

but all of them kept shocking the puppy till it died. Another researcher did

an experiment in “obedience” involving “normal” people who were told that

they were part of blood pressure experiments. Live white rats were put on

their hands and they were told to decapitate them. The men swore, the women

cried. But since they had been “ordered “75% of the volunteers decapitated

the rats while they were squirming in their palms by stabbing and sawing

away at them.

Contrast this with a study done in Chicago. Researchers locked rhesus

monkeys into cages. To get food they had to pull a chain. But if the monkey

pulled the chain, his neighbour got an electric shock. After seeing the

agony of their neighbours, all the monkeys refused to pull the chain. Some

went hungry for as long as 12 days before they died, instead of inflicting

pain on one of their own kind. Whenever this experiment has been repeated –

from apes to rats and cockroaches, all of them have reacted like this. They

would rather die than cause wanton pain.

Do we deserve the Earth? Are we superior in any way?

 

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