Sublime

In controversial experiments, now simply known as the Milgram Experiments, named for the psychologist Stanley Milgram, researchers told “normal” people that they were to punish other volunteers for breaking various rules. And punish them they did, sometimes escalating the punishment to the point of physical abuse. Almost none of the punishers

In his work on the psychology of emotion and moral judgment, David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, has studied the effect of such “team affiliation” on moral reasoning. In one experiment, subjects who had just met were randomly divided into teams by giving them colored wristbands. Then they were separated. The first group was

In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the

One classic study that purported to demonstrate this was led by the psychologist Muzafer Sherif. In the 1950s, Sherif got twenty-two ten- and eleven-year-old boys, all with a Protestant, two-parent background, all white and middle class, to enlist in a fake summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma.16 Yes, fake. Social psychology

cleverest observer. Consider

Tajfel découvrit que ses sujets affichaient une nette préférence pour les membres de leur propre groupe, refusant d’adopter une stratégie de distribution égalitaire, et récompensant de manière disproportionnée ceux à qui ils s’identifiaient désormais. D’autres chercheurs ont réparti des individus dans différents groupes selon des stratégies encore

Dans ses études, Tajfel démontre deux choses : premièrement, que les humains sont sociaux, et deuxièmement qu’ils sont antisociaux. Ils sont sociaux parce qu’ils aiment les membres de leur propre groupe. Antisociaux parce qu’ils n’aiment pas ceux des autres groupes.