RS4 (Freakonomics) Fear Thy Nature

This blog is a response to the Freakonomics podcast, Fear Thy Nature by Stephen J. Dubner.

After 37 minutes of this Freakonomics podcast, I was slightly flabbergasted. Originally, staring at our assignment literally made me feel queasy knowing that I would have to listen to something for 37 whole minutes. I should have trusted Professor Engel’s judgment better, and should have assumed this would be no boring podcast.

Stephen J. Dubner does a great job of administering this podcast. I am a rookie podcast listener, but felt that the sway of topics and ideas flowed extremely well in this audio clip.

Dubner first introduces Philip Zimbardo, one of the most interesting and well-known psychologists in the world. Zimbardo talks of his experiences at Hair, the musical, and explains how it was so different and untraditional that he felt strangely out of place. Zimbardo was also the man who implemented the Stanford Prison Experiment social science project.

The experiment went on for two weeks and included 24 male college students. Half of them were put in roles as guards and half were put in roles as inmates of a makeshift prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department. The inmates’ individuality was taken away, they wore prison gowns with no underwear, and their ID numbers addressed them. The guards wore matching outfits and became anonymous and synonymous. 1/3 of the guards took advantage of their power and treated the inmates horribly, so far as having them reenact sodomy. Zimbardo even mentions seeing changes in himself as the “prison supervisor”, changes he did not like to see. He was puffing out his chest, crossing his arms, and marching back and forth.

The point of the project was to find out the incentives of why a person acts the way they do. In economics, the decisions people make are based on different things. Do people make decisions based on their identity or based on the role they are put in within a certain environment? He believes people are not necessarily good or bad but their behavior is depended on their situation and the role they are expected to play. After 36 hours of this project, people had mental breakdowns, and after 6 days, the project halted earlier than expected. One student who acted as a guard admitted years later “ our professor never said I couldn’t do it, and therefore I did it.”

Phillip Zimbardo likes to mess with people. He tweaks his environment to see people’s reactions and in his studies, he has always found that people’s decision-making skills change with their environments. Zimbardo proves that the test of a theory is its ability to predict, since his predictions were on key.

Stephen J. Dubner also relates this idea to the Sleep No More play in New York City located in an old hotel. The play is put on my actors and actresses who do not speak, and is a “build your own adventure” type experience. The audience is masked and free to roam a 6-story building where each room is a 360-degree difference in scenery from the one before it, ranging from hospitals to Macbeth’s home. People describe the experience as sexual, insane, violent, and crazy. This play, a creation by the Punchdrunk theater group, is a challenge for people who like to be in control, and a blessing for those who like the idea of being clocked in anonymity. When the mask is put on, people’s incentives change and they make decisions on whims because they have nobody to judge them. They utilize marginal analysis and make decisions on the whim, with no incentives. With a mask and with anonymity, you do not need incentives to make decisions because nobody can judge you.

Dubner concludes asking the listener what the learning lesson was. I believe that putting people in totally new situations helps them discover things about themselves. Maybe somebody is not a truthful person if they stole a letter from Macduff’s office in Sleep No More because they had a mask on and knew they would not get caught. In society, rules are established and sometimes broken, but full chaos never breaks out because people cannot be put in basements and told there are no rules, nor can we all wear masks.

I absolutely agree with the viewpoint of Steve Levitt, professor of economics at University of Chicago. “Why does the average person who has literally hundreds of chances to commit crimes in a day not take advantage of those?” I think it is because they are scared of being judged.

This type of interesting social science information is good, but it is costly. What can the listener lose when hearing the viewpoints of these world-renowned social scientists and social science experiments? Their sense of identity.