This vin­tage stunt from a 1962 episode of Can­did Cam­era makes for a good laugh. But it also cap­tures some­thing impor­tant about human psy­chol­o­gy — some­thing that social psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bar­do, famous for his Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment, describes on a web­site relat­ed to his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Under­stand­ing How Good Peo­ple Turn Evil. He writes:

One of the most pop­u­lar sce­nar­ios in the long his­to­ry of Alan Fun­t’s inge­nious Can­did Cam­era pro­grams is “Face The Rear.” An ele­va­tor is rigged so that after an unsus­pect­ing per­son enters, four Can­did Cam­era staff enter, and one by one they all face the rear. The doors close and then reopen; now reveal­ing that the pas­sen­ger had con­formed and is now also fac­ing the rear. Doors close and reopen, and every­one is fac­ing side­ways, and then face the oth­er way. We laugh that these peo­ple are manip­u­lat­ed like pup­pets on invis­i­ble strings, but this sce­nario makes us aware of the num­ber of sit­u­a­tions in which we mind­less­ly fol­low the dic­tates of group norms and sit­u­a­tion­al forces.

Often times, the mind­less sub­mis­sion to group norms has entire­ly innocu­ous results. But, in oth­er cas­es, it can lead to “good peo­ple engag­ing in evil actions.” Wit­ness what hap­pened with­in the con­trolled envi­ron­ment of the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment. Or, worse, the dev­as­tat­ing abus­es at Abu Ghraib, which brought oth­er­wise aver­age peo­ple to com­mit atro­cious acts. For more read The Lucifer Effect.

H/T Sci­ence Dump

Back in 1970, three psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sors pulled off a hoax that dou­bled as med­ical research. They brought Dr. Myron L. Fox, “an author­i­ty on the appli­ca­tion of math­e­mat­ics to human behav­ior,” to a con­fer­ence near Lake Tahoe and let him talk about “Math­e­mat­i­cal Game The­o­ry as Applied to Physi­cian Edu­ca­tion.” Lit­tle did the audi­ence know that Fox was­n’t actu­al­ly a researcher or schol­ar. He was actu­al­ly an actor who had played parts in Hogan’s Heroes and Bat­man. And he was giv­en a gib­ber­ish-filled script to learn only the day before. Nonethe­less, the edu­ca­tors in the crowd ate up his mean­ing­less talk, and it allowed the researchers to draw the con­clu­sion that “style was more influ­en­tial than con­tent in pro­vid­ing learn­er sat­is­fac­tion.” A nice way of say­ing that jar­gon and cant can some­times take you a long way in the acad­e­my — in the human­i­ties and sci­ences alike. More back­sto­ry here. H/T Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment on YouTube

Carl Gus­tav Jung Talks About Death

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

On June 6, 1961, the great psy­chol­o­gist Carl Gus­tav Jung died at his vil­la at Küs­nacht, on the shore of Lake Zurich, Switzer­land. He was 86 years old.

Jung viewed death as a ful­fill­ment, rather than a nega­tion, of life. “As a doc­tor,” he wrote in his 1930 essay, The Stages of Life, “I am con­vinced that it is hygienic–if I may use the word–to dis­cov­er in death a goal toward which one can strive, and that shrink­ing away from it is some­thing unhealthy and abnor­mal which robs the sec­ond half of life of its pur­pose.”

To this end, wrote Jung many years lat­er in Mem­o­ries, Dreams, Reflec­tions, a per­son should fol­low his instinct and embrace myth: “for rea­son shows him noth­ing but the dark pit into which he is descend­ing. Myth, how­ev­er, can con­jure up oth­er images for him, help­ful and enrich­ing pic­tures of life in the land of the dead.”

Jung cer­tain­ly embraced the myth of an after­life, as evi­denced in this excerpt from an Octo­ber, 1959 inter­view with John Free­man for the BBC pro­gram Face to Face. The 40-minute interview–in which Jung talks about for­ma­tive events of his child­hood, his friend­ship and falling-out with Sig­mund Freud, and his views on reli­gion and death–can be viewed in its entire­ty here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Carl Jung’s Fas­ci­nat­ing 1957 Let­ter on UFOs