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humans
killing humans
a briefing document |
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the prevention
of violence
humans killing humans
on inadvertently giving permission
to kill
on "point-and-shoot"
arcade and video games
the milgram
machine strikes! - only following orders
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“For far too long, violence - especially that occurring
among families, friends and acquaintances - has been tolerated as
an inevitable part of human existence. But for a little more than
two decades, the U.S. public-health movement has been engaged in
various efforts to address violence as a preventable problem.”
“The biggest gains from arguing that violence in the United
States is a preventable public-health problem have been in greater
awareness and understanding of the complexity of the problem and
potential solutions. This, in turn, has led to a decline in violence
in some cities, especially among youths. Most remarkable is the
acceptance and endorsement of prevention as a possibility and a
goal. Now, with the World Health Organization report, we can expect
similar gains globally.”
“In Tanzania, an estimated 500 elderly women accused of
witchcraft – often connected with an event like crop failure
– were murdered every year, it said.” [Quoted from WHO
report on violence]
The report has a host of other odd facts.
humans
killing humans
From a useful but slack
background item,
not recommended to unsophisticated readers.
“[...] the recipient of modern military conditioning is statistically
no more likely to engage in violent crime than a nonveteran of the
same age. The key safeguard in this process appears to be the deeply
ingrained discipline that the combat soldier internalizes with his
military training. However, with the advent of interactive "point-and-shoot"
arcade and video games, there is significant concern that society
is aping military conditioning, but without the vital safeguard
of discipline [...]”
—
“One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology
is the observation that such resistance to killing one's own species
is also a key factor in human combat. Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall
first observed this during his work as an official U.S. Army historian
in the Pacific and European theaters of operations in World War
II. Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his
book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of
the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons
at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as flame-throwers,
were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as machine guns, almost
always were fired. And action would increase greatly
if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier
fire. But when left on their own, the great majority
of individual combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling
to kill.”
It is worth reading, especially for teachers,
as supplementary to Children
and television violence. |
“Another example of kids getting permission to proceed occurred
at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Two high school
students were given an assignment to shoot a video, so they taped
themselves wearing black trench coats as they walked through their
school with toy guns pretending to shoot fellow students. Afterwards,
they turned the video in for a grade and, you guessed it, the teacher
gave them a good one. Afterwards, she wondered if there could be
a problem, as thoughts of places like Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro,
and Springfield floated about in her mind. So she informed the principal,
but still no action was taken, other than to give the boys a good
grade. Shortly thereafter, the boys committed the largest school
massacre in American history -- and the school had given them permission
to proceed.”
The child can read this (for instance, a
positive review or mark) as permission to proceed. |
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“Now, you need three
things to kill: You need the weapon, the skill,
and the will to kill. The video games provide two
out of three. They give the skill and the will to
kill. The weapons have been there for a long, long
time. During World War I, and prior to World War
I, and throughout the years after World War I, and
throughout World War II, high-capacity 9 mm pistols
were everywhere in Germany. We had literally hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of young soldiers,
walking through Germany with military quality weapons,
and high-capacity 9 mm pistols. The first real,
double-stacked, high-capacity 9 mm pistol was probably
the German Mauser, to this very day a highly-respected
gun. It is well over 100 years old. The Luger is
close to 100 years old, and there were hundreds
of thousands of them in World War I. The weapons
have been there for a long, long time....”
“The new factor, is that the violent video
games are giving the boys the skill and the will
to kill; even as we reduce the number of weapons,
the ability to use the weapons has gone up. If a
criminal wants drugs, he'll get drugs, anywhere
in the world. Drugs are illegal, but if the criminal
wants drugs, he'll get them. If a criminal wants
guns, he'll get them. No matter how illegal you
make them, if a criminal wants them, he'll get them.
But, whether or not the teenager has the desire
to use drugs—if drugs have been glamorized,
and he's been taught that it is the right thing
to do—it's the media and the violent video
games, that are far more important in this equation.
If there is a new factor occurring, [it's that]
we're greatly reducing the supply of guns. And yet,
the incidence of these kinds of brutal murders—that
has never happened before in human history, never
before in human history.”
—
“ [...] Simply by educating children about
the health impact of violent video games and violent
television, there was a 40% reduction in violence
in this test score, because the majority of the
children voluntarily turned it off. When their elementary
school teachers tell them about this, the children
believe it, they know it, and they take action.”
“Motorists who seem to turn off their brain
when switching on their car's satellite navigation
system have had a number of spectacular crashes
in the past year - but occasionally they're right
to blame the machine.
“Drivers obeying directions given by a sultry
satnav voice have crashed into rivers, construction
sites and roadside toilets in Germany, and had similar
accidents in Britain.directions given by a sultry
satnav voice have crashed into rivers, construction
sites and roadside toilets in Germany, and had similar
accidents in Britain.”
—
“In southern England a 29-year-old woman survived
unscathed after misreading her satnav and driving
the wrong way on a motorway near Portsmouth at nearly
120km per hour, according to a local newspaper.
“When stopped after 22km of dodging oncoming
traffic, she told police she had only followed the
satnav orders.”
Stanley Milgram, a Yale University
psychologist, developed an experiment to try and answer
the question, “Could it be that Eichmann
and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were
just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”.
The experiment was to measure the willingness of someone
to obey instructions, given by an authority figure,
to act in conflict with their own conscience.
The experiment participant, appointed
as a ‘teacher’, was instructed/ordered
by a ‘scientist’ to punish a ‘learner’
in another room if the ‘learner’ made
an error in ‘learning’ words. The punishment
was an apparent electric shock.
In
the words of Stanley Milgram:
“In the basic experimental designs two people
come to a psychology laboratory to take part in
a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated
a "teacher" and the other a "learner." The experimenter
explains that the study is concerned with the effects
of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted
into a room, seated in a kind of miniature electric
chair, his arms are strapped to prevent excessive
movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist.
He is told that he will be read lists of simple
word pairs, and that he will then be tested on his
ability to remember the second word of a pair when
he hears the first one again. whenever he makes
an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing
intensity.”
—
“Before the experiments, I sought predictions
about the outcome from various kinds of people --
psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class
adults, graduate students and faculty in the behavioral
sciences. With remarkable similarity, they predicted
that virtually all the subjects would refuse to
obey the experimenter. The psychiatrist, specifically,
predicted that most subjects would not go beyond
150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit
demand to be freed. They expected that only 4 percent
would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological
fringe of about one in a thousand would administer
the highest shock on the board.
“These predictions were unequivocally wrong.
Of the forty subjects in the first experiment, twenty-five
obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end,
punishing the victim until they reached the most
potent shock available on the.generator. After 450
volts were administered three times, the experimenter
called a halt to the session. Many obedient subjects
then heaved sighs of relief, mopped their brows,
rubbed their fingers over their eyes, or nervously
fumbled cigarettes. Others displayed only minimal
signs of tension from beginning to end.”
Recently,
a virtual version of the Milgram Experiment has been
devised:
“Slater's volunteers did a similar experiment,
but in an immersive virtual environment where they
interacted with a virtual woman. This counters some
of the ethical protests that have prevented Milgram's
experiment from being repeated because the volunteers
knew they would be interacting with a virtual woman
and so, unlike Milgram's guinea-pigs, knew that
nobody was being hurt.”
—
“The group from whom the virtual woman was
hidden delivered shocks up to the maximum voltage,
like many of those in Milgram's experiment. Those
who could see her were more likely to stop before
reaching this limit.
“Almost half of those who could see the woman
said afterwards that they had considered withdrawing
from the study, and several actually did. "Of course,
consciously everybody knows nothing is happening,"
says Slater. "But some parts of the person's perceptual
system just takes it as real. Some part of the brain
doesn't know about virtual reality." ”
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