You Might Be a Zombie . . . (30 page)

The guards saw this as a pretty good excuse to start squirting fire extinguishers at the insurgents because, hey, why not?

The Stanford prison continued to ricochet around in hel for a while. Guards began forcing inmates to sleep naked on the concrete, restricting bathroom use, making prisoners do humiliating exercises and clean toilets with their bare hands. Incredibly, it never occurred to participants to simply ask to be let out of the damned experiment, even though they had absolutely no legal reason to be imprisoned.

Over fifty outsiders stopped to observe the simulation, but the morality of the trial was never questioned until Zimbardo’s girlfriend, Christina Maslach, strongly objected. After six days, Zimbardo put a halt to the experiment.

What this says about you

Ever been harassed by a cop who acted like a complete douchebag for no reason? The Stanford Prison Experiment indicates that if the roles were reversed, you’d likely act the same way.

As it turns out, it’s usually fear of repercussion that keeps us from torturing our fel ow human beings. Give us absolute power and a blank check from our superiors, and Abu Ghraib- style naked pyramids are sure to fol ow. If it can happen to the sanest 35 percent of a group of hippie college students, it sure as hel could happen to you.

3. BYSTANDER APATHY EXPERIMENT (1968)

The setup

When a woman was murdered in 1964, the
New York Times
reported that thirty-eight people had heard or seen the attack but did nothing. John Darley and Bibb Latane wanted to know if the fact that these people were in a large group played any role in the reluctance to come to the victim’s aid.

The psychologists invited a group of volunteers to an “extremely personal” discussion and separated them into different rooms with intercoms, purportedly to protect anonymity.

During the conversation, one of the members would fake an epileptic seizure. We’re not sure how they conveyed, via intercom, that what was happening was a seizure, but we’re assuming the words, “Wow this is quite an epileptic seizure I’m having,” were uttered.

The result

When subjects believed that they were the only other person in the discussion, 85 percent were heroic enough to leave the room and seek help once the seizure started. This makes sense. Having an extremely personal conversation is difficult enough, but being forced to continue to carry on the conversation alone is just sad.

However, when the experiment was altered so that subjects believed four other people were in the discussion, only 31 percent went to look for help once the seizure began. The rest assumed someone else would take care of it.

What this says about you

Obviously if there’s an emergency and you’re the only one around, the pressure to help increases massively since you feel 100 percent responsible. But

when you’re with ten other people, you feel approximately 10 percent as responsible. Problem: so does everybody else.

This sheds some light on our previous examples. Maybe the drivers who swerved around the injured woman in the road would have stopped if they’d been alone on a deserted highway. Then again, maybe they’d be even more likely to abandon her since nobody was watching.

We just need the slightest excuse to do nothing.

2. THE ASCH CONFORMITY EXPERIMENT (1953)

The setup

Solomon Asch wanted to run studies to document the power of conformity, for the purpose of depressing everyone who would ever read the results.

Subjects were told they’d be taking part in a vision test. They were shown a line, and then several lines of varying sizes to the right of the first line. all they had to do was say which line on the right matched the original. The answer was objectively obvious.

The catch was that everybody in the room other than one subject had been instructed to give the same obviously wrong answer.

Would the subject go against the crowd when the crowd was clearly wrong?

The result

If three others in the classroom gave the same wrong answer, even when the line was plainly off by several inches, one in three subjects would follow the group right off the proverbial cliff.

What this says about you

Imagine how much that figure inflates when the answers are less black and white. We all laugh with the group even when we don’t get the joke or doubt our opinion when we realize it’s unpopular.

“Wel , it’s a good thing I’m a rebel ious nonconformist,” you might say. Of course, once you decide to be a nonconformist the next step is to find out what the other nonconformists are doing and make sure you’re nonconforming correctly.

1. MILGRAM (1961) AND MILGRAM 2 (1972): ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

The setup

At the Nuremberg trials, many of the Nazis tried to excuse their behavior by claiming they were just fol owing orders. So in 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the infamous Milgram Experiment, testing subjects’ will ingness to obey an authority figure.

Each subject was told they were a “teacher” and that their job was to give a memory test to a man (actual y an actor) located in another room. Subjects were told that whenever the other guy gave an incorrect answer, they were to press a button that would give him an electric shock.

As far as the subjects knew, the shocks were real, starting at 45 volts and increasing with every wrong answer. Each time they pushed the button, the actor would scream and beg for the subject to stop.

The result

Many subjects began to feel uncomfortable after a certain point and questioned continuing the experiment. However, each time a guy in a lab coat encouraged them to continue, most subjects followed orders, delivering shocks of higher and higher voltage despite the victims’ screams.

Eventual y, the actor would start banging on the wall that separated him from the subject, pleading about his heart condition. After further shocks, all sounds from the victim’s room would cease, indicating he was dead or unconscious. Take a guess, what percentage of the subjects kept delivering shocks after that point?

Between 61 and 66 percent of subjects continued the experiment until it reached the maximum voltage of 450, continuing to deliver shocks after the victim had, for all they knew, been zapped into unconsciousness or the afterlife.

Most subjects wouldn’t begin to object until after 300-volt shocks. Exactly zero asked to stop the experiment before
 
 that point (pro tip in case you’re ever faced with a similar dilemma: Under the right circumstances 110-230 volts is enough to kil a man).

The Milgram Experiment immediately became famous for what it implied about humanity’s capacity for evil. But by 1972, some of his col eagues decided that Milgram’s subjects must have known the actor was faking. In an attempt to disprove his findings, Charles Sheridan and Richard King took the experiment a step further, asking subjects to shock a puppy every time it disobeyed an order. Unlike Milgram’s experiment, this shock was real.

Exactly twenty out of twenty-six subjects went to the highest voltage.

What this says about you

Almost 80 percent. Think about that when you’re at the mall : Eight out of ten of the people you see would torture the shit out of a puppy if a dude in a lab coat asked them to. And there’s a good chance you would too.

THE
best creepy campfire stories are always the ones that end with the words, “It’s all true, and I have the documentation here to prove it!”

In that spirit, we’ve tracked down five of the creepiest tales and urban legends that really happened to real people, proving once and for all that nothing is more terrifying than everyday life.

5. THE LIVING SEVERED HEAD

The legend

Your head remains aware even after it’s severed from your shoulders (giving you just enough time to reflect on how stupid you were to stand up on that rol er coaster).

The legend says severed heads have been known to blink and, yes, even to try to talk.

The truth

Throughout history, death by decapitation has been assumed to be instant and painless (the guil otine was designed as a humane execution method—the fact that it looked freakin’ cool was a bonus) but there’s evidence that your brain remains conscious anywhere from several seconds to a minute after your head gets lopped off.

One of the earliest and best-known proofs of this came from a Dr. Beaurieux, who conducted an experiment on a French murderer named Languille.

Post-guil otining, Languille’s eyes and mouth continued to move for five to six seconds, at which point he appeared to pass on. But then when Beaurieux shouted the subject’s name, Languille’s eyes popped open.

In Beaurieux’s own words: “Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine, the pupils focusing themselves,” and the doctor continued to get similar results for up to thirty seconds (at which point Languille possibly just got tired of playing decapitation peekaboo).

Since modern beheadings tend not to be scheduled public events, scientists are rarely on the scene to interview a freshly chopped head. However, according to the website the Straight Dope, unlucky eyewitnesses to car accidents have reported seeing facial expressions and eye movements that seem to indicate a long moment of awareness during which the victim’s detached head had time to see their own body and register whatever horrifying emotions accompany such a realization.

We did find it comforting to learn that people have taken advantage of this horrific phenomenon.

Multiple adventurers and “ethnologists” who explored the Congo basin in the late 1800s wrote about a tribe that would tie a condemned man’s head to a springy sapling before chopping it off, so that the head was then catapulted into the distance after the blow. Thus their last few moments of awareness were of their head sailing breezily through the air.

If you have to die, that’s got to be one of the top five ways to go.

4. THE DEADLY ELEVATOR

The legend

The metal doors clamp down on a hapless victim, who can do nothing but scream in terror as the elevator dings and begins to rise, shearing off his head or limbs as it does. It’s a scene that’s turned up in several cheesy horror movies. But everyone knows the doors always safely open back up when they close on your hand.

The truth

There are safety measures in place, sure. But as Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh learned on August 16, 2003, sometimes they don’t work. Why didn’t the elevator open again or shut down when the doctor became pinned between the doors at the shoulders as he was getting on? To this day, nobody knows.

On that day, the doors held Dr. Nikaidoh in place like a vise as the elevator began to ascend, until it sliced his head in two at mouth level. Find that a little nauseating? well, try to imagine what it was like for the other person in the elevator. Yes, a nurse was in there and had to spend almost an hour in a blood-soaked box with the doctor’s head.