At 12:03 PM 1/26/2007 +0000, Peter Wallace wrote:
>Dear Keith,
>You may be interested in the following website?
>
>http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/vr/Projects/Presencia/MilgramVR/
>
>I believe University of Southampton is also involved in some way.
I only watched the first clip. It's clear where the simulation is going
though.
There is no question people are wired up to act as Milgram showed. The
question is *why*?
Restated, how did the human psychological traits behind the unsettling
results of such experiments help human genetic survival during the long
period when our ancestors made their living as hunter gatherers?
(Evolutionary psychology claims that every psychological trait humans have
is either the result of direct selection or a side effect of some other
trait that was under selection pressure.)
I can make a strong case as to how the trait behind Stockhome syndrome
became a human trait. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture-bonding
Humans almost certainly have a similarly wired-in psychological trait to
activate capture bonding in captives. I.e., the Stanford prisoner
demonstrates the other side of capture bonding with the exception that it
is "frustrated" since the prisoners are never accepted into the "guard"
tribe. (Their "wild state" fate would probably be being beaten to death.)
I can't make as strong a case for the Milgram results, but I suspect they
are related to "war mode" since psychological traits adapted to war would
be expected to have been under even stronger selective pressure than
capture bonding. See Azar Gat's really excellent paper here:
http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf
It would be most enlightening to model the emergence and persistence of
such gene based traits using a landscape of hunter gatherers with gene flow
between the groups.
Whatever traits Milgram type experiments expose, I strongly suspect they
have massive real world consequences such as in Rwanda and Cambodia.
>Good luck
Thanks,
Keith
>Peter
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