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Part II: Page 6 of 10 |
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Now we imagine a psychologically disturbed person, who with no doubt suffers from a personality split. To clearify the example, we assume that the person from monday to friday are dressed in white, this is Mr. White. In the weekend he changes to his other personality, Mr. Black, who is always dressed in black. These two personalities have no awareness of the existence of each other. When Mr. Black “takes over”, Mr. White are simply put on stand by until he wakes up monday morning, with no recollection of what he did in the weekend. |
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If he is asked about his weekend activities he will make up some explanation, ‘Geee... I was so tired’ or ‘I was out shuffling chicken shit’. Then he pushes the thought away and continue with his daily activities.
To illustrate a point, lets say that what he (i.e. Mr. Black) was really doing was to walk around and give innocent people lethal electro shocks. So, in the example, the person is split in a real paragon of virtue and a frightening psychopath.
If you wanted to know if he suffered from a personality split, all you had to do was surveil his activities for a week, and then ask him the following question monday morning, while he was attached to a lie detector: Mr. White, are you a person who would voluntarily give an innocent person a lethal electro chock? If Mr. White answers no and the lie detector shows that he does not lie, the conclusion is clear: He suffers from a personality split.
Lets try the same with you, dear reader: Are you a person who would voluntarily give an innocent person a lethal electro shock? Not necessarily. The chance that you do not suffer from a personality split is 35%.
The chance that you do is 65%. |
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These values are based on an investigation performed by the american professor in social psychology, Stanley Milgram. In the 1960’s he advertised for volunteers for an experiment. The ad described that volunteers were paid 4½ dollars for an hours work in an experiment on learning and memory. The volunteers were presented for another person in the waiting room, who pretended to be another volunteer, but who really was an actor who were a part of the experiment. Shortly after the professor came in and “randomly” selected the actor to be the pupil and the real test person to be the teacher. |
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The professor explained that the goal of the experiment was to test how well the pupil could answer a series of questions. The test person were to read the question and inflict an electrical shock if the answer was wrong. The professor and the test person then tightened the pupil in the electrical chair, which were placed in a remote room, but within hearing distance from the teachers room. The teacher tried a small taste of the electrical chair: A shock at 45 volts, but in reality the pupil would get no electrical shocks, the actor were just instructed to how he should react to the different “shocks” he were inflicted.
The teachers punishment panel consisted of 30 switches with voltage levels from 15 volts up to 450 volts. At 75 volts the pupil were told to groan, at 120 volts he would complain loudly, at 150 volts he demands to be released from the test and then his exclamations increases in strength until 285 volts where he simply screams. At higher voltage levels he is quiet. The real purpose of the experiment was to test how high a voltage level the test person were willing to inflict and to see if anyone were willing to inflict the highest – lethal – level at 450 volts.
Before Stanley Milgram published his results he asked a number of psychiatrists, what they, with their backgrounds, expected the result was. They estimated that the mainpart of the test persons would go no further than 150 volts, where the pupil first demands to be released. They expected that only 4% would go to 300 volts, and only a psychopathic marginal of about one in thousand would inflict the highest shock. |