#93- Five Studies That Will SHOCK You About Human Nature

Clinton Shum: The Scarface experiment is the fourth one on our list today and one of my personal favorites. Here's how it went. A makeup artist applies a realistic scar to your face. Raised, red, running across your cheek. You look into the mirror, it's convincing. You're told you're about to have a conversation with a stranger. Last but certainly not least, cognitive dissonance. Let's imagine you spend an hour performing an intentionally boring task, turning wooden pegs, moving spools across a tray, repeating the same meaningless actions over and over and over. The boredom is deliberate. At the end, the researcher asks a favor. The next participant is waiting outside. Okay, so study number one, it's called the Ash Conformity Experiments. So imagine you're sitting in a room with eight other people. A researcher holds up a card with a single line on it, and then shows you three more lines labeled A, B, and C. Your job is simple. Say which one matches the first. The answer is obvious. Any child could see it, but one by one, everybody else in the room calls out the wrong answer. All of them, unanimously. The Good Samaritan experiment. Imagine you've spent years studying ethics. You've read moral philosophy, you've chosen a career centered around helping other people. This is something that's fundamental to your value system as an individual. You've just finished reading the parable of the Good Samaritan, the story of the lone person who stops to help an injured stranger whilst everybody walks past. You probably believe you think for yourself, that your morals are stable, that you see reality objectively, and that if history placed you under extreme circumstances, you would do the right thing. Psychology research suggests otherwise. Over the last century, psychologists ran a series of experiments that produced an increasingly uncomfortable picture of human nature, not because they revealed that humans are uniquely evil. The Milgram experiment. It's 1961. The trial of Adolf Achmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who organized the transportations of millions of Jews to death camps is underway in Jerusalem. His defense? He was just following orders. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to find out whether that defense was psychologically plausible. and the researchers want to study how people react to your visible disfigurement. But right before their interaction begins, the makeup artist returns, supposedly to make a final adjustment. In reality, they remove the scar entirely. You walk into the room believing that you still carry a visible disfigurement. The other person sees nothing unusual. Could you tell them that the experiment was actually quite enjoyable? Some participants were paid $1 to do it. The others were paid $20. That was the design of the famous 1959 experiment conducted by Leon Festinger and James Carl Smith. The tasks were dull. The participants knew they were dull. Now you're late for a meeting. There's a person slumped in the doorway ahead of you. Do stop. In 1973, psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson decided to find out. Their participants were Princeton theology seminary students, people training to become priests and ministers. Some were asked to prepare a talk about the Good Samaritan story itself, and others were asked to prepare a talk on unrelated topics. Crucially, Now it's your turn. What do you say? That was the setup Solomon Ash designed in the 1950s. The eight other people weren't real participants, however, they were actors instructed to intentionally give the wrong answer. The only real subject was you. And the question Ash was actually asking had nothing to do with vision. Could ordinary people really be led to harm others simply because an authority figure instructed them to? He recruited everyday Americans, teachers, engineers, postal workers, for what they were told was a study on memory and learning. Each participant sat in front of a machine with switches running from 15 volts to 450 volts. but because they revealed how profoundly shaped we are by forces that we barely notice. Groups shape belief, authority shapes action, stress shapes morality, expectation shapes perception, and sometimes our minds reshape truth itself. That was the basic design of the study conducted by psychologists Robert Kleck and Angelo Stranta. The researchers were not primarily studying discrimination itself. They were studying something more psychologically unsettling. Whether merely believing you carry a stigma is enough to reshape how you experience social reality. Before running the study, Ash asked other psychologists what they expected. The consensus was that almost nobody would cave, maybe one or two percent. The answer was too clear and obvious, but they were spectacularly wrong. Roughly 75 % of the participants conformed at least once. Across all trials where the actors intentionally gave the wrong answer, participants went along with the group about a third of the time. And when they were asked to tell somebody else the opposite, afterward, everybody asked the same question. How much did you actually enjoy the task? Some participants were told that they were late. Others were told that they had plenty of time. Along the route to the lecture, sat an actor slumped in a doorway, coughing and groaning, and in desperate need of help. These are five studies that fundamentally changed how psychologists understand human behavior and what they might reveal about all of us. I'm Clinton Shum. This is the xpect Performance Podcast. Let's go. Whether the person in the next room answered the question incorrectly or not, they were instructed to then administer an electric shock and increase the voltage. The person in the next room was an actor. The shocks weren't real, but the participants didn't know that. shocking result. Most psychologists at the time predicted the same thing, which was that the participants that were paid $20 would report enjoying the task more. The reward should create a more positive attitude is what they hypothesized. The results moved in the opposite direction. The $1 group reported significantly greater enjoyment of the task. The $20 group showed far less attitude change. Whether the participant had just been thinking about the Good Samaritan parable made surprisingly little difference. What mattered most was whether or not they believed that they were in a hurry. Participants with time available stopped to help far more often. Participants told they were running late rarely stopped. Some walked straight past the person in distress on their way to give a talk about compassion. The results were shocking. After the interaction, participants were asked how the stranger had behaved. Had they stared? Did they seem uncomfortable? Did they act awkwardly or cold? Participants who believed they had a scar consistently reported signs of discomfort and rejection. They experienced the interaction as tense, strained, and socially loaded. Before the study, Milgram asked psychiatrists what they expected to see. Their answer, maybe one or two percent would continue all the way to maximum shock. Only the truly disturbed would take it that far. The rest would refuse early on. The actual result was profoundly different. 65 % of participants continued all the way to 250 volts. People were looking directly at the correct answer the entire time. And still publicly they chose to say something they knew was false. When interviewed afterwards participants gave several reasons. Some genuinely started to doubt their own perception. If eight people could see something different, maybe I'm the one who is getting it wrong. Others knew they were right, but didn't want to be seen in a different light and that one being the odd one out. The people paid almost nothing to lie became the most psychologically convinced by the lie. The people paid well remained comparatively unchanged. But when the independent observers later reviewed the interactions, they found little evidence of objectively different treatment. The strangers had behaved largely normally. The participants were not hallucinating. They were interpreting ambiguous social cues through a lens shaped by expectation. A glance became evidence. A pause became suspicion. Neutrality became loaded with meaning. A few later reported noticing the victim but feeling unable to stop. The situation had shaped the decision before conscious moral reasoning fully caught up. Every participant continued past 300 volts, the point at which the learner had gone completely silent. Many participants were visibly distressed, sweating, shaking, laughing nervously, asking whether they should continue. And many kept going anyway, not because they appeared sadistic, but because a man in a lab coat calmly insisted, Others knew they were right but couldn't and some assumed the group had access to some information that they perhaps didn't. What does this reveal about us humans? The logic behind the results is deceptively simple. The participants paid $20, had a clear external explanation for their behavior. They lied because they were paid well. Simple as that, no contradiction needing to be resolved. But the $1 participants faced a more uncomfortable situation. This study is slightly different from Ash and Milgram. Those experiments suggested people sometimes act against their values under social pressure or authority. The Good Samaritan study suggests something a little more subtle. People can fail to act on their values with no direct pressure at all. Just busyness, just cognitive overload, just that feeling of running behind. What does this reveal about human nature? Ash had uncovered something that psychologists now call normative social influence. It's the difference between believing that the group is right and needing to be seen as belonging to the group. Most of us can resist the first. We're much worse at resisting the second. We often think perception works in one direction. We observe the world and we form conclusions about it. The Scarface study suggests that this process also runs the other way. Beliefs about ourselves can shape what we notice, how we interpret it, the emotional meaning we attach to it. The experiment requires that you continue. That's all it took. They'd said something false for almost no meaningful reward. That created a psychological inconsistency. I'm not the kind of person that lies for no reason, but I just did. To reduce that tension, the mind quietly shifted the belief itself. Maybe the task wasn't that boring. Maybe it was somewhat interesting after all. For most of human history, being rejected from the group and by the group wasn't emotionally painful, it was dangerous. Isolation could mean starvation, vulnerability, and death. Research suggests rejection and physical threat overlap in some of the brain's processing systems. Deep down, part of the brain still treats exclusion as a survival problem. The study challenged the classical idea from virtue ethics. The ⁓ belief that moral behavior flows ⁓ from stable character traits. If someone is compassionate, they will reliably act compassionately. Dali and Batson suggested the situation itself may matter far more than we comfortably assume. Character. ⁓ Milgram described what he observed as an agentic state, a psychological shift where people stop experiencing themselves as the primary author of their actions and instead see themselves as instruments carrying out somebody else's instructions. When that shift happens, moral responsibility appears to move upward towards the authority figure. The individual becomes in their mind just The participants expected rejection. That expectation produced a hypervigilance, a constant low-level scanning of the environment for signs of a threat. And once that scanning process began, neutral interactions could be easily interpreted as confirmation. A glance became a stare. A hesitation became revulsion. Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, the discomfort produced when behavior and beliefs contradict one another. And he proposed the insufficient justification effect. The smaller the external justification for a behavior, the more pressure the mind feels to internally justify it. What made the theory so influential is that it challenged a deeply intuitive assumption. Ash's experiment forces a genuinely uncomfortable question. How much of what we believe, not just what we say, is actually ours? And how much has been quietly borrowed from the ambient consensus of the people around us? doesn't operate in a vacuum, it operates inside attentional constraints. When people become rushed, overloaded, or cognitively crowded, their field of awareness narrows. The person in the doorway doesn't disappear, they simply fail to fully register a moral call to action. the executor. What makes the finding so unsettling is how little force was required. No threats, no physical coercion, just institutional authority delivered calmly and confidently. The philosopher Hannah Arendt described the banality of evil. The idea that extraordinary harm A normal conversation became evidence of social judgment. This study has come under some scrutiny. It was conducted in the United States during a period of unusually strong social conformism. Cross-cultural replications later found different conformity rates depending on the country, era, as well as social context. The sample was also narrow, primarily young American college men. And the task itself carried no meaningful consequences. Nobody's livelihood, relationships, or safety were on the line. Sociologist Irving Goffman described this process as spoiled identity, the way stigma can reorganize not only how others see you, but how you interpret yourself and every interaction around you. The SCAR study placed that mechanism into a controlled setting and made it briefly visible. It did have some limitations. The sample was small and university-based. When we're rushing, our minds don't just move faster, they shrink. The study has some limitations, as do all studies. The sample was small and highly specific. There were male theology students at an elite university. And unlike some other classical findings, it was never replicated with the same cultural prominence or scale as some later social psychology research. that beliefs always drive behavior. can emerge not only from fanaticism, but from ordinary people functioning within systems. Milgram gave experimental weight to this possibility. He also identified another powerful mechanism, incremental escalation. Nobody jumped directly to 450 volts. Festinger suggested that relationship also runs in reverse. Behavior, once committed to, can reach backward and reshape beliefs that we would think primarily came first. These aren't trivial objections. They suggest conformity is not a fixed human trait, but a variable one shaped by culture, incentives, and context. But there's another finding that Ash rarely gets as much attention as it should. When the participants just had one ally, The study has faced some criticism. Psychologist Darrell Bim proposed an alternative explanation called the self-perception theory. Rather than experiencing uncomfortable internal tension, participants may simply have inferred their attitudes by observing their own behavior. I said the task was interesting and had little reason to lie, so perhaps I actually found it somewhat interesting. They were walked there 15 volts at a time, each step only slightly worse than the last. By the time the situation felt clearly wrong, participants had already crossed dozens of smaller lines. The SCAR lasted minutes, not years. The participants were explicitly told the study concerning reactions to facial disfigurement, which may itself have primed them to interpret interactions through that lens. The situationist interpretation can also be overstated. In the high-hurry conditions, some participants still stopped to help. Individual differences did not disappear. They were suppressed. The distress situation itself. The study has limitations. Archival analyses later suggested that some participants expressed varying degrees of skepticism about whether or not the shocks were real. And Milgram did admit this in his study and may have involved social performance rather than pure obedience. Some experimenters also applied more pressure than originally published in the procedure implied. More importantly, the study is sometimes badly misinterpreted. It does not suggest in any way, or form that discrimination against people with visible differences is imaginary. In real social environments, people with disfigurements, disabilities and other stigmatized identities often do experience measurably different treatment. was also somewhat ambiguous, which may have made it easier to ignore a more obvious life-threatening emergency. There's an important distinction that the study does not fully separate. Failing to notice somebody in need is psychologically different from consciously deciding not to help. One other person willing to publicly give the correct answer. Conformity dropped dramatically, sometimes by more than half. In other words, conformity is human, but context determines how powerful it becomes. The mechanics of Ash's experiment now exist at scale, at a scale that he could never have imagined. might be something you would say to yourself. Same outcome, different mechanism though. Psychologists still debate which explanation better accounts for the findings. The original study also relied on a very small sample of male college students, limiting generalizability. Cross-cultural research later suggested dissonance processes can look different. And the ethical concerns are substantial. This is not a study that could be conducted in today's day and age. Cross-cultural replications later found varying rates dramatically depending on context and country from under 30 % to over 80%. ⁓ That matters. It suggests the 65 % is not a fixed feature of human nature. It was a product. Harry may primarily impair the first. That matters because it suggests that the solution may not be simply obtaining better moral values. It may involve protecting attention itself. The study isolates one psychological mechanism under artificial conditions where the stigma itself was absent. Specifically, how the anticipation of rejection can distort perception. The existence of that mechanism does not make discrimination less real. If anything, suggests stigma imposes a double burden. Not only differential treatment itself, Like every count, every label, every trending follower metric, the outrage cycle is a digital version of eight people confidently calling out the wrong answer before you speak. The pressure to conform is not just social anymore. It's quantified, it's algorithmic, and it's continuous. in collectivist societies where consistency with group norms may matter more than consistency with personal attitudes. And there's a broader scientific criticism. Cognitive dissonance can sometimes become difficult to falsify. Chronic time pressure is no longer an occasional experience in 2026. For most people, including myself, it is a default condition of modern life. Most professional environments are explicitly designed around urgency, packed calendars, constant notifications, ambient pressure, the perpetual feeling of being behind. but also a perceptual system that becomes increasingly tuned to detect it. of a specific institutional and cultural setting. Historians have also challenged the simplistic comparisons between the experiment and the Holocaust. In the boardrooms, the same dynamics appear as groupthink, people who privately see the problem stay silent because everybody else seems comfortable. Some of the most consequential institutional failures in modern history track back to that silence. But the ally finding points somewhere hopeful. Many real world perpetrators were driven not merely by obedience, but by ideology, dehumanization, and group identity. Still, after decades of criticism and refinement, one core insight remains remarkably durable. Authority strongly shapes human behavior. The agentic state is not confined to psychology labs. It is built into the structure of nearly every large institution. The mechanism described in the study extends far beyond facial scars. It can emerge wherever people believe they carry something socially discrediting. Their appearance, their accent, their race, their socioeconomic background, their mental health history, their gender, their body. The study is especially relevant to understanding social anxiety. One core feature of social anxiety is precisely this cycle. Still, despite decades of ⁓ debate and revision, the broader insight has remained remarkably influential. beings ⁓ often reshape beliefs to preserve psychological coherence. If Dali and Batson were broadly correct, we may have unintentionally built social systems that reduce helping behavior, not by making people less moral, but by making them less mentally available. That has major implications for how we think about moral education. suggests conformity isn't inevitable, but it's structural. One person willing to say the obvious thing out loud changes the calculation for everybody else in the room. Psychological safety is not just a soft cultural ideal. It's one of the variables that determines whether truth survives the meeting. Once you notice this mechanism, you begin to see it almost everywhere. After buying something expensive, people often rate it more positively than when they did beforehand. There's a justification for the actions. Not necessarily because the product improved, but because the purchase created a level of commitment and the mind moved to align the belief with the action. Marketers understand this well. Small commitments lead frequently to larger ones. A compliance officer approves the form. An engineer deploys a feature. A logistic worker ships a package. Each person handles one small piece. No one feels like the sole author of the outcome. The diffusion of responsibility across departments and hierarchies is often structurally convenient. If the core problem is not a lack of values, but a lack of cognitive space to act on them, then lectures about compassion may have limited impact. Designing environments differently may matter more and may yield and bear more fruit. Reducing overload, creating slack, making need more visible, lowering the friction required to help. A belief that you are being judged creates hypervigilance. Hypervigilance increases the likelihood of false positives, and those false positives reinforce the original belief. This loop becomes self-confirming and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many cognitive behavioral therapy approaches are designed specifically to interrupt that process, creating enough distance between expectation and interpretation. A free trial, a badge, one meeting becomes two meetings. Once behavior shifts, identity often follows. In politics, cognitive dissonance explains why contradictory evidence rarely changes deeply held beliefs. This is hugely relevant in today's political climate. When information threatens identity, updating the belief can begin to feel psychologically similar to betraying the self. and when responsibility becomes fragmented, resistance becomes less likely. Milgram's most revealing variation is one that is possibly least discussed. When participants were placed closer to the learner, close enough to see the distress directly, obedience dropped significantly. people to test whether the evidence actually supports their fear. The deepest implication might be this. The most isolating feature of stigma is not only that others may sometimes treat you differently, it is that you can eventually stop trusting your own ability to accurately judge whether they do. Once that lens takes hold, neutral interactions can The Good Samaritan study ultimately suggests goodness is not only a personal trait, but it is also an environmental achievement. When they had to physically place the learner's hand onto the shock plate, it dropped further still. What does this mean? Moral distance matters. The farther people are from the visible consequences of their actions, the easier compliance becomes. Closing the distance between action and consequence is not another soft cultural value. The easier path is often to reinterpret and dismiss the evidence instead. The stronger the prior public commitment, the stronger the pressure to defend it. The same mechanism appears inside organizations. And more publicly, a leader commits to a failing strategy, the harder it becomes to reverse course. Cutting losses feels like contradiction. Persisting feels like consistency. begin to feel loaded, ambiguous situations threatening and ordinary social friction emotionally diagnostic. For a few minutes inside a laboratory, the Scarface study recreated that experience and made something normally invisible briefly legible. but it might be one of the strongest structural safeguards against moral disengagement that institutions possess. The mind prefers the story that it can preserve and that preserves coherence. And perhaps the most important implication in this. Every time people repeatedly act against their own stated values for reasons that feel insufficient, the mind does not simply file those moments away as isolated failures. can begin quietly adjusting beliefs to reduce the contradiction. Integrity then may not only be a moral achievement, but it may also be a cognitive one. The ongoing effort to stop behavior from silently rewriting identity. The deeper psychologists studied human behavior, the more uncomfortable the discoveries often became. Human beings are profoundly social, highly context dependent, deeply sensitive to authority, attention, identity, and expectation. We conform more than we realize, obey more easily than we'd like to believe, miss suffering when overloaded. interpret reality through fear and anticipation, and sometimes reshape our own beliefs to protect a coherent sense of self. But none of these studies prove humans are doomed, in fact, many of them to point toward the same hopeful conclusion. Context matters. One ally reduced conformity. Closeness reduced obedience. Attention increased compassion. Awareness interrupted distorted perception. And conscious reflection made self-deception harder to sustain. The uncomfortable truth running through all five studies is not that humans are monsters. It's that human behavior is far more malleable than most of us imagine. And maybe that's exactly why understanding these forces matters. Because the more aware we become... of the pressures shaping us, the more capable we are of deciding which ones deserve our obedience and which ones don't.