Day 11: Social Experiments

Last year I took a class called 'Intro to Psychology'. We covered a lot of things, one of them was a social experiment conducted by a man whose name is currently escaping me. The experiment was on obedience. He acquired his experimentees by putting an ad in the paper saying that he would give $50 to any man who came to assist him in a science experiment on a given date. They arrived at the lab and were told that there was a man in the room next to him, hooked up to a bunch of wires, and that he was going to be given a quiz. Every time he got an answer on the quiz wrong, he was to be given an electric shock, and the voltage of the shock grew the more questions he got wrong. The experimentees were to deliver the shock to the man through a circuit board. The man in fact was an actor, and was not truly being shocked, but what the experiment was truly testing for was how far the experimentee would continue to shock the man as he got questions wrong. I'm can't be sure on any of the results of their experiment, but I know that there were some shocking ones.

I'm talking about this today, because I had a very interesting World History class today.

Surprisingly enough, nobody was late, and as the teacher is normally laid back that she doesn't really mind, it was a shock to see her steaming with rage as she walked in the door. Immediately I said to myself "Alright, prepare for the worst." She came in, leaned against her desk at the front of the room, and crossed her arms. "Tyler, Anne Marie and Kylie, no, scratch that, Tyler, Anne Marie and Bobby, come up here now, and bring a desk." My heart sank, I was in deep shit. There is nothing that could piss off our History teacher. Nothing. Today, I was more afraid then I ever have been. In a matter of seconds I was at the front of the room with a desk, there was no time to waste. Once the three of us were there, she handed a packet out to the class. "The rest of you are to take notes on this packet, you have a quiz in fifteen minutes. Get to work." She came back to her seat behind her desk, and said "Alright, we're gunna play a card game, that OK?" We all looked at each other, confused, and nodded. "It's semi-educational, the rules are as follows. You play one of the cards in your hand, they all have actions on them, and you get to do lots of different things with the cards here. The number on the card here is the amount of points you get, and you get one of these cards at the end of every one of your turns." She pulled out a bag of Mother's animal cookies, the white and pink ones that are defuckinglicious, and asked the three of us if we wanted any, and we heard gasps from around the class. What happened next I was not expecting at all, a fairly outspoken girl in our class stood up and said "This is not OK!" Our teacher smiled and told her to sit back down, and the girl replied "NO!" Then, a fairly outspoken guy ran over to the teachers desk, stole our card game and cookies, and ran back to his desk. Our teacher was in hysterics, it looked like she was going to cry she was laughing so hard. The packet that they were taking notes on was about the French Revolution, and our teacher made a little social experiment out of all her classes that day, doing the exact same thing. We were the first class to get what she was doing before five minutes had gone through.

The class before us took twenty minutes to understand what was going on. York, in a nutshell.

-Bobby