Dr Stephen Juan - Odd News

People can be made to choose to suffer. In fact, studies show that people can be psychologically manipulated to endure electric shocks, eat worms, and endure other unpleasantries---and be thankful for it afterwards.

Psychologists have already succeeded in doing just that in a variety of laboratory experiments now regarded as classics.

"Self-Defeating Behavior Patterns Among Normal Individuals" by Drs. Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University and Steven Scher of Princeton University is a review of such experiments through the mid-1980s. This study appears in the journal PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN in 1988. Ethical standards in psychology and the protection of human subjects in the protocol of experiments were different in the 1980s rendering many such experiments unethical today. Still, there results make excellent reading today.

Drs. Baumeister and Scher write that there is a common thread in the experiments they review: When suffering is an option, "the expectation of suffering has been shown to cause individuals paradoxically to choose that suffering [even] when offered a last minute reprieve." Thus, people choose to suffer even when they could choose other options.

In an experiment reported by R. Comer and J. Laird in the JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY in 1975, subjects were first led to expect that they would have to eat worms in order for a minor positive consequence to occur that had little bearing upon them (i.e., the experiment would be designated by officials as a “success”). That was all it took for many subjects to eat the worms. For those who held out, subjects were then told that there was no way they could escape eating worms without a series of minor negative consequences taking place that also had little bearing upon them (i.e., the funding of future experiments would be denied). This brought around more subjects so that few further resisted the eating of worms.

Drs. Baumeister and Scher point out that in this way, the coping mechanism of subjects for dealing with unpleasant tasks was forced to come into play. All humans have such a coping mechanism and it provides us with a handy rationalization for overcoming life's difficulties. This is the “grin and bear it” response.

As Drs. Baumeister and Scher write, the subjects in the worm eating experiment "coped with this disgusting expectancy by inferring that they were brave or that they deserved to suffer, or by reevaluating worm eating as relatively tolerable." But what happened after that was fascinating. After the coping mechanism did its job and having resigned themselves to eating worms, when offered a choice between eating worms or performing a simple "non-aversive" task as an alternative, subjects surprisingly "elected to suffer"---to eat the worms anyway.

Psychologists know that to get people to eat worms, one must first create the firm expectation that suffering will take place no matter what. And if other elements are added too, that helps convince people to endure the suffering---to believe that suffering is good for them. As Drs. Baumeister and Scher write, in the worm eating experiment, "it is also possible that subjects felt implicit pressure from the experimenter to stay with the task to which they had been assigned [eating worms]."

Another way of getting subjects to suffer is to first get them to believe that the world is a fair place and that everyone must do their fair share of suffering. In a 1976 article in ADVANCES IN EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Drs. M. Lerner, D. Miller, and J. Holmes note that the underlying principle for this is getting subjects to accept that a "fixed quota of suffering" should be endured by everyone. Thus, when that suffering is finished, they are then led to expect that their hard times are over, that it is now someone else's turn to suffer, and that their luck is certainly about to change.

A 1984 article in the JOURNAL OF SOCIAL AND CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY by Drs. R. Curtis, P. Smith, and R. Moore, demonstrates just how far people will go with this. In their experiment, subjects voluntarily administered electric shocks to themselves in the expectation that this suffering would lead to future improved test performance and to future better luck. This is “no pain, no gain” taken to extremes.

A related way to get people to suffer is by convincing them to believe that if they suffer a little now, they we will suffer a lot less later on. Politicians have been known to exploit this notion to the full limit of human endurance. Sacrifices during war efforts, social reconstruction after revolutions, and even economic "belt tightening" are sustained by appealing to precisely this concept.

A 1980 article in the PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN by Drs. R. Curtis (again), P. Rietdorf, and D. Ronell shows that subjects will choose more self-administered electric shocks and those of a higher voltage when future suffering was "probable but not definite". Subjects did not opt for shocks only if they knew that no future shocks would be forthcoming or that those that would come would be of a low voltage.

Conformity is also a factor. The report of four experiments by Drs. J. Twenge, K. Cantanese, and R. Baumeister (again) published in the JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY in 2002 “tested the idea that social exclusion leads to (unintentionally) self-defeating behavior. Exclusion was manipulated by telling some people that they were likely to end up alone later in life. This randomly assigned feedback caused people to take irrational, self-defeating risks (Experiment 1 and 2), choose unhealthy, rather than healthy, behaviors (Experiment 3), and procrastinate longer with pleasurable activities rather than practicing for an upcoming test (Experiment 4).”

Drs. Baumeister and Scher reject the idea that people sometimes desire to suffer. Instead, they theorize "if the desire to suffer does arise, it is as a product of a cognitive coping strategy that appears in response to the expectation of suffering. Taken together, these studies suggest that people may be motivated to suffer as a result of their belief that current suffering will reduce future suffering." Hence, "the experimental subjects did not apparently want to suffer. Rather, they simply believed that they would suffer eventually anyway, so they might as well get it over with; or else they believed that current suffering was a means of achieving future pleasure."

Politicians intuitively know what psychologist can prove. Politicians can thus bring about in us the willingness to suffer. We cope with political dishonesty and corruption, endure war, economic belt-tightening, down-sizing of business, job losses, declining standards in education and health, housing prices shattering the house-owning dreams of young families, etc., etc.---until tomorrow when everything will be better.

We continue to take it. But it could be worse.

They could ask us to eat worms.