This happens because people fear for themselves and through various "injunctions" they are able to 'pass-the-buck' of personal responsibility and act according to how they feel they are expected to act. As parents we teach our kids not to give into peer pressure, as adults our lives are entirely defined and our self-worth determined by our peer groups. We believe our motivations are much more righteous, but we haven't done anything to secure a moral sense over and above the masses of our peers. Quite naturally, the pull of peer opinion helps conform our moral intuitions to that of our peer group. We may assume an infallibility in this role as moral judge, or assume that our judgments are inconsequential, either means of coping with uncertainty in our moral decisions serves us not to unveil delusion and correct ourselves, but merely to do away with ill feelings. Our psyches are constantly engaged in moving toward pleasure and away from fear, even within themselves, if one coping strategy is able to push the pain or suffering out of mind or into the periphery of conscious attention, we are temporarily satisfied, at least enough to convince us there is no problem. A powerful injunction for these types of experiments is "The experiment needs you to continue." Not surprisingly, the subject is able to pass responsibility, and thus the pain of having to choose, onto the abstraction 'experiment'. "I am not choosing, the experiment is choosing." People in this situation, as in the above example ("La Jeu de la Mort") often say to their victims "It's not me doing it, they want me to. I am only doing what I am being made to do."

"Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life."
— Erich Fromm (To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche)

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Krishnamurti

La Jeu de la Mort
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1i8bZrXLqU

I'll take the one that rearranges the targets brain to be more attuned with reality. The Sanitazer or whatever it's called.

Cool! I think I might need one of those.

To think they used to have to grind up the beans manually with mortar and pestle. Then they'd dump the grounds in their coffee cup, fill it up with hot water and start drinking.

So they feed him whole potatos? Unreal!

They should try vegetarian dog food, like the stuff veggiepets.com sells.

It reminds me of something one of my ex-friends said: "I love my dogs, I'd rather have my dogs than my friends anytime."

At which point I unfriended her. But not before stating my armchair psychoanalsysis, that she valued her dogs over human companions because dogs look to her for constant approval and are incapable of disagreeing with her. Whereas humans demand respect for their autonomy.

Mor(e)on topic - the developmentalist Diana Baumrind initially drafted three classes of parenting - which are still in use today - and since then she has drafted a fourth. The first three are as follows:

Source: DevPsy.org

The permissive parent attempts to behave in a nonpunitive, acceptant and affirmative manner towards the child's impulses, desires, and actions.

The authoritarian parent attempts to shape, control, and evaluate the behavior and attitudes of the child in accordance with a set standard of conduct, usually an absolute standard, theologically motivated and formulated by a higher authority.

The authoritative parent attempts to direct the child's activities but in a rational, issue-oriented manner. She [the parent] encourages verbal give and take, shares with the child the reasoning behind her policy, and solicits his objections when he refuses to conform.

The fourth is neglectful parenting which I can ignore for this analysis. Baumrind found that authoritative parents succeeded the best at raising well-adjusted children, while the other two generally produced maladjusted children. The woman in question would probably belong to the authoritarian class, which includes: [the parent] values obedience as a virtue and favors punitive, forceful measures to curb self-will at points where the child's actions or beliefs conflict with what she thinks is right conduct.

Of course, such persons believe their method of parenting to be the best; they haven't studied child development.

People aren't "just stupid".

There is an informal rule in science which states "no 'just so' explanations" another way of stating this is that you need to give some basis for the appearance of some phenomena without saying it is "just so". As in "he is just stupid" or "she is just naive". The premise being that as everything is contingent upon the existence of something else, nothing ever "just" exists, but exists as the consequence of some antecedent chain of causation.

Thus, if the kid is stupid, he isn't "just" stupid. He has good causal justification for being stupid, a causation which extends to the sentiment of the people on his periphery; his community, his country, etc... That people are so quick to suggest a 'just so' explanation of the type "just stupid" is indicative of the swiftness with which his community scape-goats him and ignores their own social contributions - which is itself significant social contribution.

Zimbardo has a website call the lucifer effect which focuses on what makes "good people do bad things".

I dunno, maybe I'm too old. The word "cliche" springs to mind.

This video could be used to teach students of abnormal psychology about the onset of mental illness.

It is fascinating how we allow our intellectual minds to compartmentalise us and blind us to the illusory effect. "I'm not seeing anything illusory, I'm seeing a photoshopped image."

We are able to ignore the flaws inherent in our perception by employing our intellect. Nevertheless, we remain victims of our flaws, but perhaps we just don't like admitting it.

It's like; if I can bring myself over this illusion then I will be of greater value, so even if I can't overcome the illusion, I can make statements that superficially debase the illusion and that makes me feel superior.

Why are obscure words for common things great?

Why would I need to use the hypothesis to explain male attraction to boobies? There can be multiple threads of attraction that run along-side each other.

Adult humans have a natural attraction to infants; to care for them. Perhaps the same type of attraction can be exploited by adult women in their male counter-parts. Such that men are attracted to their boobies, but also feel an explicit desire to care-for the woman as if she were an invalid.

"We are a way for the universe to experience itself." - Carl Sagan

"for this reason have I raised the up that I may make my power known - The Holy Bible