Did they know how painful the shock was beforehand? If they were just told, “This button will give you a shock, we’ll leave you alone for 15 minutes,” I’m guessing alot of it may have just been to test it out. Most guys were probably like, “It’s probably not that bad, I can handle it.” Without knowing anything specific about this study (though I feel like I’ve heard about something similar before), I’d argue that this may have just been more a case of people testing the limits of the study/themselves, plain curiosity, and not people just shocking themselves repeatedly because the thought of being bored for 15 minutes was so completely unacceptable. Though if it’s the same thing I heard about, I think at least one person did do this, but that’s more likely an outlier and somebody who may have actually gotten something out of it.
I’m not sure what it says about Men vs Women though, maybe how well they heed warnings from “authoritative figures” (ie the people running the study).
There’s not much you can tell about the study from just the one graph. I can say that I personally would probably end up shocking myself just out of curiosity. Like what’s the point of just sitting there for 15 min?
They did know how painful it was beforehand, and 100% of participants said they would pay to not be shocked again. Notably, it was a very small sample size for the shock study, 18 men and 24 women, but similar “sit there and do nothing” studies were done across all age groups (18-77)
Did they know how painful the shock was beforehand? If they were just told, “This button will give you a shock, we’ll leave you alone for 15 minutes,” I’m guessing alot of it may have just been to test it out. Most guys were probably like, “It’s probably not that bad, I can handle it.” Without knowing anything specific about this study (though I feel like I’ve heard about something similar before), I’d argue that this may have just been more a case of people testing the limits of the study/themselves, plain curiosity, and not people just shocking themselves repeatedly because the thought of being bored for 15 minutes was so completely unacceptable. Though if it’s the same thing I heard about, I think at least one person did do this, but that’s more likely an outlier and somebody who may have actually gotten something out of it.
I’m not sure what it says about Men vs Women though, maybe how well they heed warnings from “authoritative figures” (ie the people running the study).
There’s not much you can tell about the study from just the one graph. I can say that I personally would probably end up shocking myself just out of curiosity. Like what’s the point of just sitting there for 15 min?
They did know how painful it was beforehand, and 100% of participants said they would pay to not be shocked again. Notably, it was a very small sample size for the shock study, 18 men and 24 women, but similar “sit there and do nothing” studies were done across all age groups (18-77)
Source: https://news.virginia.edu/content/doing-something-better-doing-nothing-most-people-study-shows
If someone asked me if I’d pay not to be shocked I’d say no under the assumption of I didn’t it’d become some billionaires new business idea.