I read an article recently about a really interesting experiment involving learned behaviour in monkeys.
I’m not even going to share the story with you because I’ve Googled it (I’ve always fact checked what I reference in these blogs as much as possible) and it never happened.
If you really want to have a look you can go and Google “monkey ladder banana experiment”.
But remember it didn’t happen.
So I’m going to reference another famous experiment that did happen.
The Milgram experiment.
In this experiment, a group of volunteers were instructed to give progressively increasing levels of electric shocks to what they understood to be other volunteers each time they answered a question wrong.
As the severity of the (pretend) shocks increased, the volunteers would hear the other participant begin to beg to be released and for the experiment to stop – even referencing heart conditions and banging on the walls.
Eventually, the participant would stop responding and the volunteers were instructed to treat that as a wrong answer and continue to increase the levels of ‘shock’ administered.
Anytime the volunteer requested to stop administering shocks, they were given a series of predefined responses instructing them to continue.
Everyone in the experiment went up to at least the 300 volt level at which the wall banging and and please started.
Despite their protestations and in some cases, tears and pleading, 65% of the volunteers went all the way up to the maximum 450 volt level at which, from their perspective at least, they were pretty much killing the ‘participants’.
This experiment had initially been put together to try and explain why so many people involved in the Holocaust continued to do what they knew to be wrong.
And the experiment and variations of it have been completed with similar results since.
Ultimately, the participant felt that they were just following orders and it was the fault of those giving the orders and not themselves for carrying them out.
I’m pretty sure every one of us would like to think that we wouldn’t do the same.
But us humans are often more likely to do something that we know not to be good if we feel it’s someone else’s fault, than we might like to believe we are.
We’re likely to overeat if “someone else was feeding us”.
Or it was a “works do”.
It’s very easy to blame our snacking on our other half for getting the snacks in.
Or our drinking on those that put drinks in front of us.
Or our cake and biscuit consumption on those that offer it to us at work.
And I get all of those things.
They do all make it harder.
It would be naive with me to think otherwise.
But I can help you navigate those situations better.
If we went into that experiment, knowing that that was the experiment and how it worked, I’m sure we wouldn’t keep going in the same way.
So let’s just treat life like that experiment.
Sometimes we do the equivalent of not going into the experiment at all.
Not having cake and biscuits in at home and generally minimising our exposure to certain situations.
Sometimes recognising that, whilst it’s tempting to be swayed by the actions of others………
Every actual decision is ours and ours alone (and, I literally guarantee, the best decision you could make now is to jump in here and change your life –> www.myrise.co.uk/apply)
Much love,
Jon ‘see, Jon do’ Hall
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
