Sadists Crush 'Em Up

[cronus]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 091113.php

Everyday sadists take pleasure in others' pain

Most of the time, we try to avoid inflicting pain on others — when we do hurt someone, we typically experience guilt, remorse, or other feelings of distress. But for some, cruelty can be pleasurable, even exciting. New research suggests that this kind of everyday sadism is real and more common than we might think.

Two studies led by psychological scientist Erin Buckels of the University of British Columbia revealed that people who score high on a measure of sadism seem to derive pleasure from behaviors that hurt others, and are even willing to expend extra effort to make someone else suffer.

The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Some find it hard to reconcile sadism with the concept of 'normal' psychological functioning, but our findings show that sadistic tendencies among otherwise well-adjusted people must be acknowledged," says Buckels. "These people aren't necessarily serial killers or sexual deviants but they gain some emotional benefit in causing or simply observing others' suffering."

Based on their previous work on the "Dark Triad" of personality, Buckels and colleagues Delroy Paulhus of the University of British Columbia and Daniel Jones of the University of Texas El Paso surmised that sadism is a distinct aspect of personality that joins with three others — psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism — to form a "Dark Tetrad" of personality traits.

To test their hypothesis, they decided to examine everyday sadism under controlled laboratory conditions. They recruited 71 participants to take part in a study on "personality and tolerance for challenging jobs." Participants were asked to choose among several unpleasant tasks: killing bugs, helping the experimenter kill bugs, cleaning dirty toilets, or enduring pain from ice water.

Participants who chose bug killing were shown the bug-crunching machine: a modified coffee grinder that produced a distinct crunching sound so as to maximize the gruesomeness of the task. Nearby were cups containing live pill bugs, each cup labeled with the bug's name: Muffin, Ike, and Tootsie.

The participant's job was to drop the bugs into the machine, force down the cover, and "grind them up." The participants didn't know that a barrier actually prevented the bugs from being ground up and that no bugs were harmed in the experiment.

Of the 71 participants, 12.7% chose the pain-tolerance task, 33.8% chose the toilet-cleaning task, 26.8% chose to help kill bugs, and 26.8% chose to kill bugs.

Participants who chose bug killing had the highest scores on a scale measuring sadistic impulses, just as the researchers predicted. The more sadistic the participant was, the more likely he or she was to choose bug killing over the other options, even when their scores on Dark Triad measures, fear of bugs, and sensitivity to disgust were taken into account.

Participants with high levels of sadism who chose to kill bugs reported taking significantly greater pleasure in the task than those who chose another task, and their pleasure seemed to correlate with the number of bugs they killed, suggesting that sadistic behavior may hold some sort of reward value for those participants.

And a second study revealed that, of the participants who rated high on one of the "dark" personality traits, only sadists chose to intensify blasts of white noise directed at an innocent opponent when they realized the opponent wouldn't fight back. They were also the only ones willing to expend additional time and energy to be able to blast the innocent opponent with the noise.

Together, these results suggest that sadists possess an intrinsic motivation to inflict suffering on innocent others, even at a personal cost — a motivation that is absent from the other dark personality traits.

(continued, a study in the obvious but it pays well in research funding?)

[Thinking Aloud]

And thus internet trolls are explained.

[cronus]

And thus internet trolls are explained.

You'll never find a troll cleaning a toilet. Not whilst there's bugs out there waiting to be crushed.

[JimC]

Schadenfreude!

[Tyrannical]

Those Psychologists conducting the tests should spend their time reading early anthropology explorer books, sadism was quite commonly noted amongst particular groups of primitive peoples. Not just the killing, but the delight they took in inflicting pain and watching suffering.

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

Interesting. Had to look up Machiavellianism as it seemed out of context. I'd always previously interpreted the word as the taking of extreme measures.

Machiavelli would be a great name for a motorcycle manufacturer, methinks.

[Audley Strange]

Wait, what? The choices were "suffer" "work in shit" or "sit on your arse and kill bugs?".

Fuck right off. In tests on obesity today they made gluttons choose between sitting on a spike, cleaning the house or watching Oprah and eating chocolates, guess what... Oprah causes obesity. Ridiculous.

Oh and "Dark Tetrad?" is this fucking dungeons and dragons? "Yeah we like rolled the d12 and got like a 3? So Hestagor the Necromage offered the volunteers three choices, endure the room of Frosty agony, clean the caverns of stench or like uh... kill 15 giant cockroaches?"

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

^ In all honesty, I think I'd have gone for the iced water task. - It's not like they would force anyone to hold their hand in there till it dropped off or anything.
Maybe the test would have been 'fairer' if the participants had to crush the bugs with their hands (I realise the bugs weren't really killed during the experiment). My guess is that having a machine do the actual killing placed a barrier between the subject and the actual task thereby distancing them from the deed and diminishing their sense of responsibility for their actions. - Like the difference between shooting a person from a distance or killing them with a knife. Just a thought.

[laklak]

Sadists like inflicting pain? Who woulda thought? Next thing you know they'll find masochists like being hurt. Oh, what a world.

[Audley Strange]

Yeah, however I am suspicious about the idea that killing bugs somehow relates to taking pleasure from torturing humans. For many people bugs are something that "just must be killed right now!"

Perhaps adding a tangible visceral aspect would be more balanced, since there is no real output from a bug to experience when it is slaughtered. If they were looking for some signifiers of Sadism, I think they would need to look towards not just killing bugs, but derived pleasure from control and enjoyment from the reaction such brutality causes. They would have to move up the food chain quite a bit and to do so would be unethical and pointless.

[Trinity]

I guess they could use props/camera effects e.g push this button and look on the screen as in the next room is a person wired up who will be hurt every time you push the button.
I saw a programme once where they experimented with people giving each other electric shocks. It was to do withhow people do what they are told, even if it meant hurting somebody.

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

I guess they could use props/camera effects e.g push this button and look on the screen as in the next room is a person wired up who will be hurt every time you push the button.
I saw a programme once where they experimented with people giving each other electric shocks. It was to do withhow people do what they are told, even if it meant hurting somebody.

You're talking about the famous Milgram experiment, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

[Trinity]

I guess they could use props/camera effects e.g push this button and look on the screen as in the next room is a person wired up who will be hurt every time you push the button.
I saw a programme once where they experimented with people giving each other electric shocks. It was to do withhow people do what they are told, even if it meant hurting somebody.

You're talking about the famous Milgram experiment, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Thankyou sir! X