CDS Journal

The "5 Monkey Experiment" is a very common story told as a way to try to understand human behavior... but it is usually presented as a way to say that humans are "flawed". If you do a Google search, you'll find many tellings of the story... here's one: LINK The story talks about understanding behavior by explaining how a group of monkeys behaves in an experiment... but there is one critical thing missing from it... the experiment does not account for the presence of the experimenter and the impact this has on the outcome. In the experiment, a group of monkeys is treated with some negative experience (ie. sprayed with cold water when they try to get some bananas). This negative experience is just accepted as the foundation of the experiment and there is no attempt to see THAT part of it as critical to the entire story. The monkeys behavior BEGINS with a negative experience... and their natural behavior is what simply passes it on efficiently. If the initial e...

This post contains notes about another post - CDS Journal: The Trap (2007) The Connection Between Conditional Love and the Cold War This documentary explains that during the cold war in the 1950’s, Friedrich Hayek maintained that societal altruism was destined to fail, and that unregulated individual self-interest was a better solution. The documentary explains how his idea began to prove true with scientific studies into the 1960’s and 1970's. In order to explain, the documentary spends time showing how things unfolded… which involves understanding what the concept of Game Theory is, how it came about, and how in the early 1960’s a psychiatrist named R.D. Laing used it to study private family life. Here is a rough transcript of the section of the documentary that talks specifically about the family study and the results. If you want to jump to the section of the video that these words are transcribed from, click HERE (Part 1, 24m 12s) : In institutions, Laing had noticed that ...