Zombie Entertainment: A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance and the Red Pill

Zombie Entertainment: A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance and the Red Pill
December 11, 2012 | Kimberly Paxton | www.TheDailySheeple.com | 1,695 views
8



Zombies are the new vampires in the entertainment world, but unlike pop culture vampires, they don’t sparkle, they aren’t sexy and brooding, and you don’t want to turn into one.

The most popular show in cable TV history is The Walking Dead. Dozens, if not hundreds, of zombies are slain in every episode. Head shots are taken with no more compunction than swatting as mosquito before it lands on your arm. An axe to the skull, a pick through an eye socket, blunt objects, arrows, daggers – anything goes. What’s more, it doesn’t matter if the zombie is a man, woman or child – it must be killed immediately as it staggers hungrily towards you.

Even the US military is getting into the spirit of the Zombie Apocalypse, holding mock disaster drills with the shuffling horde as the enemy.

It’s all in the name of fun, right? Simply entertainment and anyone who says otherwise needs to lighten up, right?

Perhaps not – perhaps we need to take a look at psychological experiments undertaken in the last century to determine whether the Zombie craze is just a big psychological experiment being perpetrated on us.

In 1971, a 2 week experiment was funded by the US Office of Naval Research to study the effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard. A mock prison was set up at Stanford University, and 24 students took part in the experiment, half taking on the roles of prisoners and the other half, guards in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.

The situation escalated quickly into a cycle of abuse and torture. The psychological reactions were so dramatic that the study was suddenly halted on day 6. Out of more than 50 people who had observed the experiment, one graduate student finally objected to the abuse and torture. Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who was in charge of the experiment, wrote:

At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation — a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the “good” guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work.

I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.

Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended.

And so, after only six days, our planned two-week prison simulation was called off.

This experiment proved how fragile the human resistance is to wrong-doing under stressful sitatuations, and how quickly people who are normally considered to be “moral” and “mentally stable” can digress to behavior that is both sadistic and repugnant when that behavior is considered normal for the circumstances.

This occurs because of a behavioral theory called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance (a phrase coined in the book When Prophecy Fails, by Dr. Leon Festinger) describes the mental discomfort that a person feels when faced with two diverse values – the reality of a situation and the moral belief system of the person collide. When this occurs, the person must make alterations to one or the other in order to regain his equilibrium. According to Dr. Festinger theory, “people engage in a process he termed “dissonance reduction”, which can be achieved in one of three ways: lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, adding consonant elements, or changing one of the dissonant factors. This bias sheds light on otherwise puzzling, irrational, and even destructive behavior.”

So, using the theory of cognitive dissonance, we can understand that through popular culture, any mass of crazed, violent, hungry people may be considered no longer human. Members of the military, police forces and guards can distance themselves from violent actions by reprogramming their moral compasses and aligning them with the adjusted reality that it’s okay to kill women and children and the hungry, because they are sub-human. They are to be dispatched quickly and efficiently to quell chaos and return to a more comfortable situation.

We are being pre-conditioned by the entertainment industry to accept death on levels so massive that they make concentration camp videos look like a Disney movie. When you watch the following trailer, notice particularly at minutes 1:20, 1:56, and 2:10 – the cinematography itself dehumanizes the millions being slaughtered, making them look like little more than faceless insects to be destroyed as they seek to invade.

We are being pre-conditioned to accept the inevitable scenes of death that will be flooding our evening news, so that we won’t object when we watch these real-life incidents of mass extermination. We are being socially programmed to find the unacceptable to be a matter-of-fact, everyday occurrence when we watch an axe be delivered to the head of a dirty, hungry, feral child. Forget racism – we are being taught a new kind of bias – the categorization of someone terrified and hungry as something less human than us – a threat to be enthusiastically destroyed without remorse.

During the 1950s, Solomon Ashe conducted a series of experiments on conformity. The conclusion of the experiments was that

“Self-categorization theory suggests that our individual functioning at any given moment is dependent on whether or not we categorize ourselves as similar or different from groups. When we see ourselves as similar to a group, we engage in depersonalization, a key concept in self-categorization theory. Depersonalization is when individuals see themselves as embodying the social category of the group rather than their own personal identities. Therefore, from this perspective the Asch results are interpreted as an outcome of depersonalization processes whereby the participants expect to hold the same incorrect opinions as others in the “group”.”

It’s a lot harder to brainwash people who know they are subject to manipulation. By your very awareness of the motives behind entertainment and media patterns, you can protect yourself. Don’t allow yourself to be mindlessly “entertained” by death and violence – don’t allow this to become the social norm. When/if you watch things like this, do so with an engaged mind – don’t be a passive recipient.

Fight the cognitive dissonance by thinking critically and allowing yourself to be uncomfortable with the reality being forced upon you by the media. That’s what taking the red pill is all about.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Morpheus – The Matrix

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details).

Contributed by Kimberly Paxton of www.TheDailySheeple.com.

Kimberly Paxton, a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, is based out of upstate New York. You can follow Kimberly on Facebook and Twitter.

This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com.
Zombie Entertainment: A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance and the Red Pill

 

Related

The Stanley Milgram Experiment was created to explain some of the concentration camp-horrors of the World War 2, where Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and other enemies of the state were slaughtered by Nazis.

Do as you’re told
Many war-criminals claimed they were merely following orders and could not be held responsible for their actions, in the trials following the World War 2.

Were the Germans in fact evil and cold-hearted, or is this a group phenomenon which could happen to anyone, given the right conditions?

Preparation of the Stanley Milgram Experiment
The psychologist Stanley Milgram created an electric ‘shock generator’ with 30 switches. The switch was marked clearly in 15 volt increments, ranging from 15 to 450 volts.

He also placed labels indicating the shock level, such as ‘Moderate’ (75-120 Volts) and ‘Strong’ (135-180 Volts). The switches 375-420 Volts were marked ‘Danger: Severe Shock’ and the two highest levels 435-450, was marked ‘XXX’.

https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment source - this and other data is on the web.

This should scare you to no end....

Oh - The ‘shock generator’ was in fact phony and would only produce sound when the switches were pressed. The participants didn't know that.....

 

Having seen and experienced the almost casual indifference and "Ho-Hum" attitude to violence that man can develop during a prolonged existence in a combat setting....I am not surprised at all by the posts above.
It saddens and sickens me with the amount of violence that shown / used for entertainment via movies and video games etc...
'Course it might not be all that different from the entertainment given to society in the various Roman Arenas...
As the song says..."Same as it ever was..."
Andy

 

Actually there is a bunch of information out now that the stanford prison experiment was a rigged fake.
https://nypost.com/2018/06/14/famed-stanford-prison-experiment-was-a-fraud-scientist-says/

 

@DKR "The psychologist Stanley Milgram created an electric ‘shock generator’ with 30 switches"

Actually, I think they even made a film of it...called the '10th Level' or something like that... Supposedly, one of the 'shockers' actually went to the highest level after being assure he was being order to do so with the responsibility resting upon the Supervisor and he jump out a window, in his remorse, hurting himself afterwards...concluding the experiment, of course.

Incredibly interesting! Actually, if you dig deeper the "I was ordered' scenario goes much farther than just the brainwashed Germans of WW2 as both the Americans and British soldiers also did many, many atrocities during WW2 using the same defense...sadly most got off using it too. Think I am lying? Look it up. I dug into 4 cases, 3 American and 1 Brit, before I realized I didn't want to know anymore. Going from memory now, but I think the Brits even pass a law in 1991 stating any war crimes committed by their folks in WW2 were - well - justifiable and cannot be prosecuted.

Yes, we supposedly intelligent humans are more beast then we would like to think... But, of course, America no longer does this type of thing...better to farm it out to a country that has a strong stomach to do our dirty work...our hands our clean. no chance of litigations, and we still get the information.

 

the Stanley Milgram experiments are very intereting. People like to conform. They want to conform. The Man Who Shocked The World

 

@mysterymet Milgram was a really interesting guy producing lots of solid data that people were definitely not comfortable with yet was confirmed by other experiments/professors. And, it seems that there is no religious, ethnic, gender or demographic boundary... BTW Good article!

"I have carried out two data analyses that provide at least some evidence to back up this assertion. In one, I correlated the results of Milgram's standard obedience experiments and the replications conducted by others with their dates of publication. The results: There was absolutely no relationship between when a study was conducted and the amount of obedience it yielded. In a second analysis, I compared the outcomes of obedience experiments conducted in the U.S. with those conducted in other countries. Remarkably, the average obedience rates were very similar: In the U.S. studies, some 61 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, while elsewhere the obedience rate was 66 percent.

 

Great post and a bit frightening ...it starts with not objecting to the small things, like cheating. Seems human beings become Lord of the Flies very quickly.