how can a normal person be talked into committing murder in less than an hour what would it take to get somebody to completely deny every single Instinct of survival and social behavior and cause the death of another person what I'm about to show you is terrifying it's the darkest side of psychology and I'm going to show you what all of the experts completely missed so before we launch into this scary stuff let's discuss some extreme influence I teach probably the most advanced persuasion and influence training in the world but influence itself is just a tool
so like a surgical scalpel it can be used to save someone's life it can be used to take it so a coach a leader a therapist or maybe a parent could use the same influence skills to change someone's lives that a cult leader uses to ruin them so when it comes to ethics the tool is only a tool let me introduce you to Dr Stanley Milgram in 1961 Dr Milgram did something that would change the world of psychology forever and this quote of his about this experiment has stuck in my mind since the day that
I read it and he said I observed a mature and initially poised businessman into the laboratory smiling and confident within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse he constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands at one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and he muttered oh god let's stop it and yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and he obeyed until the end that hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it anybody that
you ask is going to say that could never be talked into such things but I think you'll be surprised so what causes a human to go from zero to killer and if some of us are willing to kill because a stranger in a lab coat tells us to should we worry so what if just like we have visual blind spots we have behavioral blind spots like maybe a small hole that allows a person to reach into our mind and start pulling some levers that they probably shouldn't have access to none of us would really like
to believe that we're vulnerable or this vulnerable to the world around us and I think most of us tend to go through our lives just firmly believing that our minds are somewhat of a fortress and the only things that really get in there are things that we're allowing to come in this belief is called The Fortress illusion and not only is it incorrect it's dangerous to believe so let's talk about a behavioral loophole really quick I Define a behavioral loophole as an inborn quality of the human brain that has its roots in protecting us from
harm so these automatic responses to specific types of stimuli create a loophole in our Behavior where we can instantly shift from processing information and cognitive reasoning to reacting to information and impulse reaction so since these loopholes are Universal in human behavior they can be pretty reliably exploited allowing an operator to basically predict an outcome and use that loophole to obtain some kind of desire to impulse response such as Focus excitement or a strong desire to feel a connection with the other person so why and how can a person hijack a human's brain their normal rational
decision-making centers so let's go back to the Milgram experiment just for a minute imagine it's 1962. you respond to an ad in the newspaper that says we're going to pay you four bucks for an hour of your time the ad says a study on memories being conducted at Yale and they're going to need all types of people so they're even going to pay for your gas to come to the campus they'll probably give you a free sandwich all you've got to do is mail a detachable coupon to Dr Milgram so when you arrive this doctor
greets you and one other participant is in the lobby there and explains the study so he says we'll be conducting a study on memory and learning and one of you will be the teacher and one's going to be the learner so the teacher is going to read off a pair of words the person in the Next Room if the learner responds incorrectly you're going to administer some electric shocks so you draw the straw and it says teacher on it the man in the lab coat shows you where the learner is going to be seated in
the Next Room and as he does he lets you see the electrodes get placed onto this person's arm he lets you feel the electricity even that the learner is going to feel in the Next Room so he sat in the learner's chair you walk out of that room right beside it there's another room and this guy in the lab coat closes the door and now you're shown to this little teacher's station at this desk right here you're going to be seated and there's a large electrical box there with different shock levers on it ranging from
15 volts to 450 volts and right after the 450 volt Mark there's some letters that say XXX and then it says danger severe shock on there so next to the machine there is a clipboard with groups of words on them you've got to read them out to this person in the other room and as you take a seat every time they get it wrong you have to shock them so Dr Milgram was average height from all accounts he was a serious dude he grew up in the Bronx many of Dr milgram's extended family still bear
Nazi concentration camp tattoos so this left a huge mark on his personality so at his own bar mitzvah his speech was solely about the suffering of the European Jews and the stuff that they had to endure during World War II and Milgram showed a special interest in this guy Adolf Eichmann he was an organizer of the Holocaust the actions of Eichmann inspired the development of The Obedience experiment and Milgram simply wanted to know if it was true that as Eichmann said while he was standing trial in Israel that he was just following orders so inside
the Milgram experiment the learner is in one room the teacher which is you or in the other room shocking this person because the person in the lab coat's telling you next to with every incorrect answer as the voltage increased the teacher was told the microphone was just one-way communication tool to the other room but he could hear the protests he could hear screaming and please for help from the other side of the wall and this sounds of the Learner in pain they were coming from a record player actually in real life with pre-recorded screams and
all that kind of stuff it even says he has a heart condition he wants to stop the experiment all kinds of stuff is going on and the sky in the lab coat is continually telling them to increase the voltage with every wrong answer so you can imagine participating in something like this could be pretty damn stressful that's why we don't have experiments like this anymore but they continued shocking the other person so initially these scientists got together they predicted that 99 of people would outright refuse they argued the only people who would go all the
way through with this were Psychopaths or sadists and they predicted only 0.1 percent of people would go all the way but in fact 65 of people about went all the way to maximum voltage 250 volts can kill you how many people do you think went all the way up to 250 volts surprisingly and sadly it was a hundred percent so of course if somebody interviewed you and asked would you go all the way up to 450 volts you'd bet anything that you own you would never do anything like that and you'd be able to resist
the experimenter I would walk out of the room the experiment has been replicated dozens if not hundreds of times with about the same results most people go all the way everybody obeys to some extent all the time so why then do people obey the experimenter didn't issue orders he didn't shout he didn't scream he didn't make demands he didn't have some secret persuasion technique there was no hypnosis being used they just listened so let's look at a few more experiments here I want you to investigate these with me another experiment that in in my opinion
is even scarier a person volunteered to take a survey they show up in a room there are several other people who are already sitting down taking the same survey and they're not knowing these people these other people in the room Are All actors smoke starts billowing from a nearby door they see the smoke they look around at the other volunteers which are the actors in this one and they seem not to care at all so the actors have been told simply do nothing so now smoke is starting to fill the room smoke detectors are going
off and beeping like crazy it's starting to look even more like there's a genuine emergency here so the actors see the smoke then they casually go back to filling out the survey in this experiment 100 of people sat in the room long enough to die of asphyxiation and if the fire had been real a hundred percent would have died so could this happen in real life though it actually did in May of 1979 a cab driver reports a fire coming from a Woolworths department store in Manchester they found some bodies that they found most of
the bodies in the restaurant and it turns out people hadn't left because they wanted to pay their bill they're operating on this social script that's just written in their mind nobody wanted to deviate from the group and nobody wanted to be the first to really stand out from the rest of the crowd so let's perform one more investigation into an experiment that shows how powerful this is I want to introduce you to this guy here his name is Dr Solomon Ash so the experimenter shows them with two pieces of paper holds them up and puts
them on the table there and one of them had a line drawn down the middle on it other sheet had three lines on it just a b and c and the students were simply just asked to determine which of the three lines was equal in length to the line on the other page which only had one line on it so nine out of ten of the students at the table were actors in The Experiment and only one person in the room was the actual participant the actor students obviously would deliberately choose the incorrect line on
the right and Dr Ash was just curious if the student would conform to the answers given by all the other people so guess what they sure did they denied the evidence right there in front of their own eyes and went along with the group Behavior so Ash Dr Ash concluded that students mostly conformed for two basic reasons they either wanted to fit in with the group or they trusted the opinion of the group more than their own so changing your behavior to fit in is called normative influence and trusting a majority opinion over your own
is called informational influence no matter where you look for the rest of your life you're going to start seeing this Behavior social media has made it even more powerful just increasing the size of a group that can influence a person and then they're only going to expose you to the news and the opinions that they want you to see exactly what they want you to see so your behavior is conforming in ways that we're not even fully aware of so people are going to tell you these experiments are about obedience to Authority I mean Dr
Milgram wrote a book called obedience to Authority so Authority essentially has five components when we're talking about obedience to Authority according to me in my training there are five components to Authority that I teach those are confidence discipline leadership gratitude and enjoyment or a sense of enjoyment so these are very precise and we're going to dig into these in a video next week so if you're subscribed you'll get a notification when that one comes out but there's something missing it's not just Authority this video is about what the hell these experiments missed so let me
show you right now so I want you to imagine you're a volunteer in the Milgram experiment that we just talked about you see the ad in the paper you drive to a building that you've never been to before you walk upstairs you never walk down into a hallway you've never been to to meet people that you've never met before you see a machine on the desk you've never seen before that's supposed to shock a human being which you've never done before there's a brand new room you've never been in there's new smells there's new sounds
there's a new test there's a brand new experience new words that are unusual from the experimenter this is what they missed and it's called novelty and I want to show you how powerful this is and my goal here is to persuade you to completely change whatever you thought was going on with these experiments so when something unexpected happens or something new is occurring our brains ramp up our level of focus which makes us more suggestible Focus kept our ancestors alive therefore they passed down this instantaneous Focus switch to us to do the same and when
something is unexpected or new we become focused on it instantaneously this is not one of the things that we can just turn off it's built into our brain stem so from award-winning speeches to TV shows we can't stop watching the injection of novelty is the fastest entry point into the human mind and I'd like you just to imagine the Milgram experiment again without any of the novelty the guy in the lab coat is the volunteers roommate and the experiment is taking place in a familiar place like maybe the volunteer's apartment so it's in his own
house the person in the lab coach the roommate boom Authority goes to zero even if you replace the person in a lab coat with the professor Authority goes to zero the novelty is not high enough to produce a tremendous amount of focus so in order to leverage any Authority Focus has to be present first and the fastest Pathway to focus is novelty something new is happening so no matter how confident you are no matter how much Authority you have if Focus isn't there you're getting nothing in return we've inherited a lot from our ancestors it's
all built in there to help us survive but sometimes these inherited traits make loopholes in us that can be hacked by somebody with training or skill and in other situations it can be leveraged to help a person to maybe stop somebody from a negative behavior or change somebody's life entirely the ethics live in you not the technique this is only part one of the series and in the next video we're going to investigate the five characteristics of true Authority and how to get them and I'm going to show you exactly how to seriously level up
your life when it comes to influence and persuasion use these wisely We rise by lifting others this is something you can do you have more training in this now than 99 of the world thank you for spending time with me today I can't wait to see you again in the next one love ya foreign [Music]
