THE RESISTANCE GENE and THE TIME EXPERIMENT
What is the resistance gene? And do I have it?
It is obviously not a gene in the scientific sense, but a characteristic of the personality that often seems so imbedded it might as well be. It is the healthy mistrust of authority and the ability to confront evil on a personal level no matter the outcome of the confrontation. Pretty much, if everyone had “the resistance gene”, the ills of colonialism and the Holocaust would have been prevented, and all the evil in the world would have been confined to the rare hateful, or truly greedy individual; King Leopold and Hitler in these cases.
In the recorded history of “heros”, or people who act justly, there is no pattern of race, religion, or class that would suggest one has it and the other doesn’t. I find that fascinating, so I decided to look deeper into the subject.
In Chicago, two weeks ago, I was standing on the street when Joe told me, “It just turned five o’clock.” I started telling everyone that walked past, “It’s five o’clock. It just turned five o’clock.” I told teN people and got drastically different responses from all of them. Some looked at me like I was crazy, some thanked me for the service, some simply ignored me, and some were clearly scared. At this point I devised a loosely scientific experiment to deduce exactly how many people have this “resistance gene” according to their spontaneous response to me telling them something as arbitrary as the time. I decided to return to New York and repeat “The Time Experiment” on one hundred people, monitoring and recording their responses.
Stanley Milgrim conducted a more controlled and legitimate experiment trying to expose the some of these same things. In his experiment he had an authoritative doctor giving instructions to the subject, an individual administering eclectic shocks to a hired actor pretending to be in pain every time the subject pushed a button and voltage was given. The results of the Milgrim experiment show overwhelmingly that the person giving the shock was more willing to listen to the doctor, and keep increasing and doling out volts, as opposed to stopping, even though they knew the person was in pain. In short, they obeyed the authority and continued hurting the individual receiving the shock as long as the doctor took responsibility and told them to. My experiment is less about response to authority, but it similarly measures an individual’s spontaneous will.
In my experiment, I represent some thing out of the ordinary.
The person receiving the information, what time it is, represents any individual presented with the opportunity to spontaneously react to an advance. They are being addressed directly, and made to feel somewhat uncomfortable. This discomfort simulates the discomfort one may experience when confronted with an opportunity to act out against something they recognize as wrong; i.e., an attack they could prevent. Since I could not commit harsh acts of injustice against, or around, these hundred people, the best I could do was simply something that warranted a response, something clearly unusual. The various reactions dictate their willingness to engage or withdraw, and ultimately, whether they have the resistance gene or not.
Before I began the experiment I created four possible categories of responses;
1)Ignore; the person who does not acknowledge me verbally or with eye contact.
2)Eye contact; the person who looks at me, but otherwise ignores the exchange.
3)Engage; the person who thanks me, says something in response, or stops to look and/or speak with me.
5)Fuck You; the person who responds violently, physically or verbally, to me telling them the time.
According to this scale the person who ignores me and withdraws from the exchange will be the least likely to resist evil, and the person who says, “Fuck you man”, is most likely to resist and possesses the ever important resistance gene.
I chose two locations to conduct The Time Experiment. First, the corner of N. 7th Street and Bedford Avenue between 11:10 am and 11:32 am. Second, Time Square, 7th Avenue, between 39th and 40th Street from 3:36 pm to 3:47 pm, both on the same day.
Bedford Avenue is the center of a neighborhood with a combination of Puerto Ricans and Hasidic Jews on the south-side, and almost exclusively young professionals and hipsters on the north-side. I live there.
Time Square is obviously different from Williamsburg, more tourists, and people are moving generally faster and are surrounded by more audio and visual stimulation. I asked 50 people at each location. Here are the results…
1) 34 people completely ignored me.
2) 29 people made eye contact with me, but said nothing, and in almost every case rolled, or quickly refocused, their eyes.
3) 37 people engaged with me, smiling, nodding, slowing down, extensive looking, giving thumbs up... 6 of those people spoke to me for varying lengths of time. Some saying, “Yes. It is.”, and some stopping for full conversation.
4) 0 people reacted violently (remember, according to this experiment, this would have been “the best” reaction).
The largest and most ranging group was “engage”. But the number of people who ignored me, plus the number of people who made eye contact with me, and then looked away, is 63, far surpassing the number of people who engaged, and not inappropriately grouped together.
Ignoring, or making eye-contact then ignoring, are virtually the same thing. One is an instantaneous, arguably unconscious withdrawal. The other is more a conscious decision not to engage. Many of the people gave me looks suggesting I may be crazy, and some were just confused. Even people who didn’t look at me often changed their look and posture.
Within the group of people who engaged, most responses were positive. This group overall obviously exuded more life, energy, charisma, then the other. Usually, eye contact initiated the exchange after my announcing the time, and then I could see a thoughtful moment when the person would hesitate and think about what was going on, and then finally, a reaction; a smile, a nod of acknowledgment, an “okay”. This group represents a portion of the population at least willing to engage on some level with a confrontational force.
No one had the “Fuck you” response I had hoped would appear. According to logic, this instantly rebellious attitude would make the most sense taking into account everything that’s ever happened.
People were more responsive in Williamsburg then in Time Square as one might
suspect. And there are a myriad of other fallacies that make this experiment scientifically unsound. More examples, “attractive females” were less likely to engage because they are approached in a similar fashion several times a day by characters probably who do not look unlike me. Headphones played a huge part in peoples reactions; I had trouble deciding whether to count them. Ultimately, I did. And me; the fact that I was wearing red, white, and blue cut-off sweat pants and a black hooded sweatshirt with a black leather hat over the pulled up hood largely impacted each reaction. But that does not make the data any less valuable. This is important information that is hard to calculate and decipher. Testing how or how not a person may spontaneously react to something they recognize as out of place, or wrong, is relevant to everything about our humanity, and speaks volumes about how each of us live our lives. Calling attention to the topic seems to me more valuable then the certainty of the science behind the experiment.
The results do not differ that much from Milgrim’s. The large majority of people chose to either ignore me, or acknkowledge me and quickly look away. The decision to ignore is a decision to be taken advantage of, to not react, and is more heavily present in actual movements of evil around the world than in this study. The fact that most people ignored me proves how few of us have taken the time and made the effort to think deeply about evil, and in turn develop the ability to spontaneously resist it. Ultimately this hints towards a quote from Professor Dilnot and a suspicion of my own, “You must be more afraid of the quiet, law abiding man than the man who breaks the law out loud.”
It is obviously not a gene in the scientific sense, but a characteristic of the personality that often seems so imbedded it might as well be. It is the healthy mistrust of authority and the ability to confront evil on a personal level no matter the outcome of the confrontation. Pretty much, if everyone had “the resistance gene”, the ills of colonialism and the Holocaust would have been prevented, and all the evil in the world would have been confined to the rare hateful, or truly greedy individual; King Leopold and Hitler in these cases.
In the recorded history of “heros”, or people who act justly, there is no pattern of race, religion, or class that would suggest one has it and the other doesn’t. I find that fascinating, so I decided to look deeper into the subject.
In Chicago, two weeks ago, I was standing on the street when Joe told me, “It just turned five o’clock.” I started telling everyone that walked past, “It’s five o’clock. It just turned five o’clock.” I told teN people and got drastically different responses from all of them. Some looked at me like I was crazy, some thanked me for the service, some simply ignored me, and some were clearly scared. At this point I devised a loosely scientific experiment to deduce exactly how many people have this “resistance gene” according to their spontaneous response to me telling them something as arbitrary as the time. I decided to return to New York and repeat “The Time Experiment” on one hundred people, monitoring and recording their responses.
Stanley Milgrim conducted a more controlled and legitimate experiment trying to expose the some of these same things. In his experiment he had an authoritative doctor giving instructions to the subject, an individual administering eclectic shocks to a hired actor pretending to be in pain every time the subject pushed a button and voltage was given. The results of the Milgrim experiment show overwhelmingly that the person giving the shock was more willing to listen to the doctor, and keep increasing and doling out volts, as opposed to stopping, even though they knew the person was in pain. In short, they obeyed the authority and continued hurting the individual receiving the shock as long as the doctor took responsibility and told them to. My experiment is less about response to authority, but it similarly measures an individual’s spontaneous will.
In my experiment, I represent some thing out of the ordinary.
The person receiving the information, what time it is, represents any individual presented with the opportunity to spontaneously react to an advance. They are being addressed directly, and made to feel somewhat uncomfortable. This discomfort simulates the discomfort one may experience when confronted with an opportunity to act out against something they recognize as wrong; i.e., an attack they could prevent. Since I could not commit harsh acts of injustice against, or around, these hundred people, the best I could do was simply something that warranted a response, something clearly unusual. The various reactions dictate their willingness to engage or withdraw, and ultimately, whether they have the resistance gene or not.
Before I began the experiment I created four possible categories of responses;
1)Ignore; the person who does not acknowledge me verbally or with eye contact.
2)Eye contact; the person who looks at me, but otherwise ignores the exchange.
3)Engage; the person who thanks me, says something in response, or stops to look and/or speak with me.
5)Fuck You; the person who responds violently, physically or verbally, to me telling them the time.
According to this scale the person who ignores me and withdraws from the exchange will be the least likely to resist evil, and the person who says, “Fuck you man”, is most likely to resist and possesses the ever important resistance gene.
I chose two locations to conduct The Time Experiment. First, the corner of N. 7th Street and Bedford Avenue between 11:10 am and 11:32 am. Second, Time Square, 7th Avenue, between 39th and 40th Street from 3:36 pm to 3:47 pm, both on the same day.
Bedford Avenue is the center of a neighborhood with a combination of Puerto Ricans and Hasidic Jews on the south-side, and almost exclusively young professionals and hipsters on the north-side. I live there.
Time Square is obviously different from Williamsburg, more tourists, and people are moving generally faster and are surrounded by more audio and visual stimulation. I asked 50 people at each location. Here are the results…
1) 34 people completely ignored me.
2) 29 people made eye contact with me, but said nothing, and in almost every case rolled, or quickly refocused, their eyes.
3) 37 people engaged with me, smiling, nodding, slowing down, extensive looking, giving thumbs up... 6 of those people spoke to me for varying lengths of time. Some saying, “Yes. It is.”, and some stopping for full conversation.
4) 0 people reacted violently (remember, according to this experiment, this would have been “the best” reaction).
The largest and most ranging group was “engage”. But the number of people who ignored me, plus the number of people who made eye contact with me, and then looked away, is 63, far surpassing the number of people who engaged, and not inappropriately grouped together.
Ignoring, or making eye-contact then ignoring, are virtually the same thing. One is an instantaneous, arguably unconscious withdrawal. The other is more a conscious decision not to engage. Many of the people gave me looks suggesting I may be crazy, and some were just confused. Even people who didn’t look at me often changed their look and posture.
Within the group of people who engaged, most responses were positive. This group overall obviously exuded more life, energy, charisma, then the other. Usually, eye contact initiated the exchange after my announcing the time, and then I could see a thoughtful moment when the person would hesitate and think about what was going on, and then finally, a reaction; a smile, a nod of acknowledgment, an “okay”. This group represents a portion of the population at least willing to engage on some level with a confrontational force.
No one had the “Fuck you” response I had hoped would appear. According to logic, this instantly rebellious attitude would make the most sense taking into account everything that’s ever happened.
People were more responsive in Williamsburg then in Time Square as one might
suspect. And there are a myriad of other fallacies that make this experiment scientifically unsound. More examples, “attractive females” were less likely to engage because they are approached in a similar fashion several times a day by characters probably who do not look unlike me. Headphones played a huge part in peoples reactions; I had trouble deciding whether to count them. Ultimately, I did. And me; the fact that I was wearing red, white, and blue cut-off sweat pants and a black hooded sweatshirt with a black leather hat over the pulled up hood largely impacted each reaction. But that does not make the data any less valuable. This is important information that is hard to calculate and decipher. Testing how or how not a person may spontaneously react to something they recognize as out of place, or wrong, is relevant to everything about our humanity, and speaks volumes about how each of us live our lives. Calling attention to the topic seems to me more valuable then the certainty of the science behind the experiment.
The results do not differ that much from Milgrim’s. The large majority of people chose to either ignore me, or acknkowledge me and quickly look away. The decision to ignore is a decision to be taken advantage of, to not react, and is more heavily present in actual movements of evil around the world than in this study. The fact that most people ignored me proves how few of us have taken the time and made the effort to think deeply about evil, and in turn develop the ability to spontaneously resist it. Ultimately this hints towards a quote from Professor Dilnot and a suspicion of my own, “You must be more afraid of the quiet, law abiding man than the man who breaks the law out loud.”
posted by Dr. Fish | 5:41 PM
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