The Power of the Situation

In the early 1970s, Craig Haney, Curt Banks, Carlo Prescott, and Philip Zimbardo conducted a landmark situational study at Stanford University. The experiment tested the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to attribute causes of behavior to personal factors, underestimating the influence of situational conditions.

For this study, a small group of college students volunteered to be subjects and were carefully tested for sound psychological and physical health. Half of the students were randomly selected to act as prisoners, the other half to act as guards. The study took place in a simulated jail facility in the Stanford University Psychology Department.

Once the study subjects entered the simulated jail, uniforms, rules, and other details distinguished the two groups from each other, and blurred the line between the reality of the study and life in prison. The students spent much of the day cramped in tiny cells, undergoing physical trials, and enduring the overall claustrophobic atmosphere of a small jail 24 hours a day. The guards, however, were allowed to return to their homes and normal surroundings after their shifts.

What happened during the study, originally planned to last two weeks, was more dramatic than anyone had anticipated, even the researchers themselves

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.

Rives tells a story of mixed emoticons

Storyteller and poet Rives tells a typographical fairy tale that's short and bittersweet.

Jiddu Krishnamurti ..

To be a freethinking individual is to step out of the darkness and see the world for what it is..to come to terms with the complete reality and not somebody elses fabrication...to understand that we all have the same mental capacity and that it is our very understanding of the complex world which shapes us as individual human beings..

Robert Sapolsky: The uniqueness of humans

At Stanford University, primatologist Robert Sapolsky offers a fascinating and funny look at human behaviors which the rest of the animal kingdom would consider bizare,he also notices similar behaviours between human and other social animals that make a big theme about who we realy are as humans..
Robert Sapolsky studies the universal human ailment of stress, but his main research subjects are the wild baboons of Kenya.
We all have some measure of stress, and Robert Sapolsky explores its causes as well as its effects on our bodies (his lab was among the first to document the damage that stress can do to our hippocampus). Every year, he goes to Kenya to visit a population of wild baboons, who experience stress very similarly to humans. By measuring hormone levels and stress-related diseases in each primate, he determines their relative stress, looking for patterns in personality and social behavior that might contribute. These exercises have given Sapolsky amazing insight into all primate social behavior, including our own.
"If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble."
Robert Sapolsky

Search for meaning -Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl's conference in Toronto with students for search for meaning.
This video belongs to logotherapy.univie.ac.at
you may find full lenght recordings of most interviews.

Jiddu Krishnamurti Teachings