Jimmy Kimmel, the Super Bowl and... Hitler ????

So I'm on the treadmill at the gym last night (Rule #1 =  Cardio!) and notice one of the nightly cable news programs is running a clip from the Jimmy Kimmel Show. The clip is a bunch of interviews of people being asked about who won the Super Bowl. The only problem is that the Super Bowl hasn't happened yet. Still we get people very confidently talking about the winner, MVP, etc. 

Normally I would chalk it up to people being stupid (they are) but that's a lazy analysis so let us dig a bit deeper.

In the aftermath of WWII a fundamental question was asked.  Why had virtually the entire German population gone along and actively participated with the German war machine and the Holocaust ??? Was the entire military "just following orders?"  Was the entire civilian population just being patriotic or overwhelmed with nationalism ???  Were the German people just evil as a country and race?

In 1961 after the start of the trial or the Nazi Adolph Eichmann a series of studies began that later became know as the Milgram Experiments.  The setup was simple:

The Test Subject (T) was to administer a series of questions provided by the Examiner (E) (who is wearing a shiny white lab coat) to a Learner (L) that is separated by a wall.  If a wrong answer is given the T presses a button administers an electric shock to the L.  The shocks get progressively worse (or so T is led to believe) which each wrong answer to the pain that L is screaming out in pain. The E's job is to assure the T that it is perfectly safe and that they will not be held responsible for injuring or killing the L.

Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

Surely very few people made it to the final massive 450-volt (twice the voltage of a clothes dryer outlet) shock??

In the first set of experiments a whopping 65% of test subjects made it to the final shock. A prior poll of 100 students in a psychology class at Yale predicted that just 3% or fewer would give the final shock.  Implicitly, this means they expected only sociopaths, sadists and outlier to be able to inflict that kind of pain on a total stranger. The result was the exact opposite-- the outliers were the only ones to speak up and refuse.

Here is a recreation form 2009:

So what does this have to do to Jimmy Kimmel ???  The Super Bowl spot clearly shows how easy it is to convince a complete stranger to abandon a fact they have in their head to please someone with a camera and a microphone. I would bet that everyone of those people thought that the Super Bowl had not happened yet they ate up the lie with a spoon in order not to be potentially embarrassed on camera or displease the person with the microphone.  It's disturbing on many levels

So what is your stupid point, Professor?

Before you go putting on a white lab coat and trying to order your wife/girlfriend/whatever around I think there are better lessons to be learned. I think the point of all this is that we need to be more cognizant of our individual actions when confronted with these types of situations. We all laugh at the Kimmel idiots, but really, how many of you would have doubted yourself and unwittingly gone along with the farce?