Albert Bandura’s 1961 Bobo doll experiment had some pretty scary results
In 1961, psychologist Albert Bandura conducted a strange experiment involving children, a clown doll, and aggression. In his Stanford laboratory, Bandura had a woman act aggressively towards an inflatable doll named Bobo the clown. The woman kicked, punched, tossed, and verbally abused the inanimate object. While this was happening, Bandura had a set of preschool children observe Bobo’s ordeal.
After just ten minutes of observation, researchers took each child to a separate room filled with toys to play with it. Soon after, they confiscated the toys and left them with Bobo, the clown.
What happened after was pretty darn scary.
Results
Its buyer claims that it was worth every penny.
On May 18, 2010, computer programmer Lazlo Hanyecz posted this on a Bitcoin forum:
I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. …
Deconstructing money with history
In 1942, Cambridge-trained economist Richard A. Radford found himself trapped in a Nazi prison camp. He was a British soldier deployed in the Allies’ North African Campaign. Unfortunately, their efforts in Libya ended in defeat. German forces then took him and the other Allied survivors to Stalag VII-A. It was Germany’s largest prisoner-of-war camp, located in Southern Bavaria.
Stalag VII-A covered about 35 hectares, and by its liberation in 1945, it kept more than 76,000 prisoners. Radford spent the rest of the war around the compound and chronicled his experiences with a unique perspective.
In Ancient Rome, dogs even fought lions.
From cocks to spiders, humans have forced animals to fight for their entertainment for centuries. This cruel tradition has deep social roots in many countries and has all sorts of creatures fight to the death. Even dogs, supposedly our best friends, aren’t spared from this practice.
In dogfighting, dogs are pitted against one another in a ring while people gamble on the outcome. Losers usually sustained fatal injuries, while winners often end up crippled.
Where did this cruel sport originate, and how did its practice spread to so many places?
Dogfighting in Ancient Times
Life in and out of prison.
On May 31, 1985, a 71-year-old man walked out of his cell and into a chamber where a rope awaited his neck. The only audience he had in his final moments were the officers assigned to the job. They were the closest thing he had to friends or family, given that during his entire life, he moved in and out of prison.
His name was Sokichi Furuya. He was a troubled child, thief, and a notorious Japanese serial killer.
Troubled Past
Furuya was born on February 16, 1914, and became the son of two well-off Fish traders. When his mother passed away…
Genius doesn’t happen on decaf
An Ethiopian legend speaks of a magic bean that was discovered by goats. After eating berries from a certain tree, the goats seemed to have a renewed sense of life and had difficulty falling asleep. When their caretaker reported this to the head of their local monastery, a curious monk experimented with the berries himself. He turned them into a drink.
With the last sip, the holy man understood what the goats felt. He had energy, focus, inspiration, and mental clarity — it was as if the dark and smokey water had momentarily blessed him with genius.
Word of this…
The history behind Robert Frost’s most misunderstood poem.
“Two roads diverge in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
For many reasons, we have immortalized these lines into our collective consciousness. They’ve been studied in schools, used in commercials, and etched into buildings probably because they sound selfishly sexy.
When most people read these lines, they picture a maverick. They surmise that the poem glorifies individualism and celebrates the authenticity of an unconventional life. It’s so easy to buy this interpretation given the poem’s hypnotic rhythm and impactful last lines.
A reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Yertle the Turtle” with a bit of history in mind
The Cat in the Hat, The Grinch, and The Lorax are among the many children’s books authored by the wise and quirky Dr. Seuss. His books not only entertain but impart valuable lessons on empathy, tolerance, and kindness. He wanted to make the world a more accepting place, having lived through the horrors of World War II.
Most people don’t know that Dr. Seuss hated Hitler and the Nazi party with passion. After his vacation in Europe in 1936, he felt called to fight the fascism he witnessed on his trip — fueled even more by his German ancestry. …
From 2002 to 2018, more than a dozen people have lost their lives to the “My Way Killings” phenomenon
In 2018, a 61-year-old man was killed by his neighbor at a birthday party in Zamboanga Del Norte, Philippines. The karaoke-drinking session turned into a fistfight when Jose Bosmion, a senior citizen, grabbed the microphone from Rolando Caneso when he was about to sing Frank Sinatra’s song entitled “My Way.”
Other guests around were able to separate the two, but this only gave time for Caneso to grab a knife and stab Bosmion in the chest. The latter was declared dead on arrival by doctors.
Eerily, this isn’t the first time someone was killed to Sinatra’s tune. Dubbed by journalists…
The philosopher argues that death is either one of two things
The executioner handed him a cup of poison brewed from hemlock. Socrates, accepting a fate that Athenian authorities forced upon him, drank every last sip. Afterward, he walked around the room while his friends agonized over the coming of death. They could not accept Socrates’s acceptance of the end.
A few weeks earlier, he had been convicted for the crimes of “failing to recognize Athenian deities” and “corrupting the minds of the youth.” During the course of his trial, he gifted the world this dictum:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
In his final moments, Plato said that Socrates…
Ben Kageyama
Truth is stranger than fiction. I write about both. || benkageyamawrites@gmail.com
