Once, Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés decided to conduct an experiment that journalists dubbed the “sex raft.” Along with himself, he placed on a small raft intended to cross the Atlantic Ocean 5 men and 6 women, who were strangers to one another and belonged to different races and social classes. The stated goal was to study the behavior of people placed in an extreme situation.
However, Genovés was convinced that humans are extremely aggressive by nature and expected an outbreak of cruelty and debauchery during the experiment. Not waiting for this to happen, he began to stage provocations himself. For example, he repeatedly tried to turn the crew against a specific individual, or publicly announced details from the questionnaires previously filled out by the participants, which he considered embarrassing and provocative. He even documented non-existent cruelty—for instance, he described the participants’ hunt for a shark to prepare food as “mob madness.” There were also constant various problems on the raft, such as leaks, a broken compass, and a lack of radio communication for several weeks. Nevertheless, no real violence occurred, and the people did not fight with one another. If the experiment participants hated anyone during this time, it was only Genovés himself, who remained extremely dissatisfied with the results of the experiment.
Another interesting story concerns a group of 6 Polynesian boys who, through foolishness, spent 15 months on a small uninhabited island. This story was discovered by writer Rutger Bregman, who did not like the gloominess of William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies.” In that novel, children stranded on an uninhabited island quickly reverted to a savage way of life and even began killing other children who disliked what was happening. Bregman decided to look for similar stories, but in real life, and reality turned out to be much more optimistic. The Polynesian boys on the uninhabited island were able to establish a system of relationships that precluded conflict and worked together to ensure survival.
These cases once again show that there are no grounds to consider humans to be creatures cruel by nature. We are often tried to be convinced of this by dubious personalities such as Henovés himself, but everything they say is simply a lie. Although, unfortunately, sometimes lies become popular. This refers to the Milgram experiment, which contained many methodological errors and had most of its results hidden from the public, yet what was actually published succeeded quite effectively in deceiving the public about the willingness of the average individual to inflict any pain on others at the command of an authority figure. It also refers to the Stanford prison experiment, which turned out to be a setup with a predetermined result from the very beginning, and the truthfulness of which the public believed for 50 years, until the archival data was thoroughly studied. Their organizers, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, also apparently seemed inclined, even before organizing their experiments, to believe that most people are easily capable of initiating violence. And their deception proved far more successful than the attempts to deceive everyone by someone like Henovés.
