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  • Vsauce, I’m Jake and there have been a number of articles and videos about why Mario might

  • not be the hero. However we are going to talk about it a bit differently,

  • a bit more psychologically but, first, we need to recap why Mario might be bad to

  • begin with. So here are a few popular examples: Mario has no problem sacrificing his friend

  • Yoshi into an abyss to save his own life. In the instruction booklet for Super Mario

  • Bros. it mentions how the Mushroom people were turned into stones, bricks and horse-hair

  • plants. So it can be concluded that those bricks Mario punches through are actually

  • the transformed people he is supposed to be saving.

  • Now, with knowing what we do let’s ask the question, Is Mario Evil? Well, what is evil?

  • In James Waller’s incredible book Becoming Evil he defines it asthe deliberate harming

  • of humans by other humans”. In The Lucifer Effect, psychologist Philip Zimbardo says

  • evil isintentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy

  • innocent others.”

  • So now, Is Mario Evil? I mean, his actions don’t harm other humans. The instruction

  • manual makes that very clear. Whenever it talks about those who are trying to rescue or protect

  • it uses the wordpeople”. The Mushroom People, the daughter of the Mushroom

  • King - it is humanizing. And we can obviously relate to people. We can put value in people.

  • But a “tribe of turtlesand theturtle king”, well, it's easier to not identify

  • with turtles. Especially when the booklet generalizes them all asbad guys”. We

  • are told this by what is ostensibly the authority on the game, I mean, it is was written by

  • the people who made the game so why would they put us in a compromising situation?

  • In 1961 psychologist Stanley Milgram began conducting a social psychology experiment.

  • It involved 3 people: The Experimenter (who acted as the authority figure), the Teacher

  • (the subject) and the Learner who was secretly part of the experiment as well. In the main

  • room was the experimenter and the teacher with a control board, and in the other room

  • was the Learner who was connected by electrodes to the board in the main room. If the Learner

  • answered one of the Teacher’s questions wrong, the teacher was instructed to give

  • them a shock and increase it by 15 volts for every incorrect response. But there were never

  • any shocks delivered, the Teacher just thought there were and, since the teacher and learner

  • were in two separate rooms, they couldn't see each other. A pre-recorded tape of the learner yelling and protesting

  • would play as the shocks got more severe. Watch how the teacher (The Subject) reacts

  • In the first set of experimentsout of 40 people, 65% continued all the way to the

  • end, delivering a supposed 450 volts. In Milgram’s book on the experiment, Obedience to Authority,

  • he mentions how some of the Teachers said that the person receiving the shockswas

  • so stupid and stubborn [that] he deserved to get shocked”. If they had just answered

  • the questions correctly, well, this never would have happened. Let’s look at the Goomba’s who

  • we are toldbetrayed the Mushroom Kingdom”. Do they deserve to be punished, to be killed?

  • Well theyre untrustworthy, theyre not even human, and theyre stupid - theyll

  • just walk off the ledge if you let them so maybe they deserve to be squashed. Something

  • is happening in our minds...two things actually we might not be entirely conscious

  • of them. Let’s use some BrainCraft to help explain...Confirmation Bias.

  • Confirmation Bias is where you interpret, remember or actively seek information that

  • confirms to your already existing beliefs. The more emotionally charged, the deeper the

  • belief. For example during the 2004 United States Presidential election neuroscientists

  • did a study where they placed people in an MRI machine to monitor their brain activity.

  • When the subjects who were pro President Bush heard information that was dissonant or didn’t

  • agree with what they already thought, the reasoning areas of their brain didn’t respond,

  • but when they were told information they agreed with, the emotional areas of the brain lit

  • up. The same thing occurred with the subjects who favored candidate John Kerry.

  • This is also a sign of cognitive dissonance, that feeling that you get when you recognize

  • that something isn't logically consistent, like knowing that youve acted in a way

  • that goes against your core values or principles. In fact if we watch the Milgram

  • Experiment video, you can actually see it happening in this subject.

  • And when faced with this dissonance we tend to convince ourselves that what we did was

  • right, like that the person being shocked deserved it, or that it was out of our control.

  • InMistakes Were Made But Not by MeCarol Tavris and Elliot Aronson talk about

  • the power of irrevocability. “The more costly a decision...the more irrevocable its consequences,

  • the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the

  • good things about the choice made”. From cognitive dissonance we try to find cognitive

  • consistency. When it comes to crushing hundreds of Goombas or jumping on turtles

  • and kicking them into pits we need to justify those decision. They can’t just be innocent

  • creatures, right? "Well of course not they helped kidnap

  • the Princess so killing thousands of them is totally worth it to save the life of one

  • Princess.

  • Let’s look at it from a different angle, let’s argue that the Goombas don’t do any harm.

  • They walk back and forth minding their own business and are literally only a threat if

  • you walk directly into them. Did we ever take the time to learn

  • about them? To find out what they do, what they were like? No, because the game manual says that they

  • are bad. And we take that as fact

  • because it comes from a place of authority. And the dehumanizing of these characters is very

  • important. They are explicitly not people. They are monsters, creatures, animals. There

  • is US and then there is THEM.

  • Us and them is also known as Ingroups and Outgroups. Ingroup bias is the belief that

  • your group is better than any other group; called outgroups. Your ingroups are those

  • you identify yourself with, like your family, your college or a sports team. This bias can

  • even get personal.

  • In 1968, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott divided her third grade class on the basis of their

  • eye colourblue or brown. She told the blue eyed children they werethe better

  • people in this room”. Almost immediately, the blue eyed children starting calling the

  • brown eyed children stupid and they wouldn’t sit with them in the playground. The blue

  • eyed children turned against the brown eyed ones simply because they were told they were

  • better.

  • As Professor James Waller states, the mere act of placing people into groups leads to

  • a bias. Then once in a group we can go a step further. We can start categorizing them with inhuman names like

  • monster, or animal, or demon. In Japanese, Bowser’s name literally translates to The Great

  • Demon King. He is the enemy. And it’s usually not an enemy or our enemy it's the enemy, the

  • definite article that makes it imputable, unchanging. Now obviously, in Super Mario Bros the bad guys aren't

  • physically human so it doesn't make sense to represent them as such

  • but we have to change the physical appearance of an individual or

  • a group to change how we feel about them, to change how we treat them. It could be something as

  • innocuous as going from calling them a student to calling them a Prisoner.

  • The Stanford Prison experiment is one of the most famous and controversial psychological

  • studies. Conducted in August 1971, 24 psychologically normal students were selected and placed in

  • a mock prison in the basement of a Stanford University building. 12 were randomly selected

  • as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. What was supposed to be a 2 week experiment had

  • to be stopped after only 6 days. The guards became increasingly sadistic.

  • Taking away their clothes, their mattresses, ridiculing and

  • mocking the other students

  • The difference between those 2 groups was their group designation: either prisoners

  • or guards. And it's crazy to think how quickly it devolved even when everyone

  • involved knew that it was an experiment. But it only took a few days for the people to

  • forget that.

  • He was just doing his job. During the experiment he doesn’t think his actions are evil, or

  • He was just doing his job. During the experiment he doesn’t think of himself as evil, or that his actions are evil. Just like Mario doesn’t think he is evil. He thinks what he is doing is

  • the right thing to do - he is saving the Mushroom Kingdom. But on the other hand King Koopa

  • probably thinks the same thing. He thinks that his actions are justified and that

  • Mario is actually the bad guy. Most people who we consider evil don’t think of themselves

  • as evil.

  • So again, we have to ask ourselves, Is Mario Evil? Or is he just a normal person put in

  • an abnormal situation? It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and form an opinion without

  • you yourself experiencing it. What would we do in Mario’s situation? Well

  • we already know. We are the ones controlling Mario. His actions are our own. Just like in

  • Milgram's experiment, we are the people delivering the shocks. And just like those people

  • we feel we have to continue, it's the only way. We have to continue because we

  • need to win, that’s what we've been told to do.

  • I recently replayed the first Super Mario Bros. and you can play the whole game without

  • killing or harming any characters, besides King Koopa. He is the only one that you have

  • to hurt to win. The rest of the game can be played by avoiding everyone else. So why do

  • we generally choose to kill them? Is it because we get more points, is it because the game manual,

  • the authority, tells us to? It might not seem like you have a choice, but just

  • like the people in Milgram’s experiment you can stop, or in the case of Super Mario Bros,

  • you can choose to play the game differently. If we admit that Mario is evil, are we also

  • saying that we are evil?

  • But in all of these judgements we make, there is this moral question of what is right and

  • wrong, what is good and evil. It’s a dilemma. Are you a hero, like the Mario were led

  • to believe in, or are your actions evil? There’s a thought experiment we can do that might

  • be able to help answer this. So, can you solve this dilemma?

  • Follow me over to BrainCraft to find out. And as always, thanks for watching.

Vsauce, I’m Jake and there have been a number of articles and videos about why Mario might

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B1 中級 美國腔

馬里奧真的很邪惡嗎? (Is Mario Really Evil?)

  • 108 3
    Yanming Liu 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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