PER 2015
can be seen as the two most limiting, as they can often be determents of restraints and compulsions and, as they have the greatest impacts on a person’s decision. Bearing this in mind, the idea of “trained helplessness”, as coined by Martin Seligman, seems all the more possible. After using pain stimuli on dogs, Seligman discovered that a third of the dogs unable to stop the stimulus eventually gave up, as the restrictions were so great, and during further experiments made no attempt to escape or stop the pain. The relation between this and freedom is often used by elitist governments as an excuse to dismantle the welfare states. Their reasoning; people on the welfare state become too dependent and so are unwilling to make their own decisions, thus limiting their freedom. However, surely in this case rewarding people to get off the welfare state would solve the problem? This, in a very tenuous way, leads to the psychological crux of the argument. People are selfish. For such a shocking and blunt statement, it’s surprisingly true. For many people, their actions, whether they’d admit it or not, are for selfish reasons, even if on the surface they seem “selfless”. Simple actions, take stealing a sandwich, are motivated by personal benefits, in this case gaining nutrition for yourself without paying for the item. The other extreme would be giving a child an ice cream after he dropped his. In this case, it would seem quite cynical to say that it is selfish but, it’s hard to deny that, it was partly motivated by wanting to help someone in need for a feeling of self-congratulation. One experiment which, in part, shows the risk of lack of restrictions in freedom, is the Stanford Prison Experiment. Despite originally designed to highlight issues faced within prisons, it ultimately showed the extent to which people would go when given little restrictions to their power. In the experiment, 24 male students were randomly assigned the roles of either ‘guard’ or ‘prisoner’. The horrors that were uncovered, including both psychological abuse and physical abuse from the guards towards the prisoners, resulted in it being terminated after only 6 days. One third of the guards started showing sadistic tendencies and one prisoner went crazy after merely two days, thus highlighting the issues of “unrestricted” power. The way this links into the idea of fully unrestricted freedom is complex, but sheds light onto how inequalities in freedom will emerge, and to a much greater extent than those now, if the anarchist ideals of completely unrestricted freedom were to be reached (Zimbardo, 2015). For as long as businesses and corporations have been around, they have used clever marketing and psychological techniques to sway you to spend money on their product. How does this relate to freedom? As mentioned earlier, psychological freedom can be easily affected by the simplest of factors, with the decisions often made subconsciously. When deciding between two products there are the obvious things that will help people make their choice such as value for money, or which yoghurt tastes nicer, but then there’s the little things. Between standard thick cut chips and potato smiley faces, people will be drawn to the smiley faces due to their cheerfulness and enjoyable branding, but most over the age of 10 will then choose the chips due to the social implications; it is frowned upon to eat food marketed for the younger generations. All of these things have individually restricted your freedom to choose processed potato but we barely flutter an eyelid at the whole ordeal.
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