Vsauce, I’m Jake and there have been a number of articles and videos about how Mario may
not be the hero we think he is.
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 in the first place 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 as “the deliberate harming
of humans by other humans”.
In The Lucifer Effect, psychologist Philip Zimbardo says evil is “intentionally 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.
In fact, the instruction manual makes a point of telling you that.
Whenever it talks about those who we are protecting or rescuing it uses the word “people”.
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 turtles” and the “turtle king”, well it is easier to not identify
with turtles.
Especially when the booklet generalizes them all as “bad 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 one.
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 only thought there were and, since
the teacher and the learner couldn’t see each other, a pre-recorded tape of the learner
yelling and protesting would play as the shocks got more severe.
Here is an example of the Teacher’s actions and response...
In the first set of experiments done with 40 people, 65% continued all the way to the
end, to 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 shocks “was so stupid and stubborn [that]
he deserved to get shocked”.
If they had just answered the questions correctly this never would have happened.
Let’s look at the Goomba’s who we are told “betrayed the Mushroom Kingdom”.
Do they deserve to be punished, to be killed?
Well they’re untrustworthy, they’re not even human, and they’re stupid - they’ll
just walk off the ledge if you let them so maybe they deserve to be squashed.
Something is happening here in our mind...two things actually that we might not be entirely
conscious of.
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 uncomfortable feeling when you recognize
that something isn't quite logically consistent, like knowing that you’ve acted in a way
that contradicts a certain value or principle you’ve expressed.
If we go back to 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.
In ‘Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me’ Carol 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 you try to find cognitive consistency.
So when it comes to crushing hundreds of Goombas or stomping on turtles and kicking them into
pits we have to justify that decision.
They can’t just be innocent creatures, right?
I mean, they deserve what happens to them because they helped capture the Princess and
surely the murder of thousands of living things is worth the life of one Princess.
Let’s look at it from a different angle, let’s argue 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 find out about them?
To learn about them or discover what they were like?
No, because the game manual says that they are “mushrooms who betrayed the Mushroom
Kingdom”.
And we take that as our reasoning since it comes from a place of authority.
And the dehumanizing of these bad guys is important.
They are explicitly not people.
They are creatures, animals, monsters.
There is US and 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 colour – blue or brown.
She told the blue eyed children they were “the 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 start categorizing them with inhuman names like animals monsters,
or demons.
In Japanese, Bowser’s name literally translates to Great Demon King.
He is the enemy.
It’s usually not our enemy or an enemy but the enemy, the definite article that makes
it permanent, unchanging.
Now obviously, the bad guys in Super Mario Bros. aren’t physically human so it should
be fine not to classify them as much, but we don’t even need to change the physical
appearance of an individual or a group to change how we feel about them, how we treat
them.
It could be something as seemingly innocuous as going from calling a person 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.
Giving the prisoners numbers instead of names, taking away their clothes, their mattresses,
ridiculing and mocking the other students.
The only difference between these 2 groups of people was their group designation: prisoners
or guards.
And it is crazy to think it devolved into this kind of situation when everyone involved
knew it was an experiment going in but it only took a few days for everyone to forget
that.
He was just doing his job.
During the experiment he doesn’t think his actions are evil, or that
he is 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.
That’s his job...right?
King Koopa probably thinks the same thing about himself - that his actions are justified
and that Mario is actually the bad guy.
Most people who we classify as 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’ easy to stand on the sidelines and form an opinion without you yourself experiencing
it.
How do you think we would act in Mario’s situation?
Well we already know.
We are the ones controlling Mario.
His actions are our own.
It's like Milgram's experiment, we are the ones delivering the shocks.
Just like the people in that room we feel we have to continue, that this is the only
way.
We have to do this because that’s how you win the game, that’s what we were 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 points, is it because the game manual, this authority, told us to
kill them?
It might not seem like you have a choice, but just like the participants in Milgram’s
experiment you can choose to stop, or in Super Mario, you can choose to play the game differently.
If we admit that Mario is bad, is that also saying that we are bad?
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 we’re 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.