I read a lot of strange articles online...

I read a lot of strange articles online. Between blogs, Tumblrs, and the occasionally insane people I work with I get numerous strange links every day. And when my random online travels brought me to this article:

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/11/electric-shock-study-suggests-wed-rather-hurt-ourselves-others

my first instinct was to laugh. Still, I saved the link because I wanted to think more closely about it.

The article is about a behavioral study. Many people are familiar with Stanley Milgram's experiment about obedience to authority (a subject I clearly never think about... *cough*), and this was apparently at least partially inspired by those experiments. One Molly Crockett, a psychologist, set up an experiment where volunteers were randomly paired, and then one of the pair was chosen as the decider. One of the two was designated as who would receive a series of electric shocks; and then the decider got to pick between between two deals, each presenting some number of shocks for some amount of money. The money stood in as proxy for how much they valued harming themselves vs. harming others and varied from $0.15 to $15, and the shocks were calibrated to be "mildly painful but not intolerable".

Based on previous experience they expected people to be averse to shocking themselves, and this was correct; people were on average willing to take $0.30 less per shock to experience fewer shocks. But where they were expecting people to be far less caring about inflicting shocks on the other person, the study found that people were willing to lose twice as much - $0.60 less per shock on average - to give the other, totally anonymous, person fewer shocks.

This is fascinatingly counter-intuitive to me. It's very easy to picture people as being immensely selfish, and that would imply people would be willing to hand out as many shocks as were necessary to get the highest amount possible; instead people were going out of the way, "suffering" monetarily to save anonymous, unknown people from pain they'd signed up agreeing to endure.

And I mean, that isn't a bad thing; as a rule a willingness to be restrained on causing pain to others isn't a bad thing. I'm not sure if I'd hold back or not. I'm incredibly big on consent, but it's hard not to take their having volunteered in the first place as consent.They knew what was expected to happen; it's not like it's against their will. So why not?

People are just so scared of causing pain to other people, and it's... Adorable. In my experience, most people have some level of pain tolerance when it comes to sex. Not everyone likes being spanked; not everyone likes having their hair pulled; not everyone likes having nails run down there back; certainly not everyone likes needles or whips or hot wax... But most people enjoy some level of it. And on the other side, people who actually like inflicting pain? They're harder to find.

How much of that is because those people really aren't out there and how much is just the fear of being exposed? There's not much stigma in enjoying a little rough sex... But the stigma in being rough is endemic. I suspect that's what happened in the study; and it's certainly what happens day to day in the BDSM community.