Is Steem a Milgramesque Experiment for the 21st Century?

Stanley Milgram, a psychiatrist from Yale University, once conducted a social psychology experiment to see if people would inflict pain upon others when ordered to do so by an authority figure. It was a twisted experiment wherein the test subjects were gaslit into believing they were causing physical harm to a person in an adjacent room.

What’s even more disturbing is that many people involved in the study were all too willing to set aside their conscience long enough to inflict terrible pain on a living soul. There were only a handful of participants who became unwilling to continue the experiment after hearing the person in the other room pretend to scream out in pain.

I’ve noticed here on Steem we have a very similar situation happening right now. Instead of administering electric shocks to a stranger in another room, some of us have doled out downvotes to wipe out the reward value of an author’s post. The psychological effect for the one receiving the downvote can be painful depending on the weight of the vote.

In the Milgram experiment, the closest real-world parallel of the man receiving the shocks is torture. In the Steem experiment, the closest real-world example of a user receiving downvotes is that he's being robbed, stolen from, or (financially) raped.

I think the key in both experiments is that most of us wouldn’t do this in real life. We wouldn’t strap someone down, attach electrodes to them and torture them with electricity; unless maybe we had some frayed or crossed wires upstairs. Also, most of us would not steal from others.

For whatever reason, both experiments are causing people to act in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise. One thing I noticed is that the motivation for the behavior of people in the Milgram experiment was twofold. They got paid for taking part in the experiment, they also were led to believe they were correcting "wrong behavior" with their actions.

Similarly, the motivation for flag wars in the Steem experiment revolves around punishing perceived ‘wrong behavior’ and getting more money to go back to the reward pool. Like crabs in a bucket, when Steemians see an investor who rewards themselves with their SP, they look at the numbers and become jealous or angry that the person is taking “more than their fair share” from the reward pool.

However, with Steem, there is no such thing as a fair share, an investor might come to Steem and buy one million dollars worth of SP. This will give them a valuable vote weight compared to someone who only invested a couple thousand dollars, so when someone with a million dollar stake rewards their own content people can get jealous.

When a person with several thousand dollars of Steem Power rewards his own content, no one has a panic attack and no one feels like the reward pool is being raped. The behavior of the two is the same. They're upvoting their own content. The makers of Steem had to know of this as the first App on the Blockchain has a little box you can tick to upvote your post as you publish.

I'm skeptical that this friction could not have been foreseen in advance by the developers which is why I titled this post the way I did. What do you think, is Steem the Milgram experiment for the 21st century? Is it a test to figure out if people would rather have Communism or Capitalism? Is it to see which ideology would win out if users were pit against each other?

From my personal perspective, I think there is room for both Capitalists (and socialists) or charitable people on the Blockchain, just so long as each is doing so voluntarily. It can feel nice to make money. It can also be nice to give to people too. My position is that we ought not to concern ourselves with who people choose to upvote because it is their SP and not ours, which is a classic, property rights take on the matter. When we force people to be charitable, what we're doing is imposing socialism upon them. As they say, good ideas don't require force.

I’m sure that some of the Robin Hood types in this downvote war, that try and “protect the reward pool” are likely very wealthy and have money in the bank to the tune of millions of dollars. I bet you when they withdrawal their APR from various savings accounts they don’t go up to the bank manager and say I’d like to split my APR with all the customers who bank here.

That would be unheard of, nobody does that kind of thing, yet in real life, we don’t have transparent wallets and our bank accounts are private. All the more reason Steem is such a strange place to be. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that this is one giant social experiment to see what consensus the people will come to, or if they come to one at all.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with the wise words of Milton Friedman and his take on what some perceive to be "Greed" (or Capitalism).