A book titled “The Two Faces of Humanity,” produced by public broadcaster EBS, was published recently. You may think the title of the book seems similar to the book called “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” because the title suggests two opposite sides of people. However, “The Two Faces of Humanity” shows how people change the way they behave according to the situations they face.
What do you think controls human actions? Is it one’s own will or the circumstances we face? Researchers have participated in many debates and experiments about this question for a long time. The movie, “The Experiment,” released in 2002, was made on the basis of this issue. In this experiment, researchers observed subjects for 2 weeks. The subjects took different roles: one group as jailers, the other as prisoners.
Researchers observed how their behavior changed. The jailers acted more viciously than actual jailers did, torturing prisoners ruthlessly. Moreover, prisoners who knew that they are not really prisoners also pretended to be real prisoners. So, the question is: why did the characters change their behavior?
In the book, electric shocks were used, which is the most famous experiment. It showed whether or not people are willing to give other people an electric shock. 65% of the subjects inflicted electric shocks on other people. How can we find the reason why they did it?
This book implicitly says these situations come from the influence of the environment they are in. For example, when an arson subway tragedy took place, many people in the subway sat there even though they saw smoke penetrating through the subway. They just remained still because other people remained still too. It leads to the reason that people were under the control of the circumstances and it naturally led to a tragic disaster.
However, you can repel the control of circumstances. There are also many examples of people controlling the circumstances they were in. In 2003, one man tried to pull a thirty-three ton subway to save a person caught between subway trains. At first, just one or two people tried to pull the subway trains and then the majority of the people in the subway station concentrated their strength on the work. Consequently, a thirty-three ton subway train was set in motion and the trapped person was rescued without serious injury. The event in the subway station, started by Mr. Lee Soo-hyun, spread to the other people around. After the incident, similar rescues have become more commonplace. This case also clearly shows that, as one man controls his circumstances, other people are also affected by the circumstances the other people already experienced.
The book contains many experiments and actual past events. It would seem that it depends on our mind whether circumstances rule human beings or human beings rule circumstances. If you help someone first, you can get help from other people. After reading this book, I hope you can control your surrounding circumstances and can make a miracle happen because of the way you control the circumstances you face.
