There's an electric fence where I volunteer to keep animals out, and apparently it's quite painful if you accidentally touch it, but not lethal. I constantly have to fight my curiosity to know just how painful it is, so I don't blame them.
I worked at a dog kennel and they had small wires on top of the fences to dissuade them from going over. Obviously, it had to be tested. It was like a 9volt battery to the body. It guess one could describe it as painful but I found it more weird than anything. 7/10 did it several times.
Interestingly, the people who owned the kennel also raised horses. That fence I touched on accident and it absolutely sucked. Parts of me were also numb for almost a minute. 1/10 do not recommend
Pain is preferable to many things. Boredom & nuisances to name 2.
My ADHD 🧠: "I'm not sure the shock would be more painful than the boredom..."
Did they know how painful the shock was beforehand? If they were just told, "This button will give you a shock, we'll leave you alone for 15 minutes," I'm guessing alot of it may have just been to test it out. Most guys were probably like, "It's probably not that bad, I can handle it." Without knowing anything specific about this study (though I feel like I've heard about something similar before), I'd argue that this may have just been more a case of people testing the limits of the study/themselves, plain curiosity, and not people just shocking themselves repeatedly because the thought of being bored for 15 minutes was so completely unacceptable. Though if it's the same thing I heard about, I think at least one person did do this, but that's more likely an outlier and somebody who may have actually gotten something out of it.
I'm not sure what it says about Men vs Women though, maybe how well they heed warnings from "authoritative figures" (ie the people running the study).
If this is the study I'm thinking of, one particular guy just kept shocking himself nearly a hundred times. Some people are just built different
I'd enjoy knowing I was an interesting statistic in the experiment. Maybe I can be an outlier worthy of a footnote or appendix.