Workforce Preparation.
“One time we were looking at a picture of the pope and everybody bowing in front of him. My father said, “Now, look at those humans. Here’s one human standing here, and all these others are bowing in front of him. Now, what’s the difference? ....“This difference is the hat he’s wearing.” (If it was a general, it was the epaulets. It was always the costume, the uniform, the position.) “But,” he said, “this man has the same problems as everybody else: he eats dinner; he goes to the bathroom. He’s a human being.” - Richard Feynman”
You could earn 1% to a maximum of 5% towards your final Psychology 100 assessment by participating in research by the Honours students. It meant sitting in front of a computer for three hours hitting keys on command to measure response times to various stimuli. Or answering multi-choice questions. Regardless of the experiment, participants were left afterwards with at least a headache or feeling light-headed and mentally fatigued.
All for 1% of a final mark.
Good preparation for the workforce.
Sensible, intelligent, level-headed humans routinely choose to suffer being inflicted with nonsense and time-wasting and performance and tokenism and mind-numbing meetings and patronising speeches and dispiriting random behaviours by other human beings who put their pants or dress on the same way as we do - that in any other context would immediately cause us to walk out.
All for a salary.