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We talked in class on Tuesday about why the crew chose to follow Ahab. The discussion that followed reminded me of a similar one last Tuesday, when we were discussing the humor in the text, especially when we discussed the opening pages, in which Melville seems to be making fun of the reader for reading into the novel too much, and looking for meaning in it.

That led me to wondering if maybe Melville was comparing us (the meaning-seeking readers) to the crew, who are so eager to follow their captain on his quest for vengeance. That comparison would make Melville into Ahab, though.

On a slightly different mental path, thinking about just the crew and their motivations in the story, I was reminded of some of the psychology experiments on peer pressure and conformity I've read about in past classes. For example, one experiment took a roomful of assistants, and placed one participant among them (who believed that the rest of them were participants in the experiment as well, not aiding the researchers). The researchers then asked simple questions of the entire room (e.g., they would show a row of lines, one considerably shorter than the others, and ask which line was the shortest). Everyone in the room except the participant was instructed to give the wrong answer. In most cases, the participant, although it was quite obvious which line was shorter, also gave the wrong answer.

Then there are other experiments regarding people's views of those in leadership positions, and the automatic tendency to obey them in most people. An example is the Stanford prison experiment (I remember discussing the experiment in a class recently, but I can't for the life of me remember if it was this class or not... If it was, sorry for the explanation, but I'll just give it quickly for those who might not have heard of it). In the experiment, a number of randomly selected, normal 21-year-old males were integrated into a prison setting. Some were chosen as guards, others as prisoners, and the guards were instructed to run the prison according to any means they found necessary (though physical violence was prohibited). As the experiment progressed, they began to psychologically abuse the prisoners. The reason I note this in relation to the crew, however, is because of the prisoners' reactions. None of them did anything wrong under the law, and none of them were legally required or bound to remain in the experiment. Yet, none of them, even after days of abuse, resigned from the experiment. Even when they wrote up a parole request, offering to give up the money they were being paid in exchange for freedom, and that request was denied, none of them simply said they quit and left. Even in an extreme situation, and even when they openly voiced resentment of those who were their "leader" figures, they did not directly disobey.

Maybe something of the same motivations were at work in Ahab's crew? The reluctance to disobey an authority figure, coupled with the reluctance to disagree with a large group of people who loudly voiced their agreement with Ahab's plan (the shout of encouragement when he first suggests it)?