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).

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.