Across human history, there have been examples of people doing utterly terrible things for no other reason than the fact that they can. The Stanford Prison experiment showed that given a little power, a person would easily begin to mistreat peers under their own free will; a public art piece by Marina Abramovich showed that simply giving a gun and instructions to “do as they wish” to random bystanders was enough to make them almost commit murder.
These are just a couple of examples of how easy it is to get regular humans to do awful things, and one museum "experiment" in 2000 took things just as far.
Debuting at the Trapholt Museum, Denmark, an "art" piece called “Helena & El Pascador” by the somewhat-infamous Marco Evaristti presented museum-goers with 10 blenders, filled with water and a single goldfish in each swimming around the blades. The visitors were given a simple choice: press the large “ON” button and kill the fish (for absolutely no reason), or don’t touch the button and let the fish live.
