Can you tell ahead of time if you're susceptible to Milgram-style control?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by this thread, discussing the lawsuit by a McDonald’s employee who was coerced to strip and eventually perform oral sex by a manager and her fiancee, who were acting in accordance with instructions from a man on the phone impersonating a police officer.

Of course, nearly everyone who hears of such incidents is outraged and shocked, and sure *they *would never fall for a con like that. Everyone involved, including the victim, is described by at least some posters in that thread as unbelievably stupid.

But, since nearly everyone is sure they wouldn’t fall for it, and a significant minority actually do, it seems that we aren’t good judges of our own potential response to authority. We all like to think of ourselves as morally independent, keen, skeptical, and rebellious against suspect authority, rather than as obedient sheep.

My question (which probably has no definitive, right answer, hence IMHO rather than GQ) is whether there’s a way to test or predict what someone’s reaction in such a situation is likely to be. It seems education has little to do with it - the person who put a stop to the mess was a high school drop out.

IQ? Need for cognition? History of problems with authority? Cynicism? A generally suspicious personality? A tendency to take one’s time and think before acting? They all seem like possible traits that could coincide with immunity to this type of manipulation, but is there any research on the subject?

If you think you’d see through the sham and not comply (and you probably do), what about you makes this likely?

2

Hm, having been trained as a paralegal, understanding the limits of what employers can make you do and knowing what cops can make you do …

There is NO freaking way I would do anything further than empty the contents of my pockets and purse on a desk without actually having the cop present in the room. The cop is the only one I would allow to do a standard frisk. For there to be a strip search, it would be locked in the bathroom with a female cop and while under actual arrest.

back in the day when I was getting a security clearance, a good friend of mine was asked if I could be coerced into doing something and his reply was to laugh and say that if anybody was going to be doing the coercion, it would be me…

3

I’m pretty intelligent and I’ve been talked into some pretty stupid shit, some of it pretty recent. I’d have to say “yes.”

4

I am smart enough and I am pretty sure that I would shock people when given the order. For that matter, I am pretty sure that they could get me to work in a Nazi concentration camp given the right circumstances. I don’t think that I am any more moral than those that did and probably less so than many of them. It takes work and risk to avoid such a thing and I simply don’t think I would care enough to make a scene or, in the extreme cases, I would worry more about what was going to happen to me if I caused a scene. In the case of a concentration camp, my family would probably be at risk if I refused to comply so there is no way that I would risk that. The only situations I like to believe I would become extremely defiant are ones involving a child. I hope that I wouldn’t allow anything to happen to a child but anonymous adults would be fair game for just about anything.

5

I’d say that the most important factor for being “immune” to such control would be to have what I heard called a “questioning attitude.” Don’t simply accept anyone’s verbal authority without proof, for example. Or, to put it another way, don’t panic, and keep thinking about what’s happening.

For the situation that you’re mentioning, things that would come to mind: would this be legal in a police examination room? I cannot imagine any circumstance where demanding a sex act in a police station would be kosher, so having a “cop” insist on it is pretty fishy. The first defense that would come to my mind, for a random phone call from someone claiming to be a police officer would be simply to say: “What station are you at? I’m going to get the phone number of that station and call you back.”

I may joke with friends that I’m borderline paranoid, but I really don’t think that’s the case.

Then again, I know, for a fact, I threw out legitimate EPA agents from my workplace, because I refused to answer the questions they were asking about propriatery information. I never got to ask if they had ID, I simply asked whether they had a warrant or anything that would compell me to answer their questions. I ended up telling them that they could, if they wanted, come back when my boss, the owner, was in, or come back with a warrant. Until then I wasn’t going to risk trouble by answering those questions.

They came back and did talk to her, and no consequences ever came of it, other than my boss liked that I was cautious. The agents themselves seemed resigned but not surprised.

Note: None of this is saying that I don’t think I’m immune from being compelled to do things that I would consider immoral. Nor immune to the sort of group control that some people claim for the Nazis - i.e. everyone’s doing it, so it must be right. This is in response to the scenario of a specific one or two person team using some kind of mantle of authority to demand action or answers from me.

6

Think about it this way. All over the globe right this second, America’s nuclear assets are ready for launch from nuclear submarines under Arctic ice to secure silos on the U.S. mainland. The U.S. and Navy officers that run those launch facilities tend to be very smart, educated thoughtful people and the enlisted people selected for that duty aren’t immoral slackers either. However, if the launch orders come tonight, each of them with faithfully follow their jobs and committed to the death of millions of men women and children who never saw it coming. I have never heard anyone consider the people that work in those capacities monsters yet they may have a hand in the biggest single loss of life in human history. They would be following orders even though they know the implications of that well ahead of time. That seems much more serious than giving a fake shock to a single person in an experiment yet most people give it little thought.

7

I suppose someone could do studies to see if any specific traits correlate with dialing up the voltage in a Milgram experiment. I don’t imagine any such studies have been done.

For those certain that they’d defy authority in such a circumstance, note that in both the Milgram experiment and in the fast-food conman cases, the “subjects” were first presented with a supposed authority figure in an uncontroversial setting. The acceptance of this authority figure was first cemented, and only then was immoral behaviour requested, and then only in slow increments. Milgram didn’t have some random guy walk into the lab and tell the subject “Here, this voltage will seriously injure the guy you can see through the window there. Flip the switch.” No, the subject was introduced to a very reasonable guy in a lab coat who explained the purported experiment concerning learning and shock in perfectly reasonable terms, and initially only asked the subject to inflict mild discomfort on the “student”. It was all very gradual and incremental. Given the account of the fast-food cons, the same appears to apply there. It’s all well and good to say that the nth request was completely unreasonable and anyone should know that. But the 1st request was hardly unusual, and each subsequent request was only just a little further than the last.

Could I be walked along that garden path? I hope not, but I won’t claim it’s not possible.

8

Shagnasty, I think you’re setting up a false identidy of circumstances there, though. In the nuke scenario there are huge controls to make sure that no one can falsely order a launch. There are procedures upon procedures that tell the people at the button when they can, and when they can’t press that button. I don’t think that anyone thinks that it’s possible for the current US nuclear arsenal to be used without orders from the proper authorities. This isn’t to say that they will be used wisely, just that they will be used in a manner that has been defined as legal, for the persons pressing the buttons.

With the shocking someone for a psych study it’s a bit different - there is no legal obligation for the person with the buzzer to press that button. In fact AIUI a case can be made that they have an legal obligation to not press it, since at least one study I remember hearing about indicated that the shock was severe enough that it could cause permanent damage.

I’m not trying to debate your moral values. IMNSHO, you’ve got a point. I’m just saying that there is a huge legal difference between the two situations.

And neither scenario is at all similar to the legal or moral situation those idiots in the McDonald’s case were involved with - where anyone who took a little time to think about what was going on should have realized, at the very least, when the sex act was ‘ordered’ that things had gone beyond what would be legal under any circumstances. And I believe that there were more than a few signs before that where a questioning attitude should have raised a red flag for at least one of the participants.

9

Gosnak, I respectfully disagree with you there. Not about the Milgram experiment, of course. You’ve got a good point there. But with regards to the McDonald’s case, I’d have grave reservations about an alleged police officer conducting an interrogation via the phone. Especially when it’s not direct, but being transmitted through the offices of an untrained (In police procedures, at the very least.) fast food manager. I am not a lawyer, and only mildly interested in the law, but to my mind that would make anything that the “officer” heard a matter of hearsay evidence, since he had no way to know whether the suspect was actually saying what the manager was telling him.

I do not accept that an officer of the law would handle that kind of investigation over the phone. Which makes it very much an unusual circimstance. And I would, in that case, have told the officer that I would call him back through his police station, as the easiest way for me to confirm that he was whom he said he was.

10

I am not saying that the nukes would be used illegally at all so that has nothing to do with it. I am saying that the Milgram experiment works the same way. A “lawful” order given by someone that seemingly knows more than you do about the situation tells you what to do, possibly in pieces, and you do it. The experiment had a perfectly convincing authority figure as well and the subjects had no idea where things were going. The same thing could happen in the military, police departments, or even corporations.

One of the key parts of the Milgram experiment is that it starts off in small shocks and then progresses until the subject is deeply involved. If the subjects were advised to deliver something marked as a deadly shock right of the bat then fewer would comply. This scenario mimics the real-world better than other experiments because it would be rare for a situation to develop as a black and white dichotomy. Instead, there is no clear point where subjects can say that X worked fine for me but X+1 is over the top and I feel the need to resist with all of my being.

11

Shagnasty, what are the intermediate steps, then, building up for the launch order? If you’re seriously building that similarity, those are needed for your thesis. And those intermediate steps would need some feedback too, I’d think, to be a true parallel.

Milgram built things up gradually, as you said. With feedback to his subject, so that he’d know s/he was hurting someone. I just don’t see where that progress, which seems a vital part of the Milgram model, to be part of the nuclear launch sequence.

For that matter, no one walked into the Milgram experiment expecting be told to risk someone else’s life. No one is allowed to become a part of the crew of a boomer*, without being told, up front, that their purpose is to be ready to launch nuclear weapons when they are given the order.

*I can’t speak for land-based missle systems, I believe it’s true for them, too - but I don’t know that.

12

What I think is interesting, and I apologize if I’ve missed someone noting it in either thread, is that the Milgram experiments showed that people were less likely to obey the commands the farther away the “scientist” was. A phone call from an alleged authority figure should rank pretty low on the scale of coercive figures.

I’d think locus of control measures might get at parts of it, or the FIRO-B (which looks at needs for approval, affiliation, and control) might as well.

Might be worth noting that the Milgram experiments took place at a time when people in the US majority generally trusted authority more, and generally did not assume that this was all a set-up that would wind up being filmed and broadcast on Fox or posted on YouTube.

ETA: I have historically gotten in trouble for questioning authority, but on a cultural level I have no doubt that I am somewhat like the average German citizen of the Nazi era whose silence served to condone barbarism by the authorities in that nation. Yes, I engage in forms of protest. No, they don’t seem to do much of anything, and I get tired and fear bringing the wrath of authority down on my head.

13

I’ve never understood why children get more sympathy from people than adults. An adult is simply a child that got older. :eek:

14

Shagnasty
I understand your point but I used to be one of those people ('74 - '80) and don’t consider this a good analogy. You have to think about this ahead of time unless you are a complete clod. It’s your whole reason for being there and you go into it with open eyes.
The topic used to come up occasionally whenever our thoughts turned to something other than women and exactly what we were going to do and with who and how many times when we got off patrol. :stuck_out_tongue:
In the case of my own boat, now long converted to razor blades, alas, we would have held the trigger down and launched. It would have scared us to death and we fully expected it to be the last thing we ever did, (ballistic computers and radars being as good as they are) but we would have held the trigger down and done it.

My own consciously-arrived-at decision was that the US would not launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviets. This implied that, if we got the launch order, most everyone I knew and cared about would have already died. If someone roasted my family and tens of millions of other people they could bet that I and those like me would come after theirs. And so deterrence worked.

I guess my point is that the crews aren’t “controlled” in some manner but have to make a decision to do this and they know what they’re doing and what it’s likely to cost them. As far as whether the people on the boat would have been susceptible to the Milgram control mentioned by the OP, I’d think they would come in a little better than average but not much.

Regards

Testy

15

OtakuLoki
Just as an FYI, it isn’t actually a button. There is a small safe in a guarded location containing a black-plastic pistol grip and a thick curly-cord coming out the bottom. The trigger is the last link in the chain. If someone holds it down, the computers do the actual launching. Otherwise, nothing happens. I think making this a dead-man switch was done deliberately as a last-ditch safety precaution.

Regards

Testy

16

I think (or at least hope) that being aware of things like the Milgram experiment, or the McDonald’s police hoaxer, might help one to become resistant to such control in analogous situations. Having heard of these situations, and thought about them, and especially thought along the lines of “Gee, what would I have done in a situation like that?” might help one to in fact stop and think “Gee, what should I do here? Is obeying this alleged authority figure really the right thing to do?”, should one every find oneself in such a situation. (Whether the situation is some psychologist trying to get you to carry out simulated bad actions in an experiment, or some real criminal or tyrant trying to get you to do things that actually harm other innocent people in real life.)

17

What is Milgram-style control? Is it where you just sort of go along with someone because they’re in charge, or act as if they are?

I think almost everyone is at least a little succeptible to this.

18

Testy, I was using the term button in it’s metaphorical meaning, as in everyone talking about Reagan, or any other president being the one with his finger on “The Button,” rather than any literal button. I wasn’t aware of the specific mechanism, but I was pretty damned sure it wasn’t any as simple as a button, even a button with a locking cover over it. Even that would have had too much opportunity for accidental launches.
Mosier, here’s a pretty decent overview of Milgram’s experiment, and you can probably see the parallels many of us are seeing with the recent McDonald’s incident.

19

OtakuLoki

Sure, I knew you were using “button” in its metaphorical sense as most everyone does, including me. I just thought you might find it interesting. It’s actually the final stage in a fairly long and rigidly-controlled sequence. As you point out, the chances of nucs being used unlawfully or accidentally is as close to nil as human ingenuity can make it.

Regards

Testy

20

I can see the link with military authority in general, and of course, “pushing the button” involves the ultimate harm one person could do, far beyond giving one person a heart attack with electric shocks. Yet, I think that it’s different, because the people involved go in with their eyes much more open. The Milgram and McDonalds cases seem to me cases where the people involved, once out of the situation, would look at what they did with disbelief, and an entirely different moral gloss. (Indeed, the man who sexually assaulted the girl immediately went home, called his friend, and said, “I’ve done a terrible thing.”) Someone who dropped a bomb might regret it, but most likely will have some continuity of moral reasoning about the situation.

I think aruvqan and MEBuckner bring up a good point - while general education is probably no indicator, education focusing on what legal authorities can and cannot do, or more specifically on these phenomena, might have a protective effect. For instance, ever since law school, I’ve known that if you’re arrested, say only five words: “I want my lawyer.” My knowledge of how the system works has inoculated me against that particular exertion of authority (i.e., getting a suspect to talk).

On the other hand, I bet education can work in the opposite direction as well. Fast food employees have it constantly drilled into them not to use their brains, to follow procedures and directives. I’m betting there’s also a lot of pressure in the “loss prevention” area, and they’re conditioned to cooperate with the police.

Personally, I think I’m pretty resistant to this kind of thing. I tend to be quite suspicious in general, and I don’t think I’ve accepted anyone as an authority figure since I moved out of my parents’ house. And of course, I have the above-mentioned relevant education.

That said, I don’t deny I could easily become complicit in something like what happened in Germany, to the extent that I might not raise open objections if it posed serious danger to me or (most especially) my family. I confess, I quite likely wouldn’t hide fugitives in my home, if it meant risking my children going to a concentration camp. I couldn’t tell you for sure until the situation actually occurred. But I think that’s a separate issue from the original question I raised. One is a question of acknowledging actual threat of harm, and balancing the risks and benefits of acquiescence. The other is a matter of unquestioning obedience to an accepted authority.