Not me. I might shock, but only ebcause I like to hear them scream. Heh heh heh.
Seriously, I don’t particularly care about authority figures. It’s gotten me into trouble it has.
I had a Milgram moment myself on the night My wife was giving Birth to my second child. She was induced and the Doctor said we should go home and by the morning come back. I said to my wife. “Well maybe we should go.” She insisted she was unable to go home and the baby was on its way. “But the Doctor said we should go home” Seeing she was in pain I should have listened to her… Instead I kept thinking the Doctor knew what he was talking about.
The whole thing was moot as she was full dialated within the time it took for me to be a complete moron. It was weird. I was a doofus. I saw the evidence that she was right and the Doctor was wrong and I chose to follow his advice as an authority.
Let’s see, a lawyer is defending big corporate interests against ordinary folk by saying, “They didn’t read the fine print.” That’s so weird and unusual I can hardly stand it.
For my wife’s second (and last) birth, a lot was going wrong. 2 weeks early, our Nurse Practitioner wasn’t available and they were trying to insist she take the epidural. She did not want to. I pulled out our birthing plan and argued that as long as my wife says no, you are not going to use an epidural.
They listened. My wife was very thankful I stood up for her and the nurse later said that she rarely sees patients resist advice for painkillers. I am not sure if this was a compliment or not. 
Does McDonald’s do absolutely no sexual harrassment training of its managers? Even if there had been probably cause, making a female employee strip down should be in the “things I’m not supposed to do” category.
Man, that turnip truck must have been crowded!
Possibly, but I’d bet many if not most or all of the people in the Milgram experiment who “followed orders” would have said the same thing beforehand.
Mtgman, I think I love you. 
A number of years back there was a case in which people would go around to Japanese banks and say that they were government doctors giving out nationally-mandated vaccinations. All the obedient employees lined up and got a hypodermic needle in the arm…and of course they all dropped like flies because the needle was poisoned, and the “government doctors” made off with all the bank money. (No cite, but hopefully someone knows what I’m talking about and can help me out here…the recollection is a bit vague.)
The point, of course, is that no one in their right mind actually thinks they’d fall for something like that, but we all vastly underestimate the power of authority. If someone we perceive as having authority over us tells us to do something, we’re more likely than not to actually do it, and that’s a scary thought.
It’s indeed scary, but it also makes sense. A society where everybody questions everything will be very inefficient, and will be out-competed by the more smoothly-run societies of “sheeple”. I think the ‘Milgram Effect’ is sad but inevitable.
I disagree. You can’t extrapolate from that one study that people will fall for a trick at the same rate under all circumstances.
Even the article states that the caller was successful far less than you would contend. That isn’t even taking into account that he specifically selected restaurants where the managers would buy his act
This leads me to believe the vast majority of people would not fall for such a stupid trick. Either way, you 2-1 odds are far off the mark.
You’re thinking of the 1948 cyanide poisoning of employees of the Teikoku Bank by Sadamichi Hirosawa. (The twelve employees all simultaneously drank the cyanide solution, an alleged anti-dysentery drug, rather than getting injected with it. After you’ve injected a couple of cooperative bank employees with poison and they’ve died like swatted flies, the rest of the group is almost certain to get a little suspicious.) The story got a lot of exposure through being repeated, IIRC, in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel set in Japan, You Only Live Twice.
There were two stages in this caller’s plan. 1. Establish themselves as an authority figure(usually a policeman/investigator). 2. Carry out the hoax. If step 1 succeeds, then Milgram’s experiment(which has been repeated numerous times in several countries) says that most people would co-operate with step 2. What varies is the success rate on step 1.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to hear this isn’t happening as frequently as it could be. I just think that we, with the benefit of hindsight and seeing the issue wholistically, may be overly dismissive of the issues involved in the actual situation as it occurs. In retrospect, at Nueremburg, it was easy to see that Adolf Eichmann had done horrific things which no one of human conscience could possibly forbear. Herr Eichmann’s “I was only following orders” defense inspired Milgram to do his “authority” experiment. However, when the rubber meets the road these situations are more difficult to judge and understand for those actually in the situation versus those removed from it in time and space.
I dialed a wrong number today and the person on the other end of the line offered to use the internal corporate directory(which is unpublished) to find the person I asked for. It would have been easy to parley that willingness to help into something sinister. It happens every day in the IT world and it is called Social Engineering or Social Hacking.
Enjoy,
Steven
I’m a psychologist, and I’m still continually dumbfounded by stories like this. Mtgman, do you recall what the rate of compliance was as the distance from the victim diminished? That is, Milgram’s studies also included conditions in which the subject could hear the screams of the “victim,” in which the victim was in the room, and in which the subject had to hold the victim’s hand down on a shock plate. As the distance decreased, the rate of compliance dropped. The circumstances of the OP suggest high proximity between the subject and victim, with the subject clearly administering the painful stimuli. I don’t know of any literature to back this up, but there is also a higher distance between the authority figure and the subject here, than someone in a lab coat with a stern face, which I would anticipate would lower compliance rates.
I agree that people are too quick to say that they would never do such and such, but I think these folks represent the lower end of the distribution.
It’s been a long time since I studied Milgram in depth, but some of the variations did test for proximity to the one being tortured. The Wikipedia article said that distance from the victim correlated with how soon they refused to apply additional shocks. The closer they were to the suffering being caused the less likely they were to continue.
I’d have to dig out a copy of Milgram’s book to get exact figures for a particular variation if Wikipedia doesn’t have it.
Enjoy,
Steven
Tell that to Lyndie England.
I don’t understand this comment at all. Could you summarize what you think I’m saying and how it applies to Ms. England?
Enjoy,
Steven
Employee manuals in fine print? Are you serious? Making up anything and everything to “rail against ‘THE MAN’”…eh, EC?
When we train employees, they take turns reading all the material with us there to make sure they read it, comprehend it, and ask any questions about it. HELLO?!? YOU WANT THEM TO KNOW THIS STUFF! This would help the company RETAIN profits which would be in the corporation’s best interest. If McDonalds corporate is guilty of anything, it’s lack of communication through non-compliance of it’s franchise managers…not, “You didn’t read the fine print.” Oh, and maybe paying low wages tends to only attract marginal employees would be another issue.
But management on the franchise level is to blame here ultimately.
There’s no chance this is a joke is there? Because I’m surprised this isn’t national news.
Actually, I thought of this as well. England, by all accounts, is pretty much a witless simpleton. I certainly could see the agency interrogators employing Milgram’s work without England and her cohorts ever suspecting a thing. As mentioned earlier, the fast-serve employees had been trained to be yes-men. But they have nothing on the military, so I would consider it to be easier to pull off. And the Psy-Ops folks who were working the interrogations would most likely be very familiar with Milgram’s body of work.
I’m rushed to find a cite, but IIRC, there was mention that the methods England and her cohorts used were in common usage in the world of psy-ops. An area they had no knowledge of.
At least that is what I suspect Zebra was attempting to say. At the least, it’s what crossed my mind before he even posted England’s name.
I found a link to a Wall Street Journal article, but it’s a pay to read article.