Page 62 - The Social Animal

44 The Social Animal

proves that high levels of obedience in the Milgram experiment are
not artifacts of a bygone era; today’s modern American is every bit
as susceptible to being led to shock an innocent victim as his or her
counterparts in the 1950s. 41

Implications An astonishingly large proportion of people will
cause pain to other people in obedience to authority. The research
may have important counterparts in the world outside of the experi-
mental laboratory. For example, it is difficult to read about these stud-
ies without noticing some similarity between the behavior of the
teachers in Milgram’s experiment and the blind obedience expressed
by Adolf Eichmann, who attributed his responsibility for the murder
of millions of innocent civilians to the fact that he was a good bureau-
crat merely obeying orders issued by his superiors in the Nazi regime.
During the war in Vietnam, Lieutenant William Calley, who was
convicted of the deliberate and unprovoked murder of Vietnamese
women and children at My Lai, freely admitted to these acts but said
he felt this was justifiable obedience to the authority of his superior
officers. More recently, it has become clear that the torture and hu-
miliation administered to Iraqi prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib prison
42
was not an isolated incident. Although military leaders were quick
to blame this behavior on a few “bad apples” —and court-martialed
them—the facts in the case suggest that Abu Ghraib was indeed an-
other instance of obedience to authority. In each of these cases, the
individuals who perpetrated the mistreatment of others claimed that
they were simply following orders. Interestingly, one of Milgram’s
obedient participants, when questioned after the session, replied: “I
stopped, but he [the experimenter] kept going.”
As provocative as these comparisons are, we should be cautious
lest we overinterpret Milgram’s results. Given that 67 percent of the
participants in Milgram’s experiment complied with the experi-
menter’s command, some commentators have been tempted to sug-
gest that perhaps most people would have behaved as Adolf
Eichmann did if they found themselves in a similar situation. This
may be true; but it should be emphasized that there are, in fact, some
important factors in the situation encountered by Milgram’s partici-
pants that tend to maximize obedience. Because he freely consented
to participate, he had every reason to assume that his victim had also
volunteered. Accordingly, it is likely that he felt that they were both