Page 63 - The Social Animal

Conformity 45

obligated to avoid disrupting the experiment. Moreover, he faced the
demands of the experimenter alone; a variation of the study demon-
strated that the proportion of fully obedient people dropped to just
10 percent when they were joined by two fellow teachers who defied
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the experimenter. Also, in most of Milgram’s studies, the authority
figure issuing the orders was a scientist in a prestigious laboratory at
Yale University, and his cover story credits the experiment as being
an investigation of an important scientific question. In our society,
we have been conditioned to believe that scientists tend to be respon-
sible, benevolent people of high integrity.This is especially true if the
scientist is affiliated with a well-known and highly respected institu-
tion like Yale. The participants might reasonably assume, then, that
no scientist would issue orders that would result in the death or in-
jury of a human as a part of his experiment. This was clearly not true
in Nazi Germany, My Lai, or Abu Ghraib.
Some evidence in support of this conjecture comes from further
research by Milgram. He conducted a separate study comparing the
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obedience of people to the commands of a scientist at Yale Univer-
sity with obedience of people to the commands of a scientist work-
ing in a suite of offices in a rather rundown commercial building in
the downtown shopping area of the industrial city of Bridgeport,
Connecticut. In this study, the Yale scientist achieved an obedience
rate of 65 percent compared with only 48 percent in Bridgeport.
Thus, removing the prestige of Yale University did seem to reduce
the degree of obedience somewhat.
Of course, 48 percent is still a high figure. Would even fewer
people have obeyed if the person conducting the experiment were
not a scientist or another legitimate authority figure? Milgram ad-
dressed this question in another version of the study, in which the
scientist-experimenter was replaced at the last minute by a nonau-
thoritative “substitute.” Here’s how it worked: After making the
usual preparations for the learning task, but without designating
what shock levels were to be used, the experimenter was called away
from the laboratory by a prearranged telephone call. Another “par-
ticipant” (actually a confederate) assumed the experimenter’s role.
The substitute pretended to hit upon the idea of having the teacher
raise the shock level every time the learner made a mistake. He also
prodded the teacher to proceed with the shocks, just as the scien-
tist-experimenter had done in previous versions of the experiments.