Ordinary Americans still willing to inflict shocks on strangers...

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published the results to his experiment on obedience to authority, concluding that "most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to." Sixty-five percent of people administered shocks of up to 450 volts; eighty percent were willing to go up to 150 volts.

Recently, Professor Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University replicated the experiment with similar results, coming to the conclusion that ordinary Americans, forty-five years after the original experiment, still are willing to blindly follow orders and inflict pain on strangers.

The results did not surprise Profesor Burger, who believes that the mindset of an individual is less important than the situational factors of the original experiment, which include having an authority figure give the instructions (people follow an authority figure's commands when the authority figure appears legitimate), and having the participant increase the voltage gradually.

'The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.

"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.'

Having graduated from Escuela Caribe, an evangelical Christian boot camp in the Dominican Republic, I don't find the results surprising either. During my two years there, I watched naive Christian missionaries transform into abusive staff members in accordance with the dictates of "the program," the systematic set of rules used to gradually "break the wills" of their teen charges. Eventually, under pressure from the system, I too changed, becoming a junior staff (a.k.a. a high ranker), enforcing the meaningless rules, ratting out my fellow students.

Situational factors are nearly impossible to withstand over long periods.

The NYT's concludes that "the results of both experiments pose a challenge. If this is how most people behave, how do we prevent more Holocausts, Abu Ghraibs and other examples of wanton cruelty? Part of the answer, Professor Burger argues, is teaching people about the experiment so they will know to be on guard against these tendencies, in themselves and others."

Sources:

New York Times

CNN