CHAPTER 6 (PAGES 208–236)
- The quote is from Milgram’s 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology. - All of these variations on the basic experiment, as well as several
others, are presented in Milgram’s highly readable book Obedience to
Authority, 1974. A review of much of the subsequent research on obed-
ience can be found in Blass (1991). - In fact, Milgram first began his investigations in an attempt to un-
derstand how the German citizenry could have participated in the
concentration-camp destruction of millions of innocents during the
years of Nazi ascendancy. After testing his experimental procedures in
the United States, he had planned to take them to Germany, a country
whose populace he was sure would provide enough obedience for a
full-blown scientific analysis of the concept. That first eye-opening ex-
periment in New Haven, Connecticut, however, made it clear that he
could save his money and stay close to home. “I found so much obedi-
ence,” he has said, “I hardly saw the need of taking the experiment to
Germany.”
More telling evidence, perhaps, of a willingness within the American
character to submit to authorized command comes from a national
survey taken after the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, who ordered
his soldiers to kill the inhabitants—from the infants and toddlers
through their parents and grandparents—of My Lai, Vietnam (Kelman
and Hamilton, 1989). A majority of Americans (51 percent) responded
that, if so ordered, in a similar context, they too would shoot all the
residents of a Vietnamese village. But Americans have no monopoly
on the need to obey. When Milgram’s basic procedure has been repeated
in Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, and Jordan, the results
have been similar. See Meeus and Raaijmakers for a review. - We are not the only species to give sometimes wrongheaded defer-
ence to those in authority positions. In monkey colonies, where rigid
dominance hierarchies exist, beneficial innovations (like learning how
to use a stick to bring food into the cage area) do not spread quickly
through the group unless they are taught first to a dominant animal.
When a lower animal is taught the new concept first, the rest of the
colony remains mostly oblivious to its value. One study, cited by Ardry
(1970), on the introduction of new food tastes to Japanese monkeys
provides a nice illustration. In one troop, a taste for caramels was de-
veloped by introducing this new food into the diet of young peripherals,
low on the status ladder. The taste for caramels inched slowly up the
ranks: A year and a half later, only 51 percent of the colony had acquired
220 / Influence