Page 14 - Make Work Great

Prologue

would be a fi rm “no.” But if the behavior of strangers-turned-peers
is a powerful infl uence on our own perceptions and actions, imagine
what clear, open direction from established authority fi gures can do
to us.
We don’t need to imagine such a scenario. Social conformity
experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s and
recently repeated on prime-time news tested it directly. Milgram
designed his studies to determine whether subjects would resist an
authority fi gure whose directive was to infl ict harm on an innocent
victim. Subjects were led to believe, through falsifi ed screams and
groans, that they were administering electrical shocks of increasing
intensity, pain levels, and danger to a fellow experimental subject
in an adjacent room. About two-thirds of those subjects contin-
ued to “shock” their counterparts according to the authority fi g-
ure’s directive, despite pleas, screams, and even a seeming loss of
consciousness from the supposedly suffering person. After ponder-
ing his troubling results for years, Milgram reached the following
conclusion:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particu-
lar hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destruc-
tive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their
work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions
incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively
few people have the resources needed to resist authority. 4

Perhaps most troubling about the Milgram experiments is that,
when asked many years later how many of the subjects in his experi-
ments actually went so far as to check on the health of the person in
the adjacent room, Milgram didn’t need to consult his notes for the
answer: “Not one, not ever.” Even those who “successfully” chose
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to deviate from the directives of the authority fi gure never went so
far as to deviate from the framework set up by that fi gure, despite
the fact that from our outside perspective doing so would seem the
natural—and moral—choice to make.

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