Last
week, my colleague and I were part of a front-page local news story.
No, I am
not discussing any details here (or anywhere else). But there is a lesson here
for all of us.
The banner
headline reads:
Coach:
“Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect.”
AD: “I
feel very confident in the culture we have created.”
Profs:
“We found the information credible and disturbing.”
…
Prof. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, measured the
willingness of men to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform
acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to
believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to
administer electric shocks to a "learner." These fake electric shocks
gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion
of men would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram devised
his psychological study to answer the popular contemporary question:
"Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were
just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" The
experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent
results: roughly 65% of the male participants were willing to override their conscience
and administer painful shocks to strangers.
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