Frankey Jones & Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority

["William Cala" <wcala@rochester.rr.com>]

Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard and later taught at Yale.  His award-winning book of 1974, Obedience to Authority resonates today.  Please note the following excerpt from a UK Social Psych. site:

      Stanley Milgram's studies on obedience, conducted in the late 1950s are among the most dramatic and unnerving of all Psychology studies. Milgram was interested in how far people would go in following the orders of a person in authority. In his studies, a naive subject (the 'teacher') was led to believe that he was delivering increasingly powerful shocks to a middle-aged man (the 'learner') with a heart condition in another room. 
      At some point in the study, the learner began to complain of heart problems, and to demand that the shocks stop. Each time the teacher tried to stop, the experimenter would insist that the experiment go on. To everyone's surprise, over 60% of all subjects followed the experimenter's commands to go on, even after the learner ceased responding entirely.

      Although it is sometimes suggested that the same results would not be obtained today, or with other populations - e.g., women. Remarkably however, similar results were obtained in the Netherlands in 1986, with female nurses as subjects. Some things never change.....

      I have repeatedly wondered why so many people (administrators, teachers etc.) while speaking one-on-one clearly understand and are able to articulate the damage of HST, yet when told to administer them, take them etc., they follow like sheep being led to the slaughter.    On Friday, I spoke with a fellow resisting superintendent from Nassau County in Long Island.  He said, "Bill, they've all given up down here.  They (superintendents) are now trying to raise test scores."

      When I read of the rare exceptions like Frankey Jones and James Hope (and the heroes on this list) I cannot help but think of Milgram's Theory of Obedience and why we are in the mess that we find ourselves with HST.  

      "The theory that only those on the sadistic fringe of society would submit to such cruelty is disclaimed."    "....Milgram has noted reoccurring themes (as found in Obdenience to Authority)."  (He details the My Lai massacre in Vietnam).  But the studies do not deal with extreme situations such as war.  

      "People who are doing a job as instructed by an administrative figure are following the instructions of that administrative outlook and not the outlook of a moral code. The feelings of duty and personal emotion are clearly separated. Responsibility shifts in the mind of the subordinate from himself/herself to the authority figure. There is a well defined purpose behind the actions or goals of the authority, and the subordinate is depended upon to help and meet those goals. Milgram points out, "The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or -more specifically-the kind of character produced in American society, cannot be counted on to insulate the citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority." 

      Milgram speaks of a "malevolent authority."  What would administrators and teachers do under the pressure of a "benevolent authority?"  Milgram's studies show that 65% of all the "teachers" punished the "learners" to the maximum of 450 volts.  

      I find Milgram's use of "teacher" and "learner" frigteningly analogous.  

      "According to Milgram, every human has the dual capacity to function as an individual exercising his or her own moral judgement and the capacity to make their own moral decisions based on their personal character. What is still a mystery is this, what happens to the average person who is obedient to authority when it overrides their own moral judgement?"

      We must continue the fight and support the Frankey Joneses of the world.

      Bill Cala (in total admiration of Frankey Jones and what she has done)