Grisha just linked me to this article and it completely boggles me. I don't just guess but know that I wouldn't do horrible things to people just because some authority figure told me to. Yet it's a strange human compulsion, seemingly.
Is the Nuremburg defense acceptable in this case? Is it ever acceptable?
How can people ever turn their moral agency over to someone else like this? Unquestioning obedience is evil.
posted
I have long believed that there is almost no evil that humans will not inflict on each other as long as they believe it's their job.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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yeah, especially saying she could have waled out if she didn't approve. Yeah sure, she could have walked out completely naked, after some how getting past a guy twice her size, and out of a locked room, and past her manager. Then she could just go walk home naked, leaving her car, and her clothes behind.
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I think I was personally innoculated against blind obedience to authority because of having been abused as a child.
Why do humans have this instinct to obey? Is it ever a good thing? I wonder if we should be specifically training kids to always question everything they're told to do, and make their own moral choices.
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I believe what is needed is a solid moral framework upon which to base judgement and decision, and the simple concept of obedience cannot and must not be that moral reference. Rather, obedience must always be checked against clear notions of right and wrong.
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I'm analyzing this impulse as part of a separate discussion happening on Sakeriver right now, actually. And I think part of it might be because so much of our moral literature prizes obedience above other values. That much of our modern literature prizes independent morality over obedience has I think produced a certain cultural schizophrenia.
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I never cease to be amazed and sickened at how easily the human mind can be hijacked. Humans are not rational beings, however much we would like to be.
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Well, the experiments in the 60s proved primarily that if we believe the responsibility is on the shoulders of someone with more authority and it has to be done, we turn into cows. Machiavelli knew it. Half of The Prince is based around that.
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I think it does have a lot to do with moral authorities telling children that they ought to obey adults. Heck, I remember being at a Child Evangelism Fellowship camp where there was a song about obeying. "Obedience is the very best way to show that you believe." I realized later that this was sort of scary, telling children to obey immediately, without question.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Exactly. Obedience to your superiors is a good thing, but you cannot shirk the personal responsibility of refusing orders that would cause you to do something wrong.
Of course, if you have no objective concept of right and wrong, that becomes a little difficult.
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They describe the suspect as shaking uncontrollably, not being intelligent or forceful at all in person. I don't want to convict this guy before his trial, but I knew someone once who was really nice and mild mannered in person whom I only realized was a sociopath when I got to know him online. Apparently in real life he was meek and nice only because he was so very unimposing as a person. Online he was a sicko petty criminal type who enjoyed the feeling of power he got from duping people, similar to the guy in this case. Once I saw the real him online then I was able to see the signs in real life as well, but they were small things that I had dismissed before cause he seemed nice overall.
So I totally find it believable now that someone meek and mild in person could turn into a creepy power-tripper over the phone. I hope that guy I knew got help for his mental problems.
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I think questioning authority is typically only easy when you are questioning someone else's authority - an authority you don't believe in. But when the authority is your own religion, or a teacher you trust, or the science textbook you accept, the family members that you rely upon, or even your own eyes, ears, and mind, it's much harder to follow that advice.
I think the reason for that is because following authority tends to end up being an effective strategy, for most (but not all!) cases. And ultimately, it really just boils down to which authority to trust more - your own instincts & reasoning, or someone/something else? Neither can be completely trusted.
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I think the obedience thing comes from more than just indoctrination. It seems to me that it's part of the us-them duality. If you stay with the herd, the herd protects you. If you trust on your own judgement then you become an outcast.
By the very act of being named as a criminal someone becomes a non-person in this situation. Then the assistant-manager person either treats them horribly (but oh well after all they're a non-person) or else risks becoming a non-person themselves (which is terrifying). I think the answer lies in how easy it is to become a non-person in any human society. All it takes is for someone to call you a criminal.
There's something crucial about dominance and power politics going on in this case. I wish I understood exactly what it was.
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In addition to impersonating a police officer, in most states the caller is responsible for everything done at his request. So everything the person who did it can be charged with, the caller can be charged with.
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This person, whoever made the phone calls, is a real life troll, you know? It seems like exactly the same kick that people get from trolling. Would internet people be more suspicious of something like that, just because we've seen so many trolls online?
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quote:Originally posted by digging_holes: I believe what is needed is a solid moral framework upon which to base judgement and decision, and the simple concept of obedience cannot and must not be that moral reference. Rather, obedience must always be checked against clear notions of right and wrong.
This is certainly true.
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Honestly, I'd like to see McDonald's take a little responsibilty here. A memo hardly seems like a sure-fire way to protect and inform employees. Memos are a great way to spread word to a whole lot of people in a company, but if their's something really important, shouldn't it be communicated by a store manager directly to employees?
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There is evil in the world, and this is what it looks like, sometimes.
The instinct to obey authority figures is quirky. I can not coerce my teen aged son to clean up his room.
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This is one of several articles I've read through Hatrack over the years that I wish I could go back and not read.
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And, actually, the more that I think about it, the more I wish that the title of this thread more accurately described the horror of that article... I kind of thought I was going to be reading about mean but funny "prank calls", not 18 year old girls being raped and abused.
Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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"Question authority" is a double-edged sword. It give people who want to ignore what they should do an excuse. In my experience people are generally looking for some excuse to do what they want, or avoid responsibility for their actions. Everyone has urges they suppress. Can you have a working society with the principle of “question authority?” Like ice in a lake, the veneer we put over our desires and animal nature varies from person to person. If you find a thin place it’s easy to bring it to the surface. Most of us feel bad for the victim. But to raise it to a point that we bend the problem the opposite way isn’t a solution. If you take the opposite tact, you just have the opposite problems, and “question authority” is the rallying cry for anarchy. Perhaps “Confirm authority”. In the place of the manager I would have checked, or called corporate, or the police, when the requests became odd. Even this is an imperfect solution because without some experience, what is odd? It still comes down to a persons knowledge of what is acceptable, and the marks where chosen for this. If you grow up in a small town, trust and such things are far more common than in cities. Scammers have always picked places like this for their targets. The other expectation that companies have omniscience is in the same vein as the authority issue. Try this exercise: You are in charge of McDonalds and have printed manuals that give specific guidelines about what the company allows. Employees don’t read them. How do you make them read them without getting in trouble? Apparently the managers don’t read them either. Second you have called all the stores and warned them about this going on. You don’t list out ever possibility, because you assume that a warning is sufficient. I have to ask, if someone called you and wanted you to strip-search your 18-year-old daughter, would you just do it? So being in charge of McDonalds how do you protect however many thousands of employees who don’t make the leap of intuition that a warning about a hoax call might include a hoax calls that ask for things like strip searches. I’m not a proponent of McDonalds, I don’t much care for them, but to point at this or that instead of the real issue doesn’t do much good. The real issue is that bad things happen. You try to minimize them. There are bad people that will do bad things given the chance. And for others the world has become so complicated and difficult to deal with. Without exposure to it we don’t guard against it, and that exposure is often painful. Our marketing is aimed at the thin spots. I believe this is the reason you see more of the extreme behavior. If someone’s ice is thin and they are exposed to enough advertisements that say it’s ok, others are doing it, you deserve it, don’t hold yourself back, etc., then people eventually feel it’s not really so bad to act on inappropriate behaviors. Advertisement has become a means of getting past people basic “no”. Not everyone can handle the temptation and so we see the effect. If we encourage the bad tendencies we will see more of the bad tendencies.
Askew Finding the balance
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I find this horrifying. I'm going to think on it for awhile more but I think it says something very disturbing about American culture.
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A lot of times we hear about situations and we say to ourselves that we can't really know what we would do if were in that situation. Like, would we be part of the screaming crowd when Jesus was crucified, or would we be one of His crying followers? Would we go along with the status quo if we were Germans during World War II, or would we speak out?
Well, in this instance... There is NO doubt in my mind. I never would have been fooled by such a phone call. I would have told them to F off and called the police.
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You know, it says, "how would we initially react?"
I don't know about you, but I would ask the caller for a badge number, then ask him to hold while I called and checked it. I would do this if anyone called asking me anything and claimed to be a police officer.
Are the people who blindly obeyed just not as smart as I am? I don't know. But last I heard, stupidity is not a viable defense, nor is following illegal orders from anyone when not under imminent threat of your life.
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I'm going to take an unusual stance and actually defend McDonalds, a company I don't exactly think the world of. For one thing, according to them they have a policy against strip searching employees, that alone should have been enough - the manager should have said to the caller "It's against company policy to strip search employees, I can't do it." They also did send out a warning, the article seems to suggest they sent a written memo and there was a phone message for managers.
Truly, the square sum of blame has to fall on the managers who allowed this to happen.
But the points about blindly accepting authority are good ones. Any decent cop would understand if you said "hey, I'm not comfortable, can I hang up and call the station back myself?" Any decent cop would understand if a person asked for photo ID of a person claiming to be a police officer. If they object to those types of things, it's a pretty clear indication they aren't what they say they are. No one should ever be afraid to question someone who claims to be a police officer because if they're legit, they'll understand. My father the cop was the one who told me to always ask to see not just a badge, but photo identification as well. Fake badges are easily obtained and police impersonators are common enough that cops understand and appreciate the public's need to be wary.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The "square sum of blame" has to fall on the person who is making the calls.
I'm currently studying psychology in college and we had to study Milgram's experiments and others like it. It would be painfully easy to get people to do what you want so long as they percieve that you have authority over them.
Also, the person making the calls is unsing the "foot in the door technique" which is where you start with something small. The caller did not tell the manager to strip search the employee. It clearly states that the manager was told to remove one piece of clothing at a time.
Would you obey if you were told that someone was working for you was suspected of thievery? What if the suspect were wearing a heavy jacket and they just told you to take that off because it could easily conceal stolen merchandise. I would probably obey. I don't like admitting it but I would.
I think of myself as upstanding enough not to fall for this sort of thing. But then again, I bet the people who did fall for it would have thought better of themselves too.
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Yeah, but to start slapping a naked girl's butt? To give a guy oral sex? At some point, it has to trigger a response like, "This isn't right. This makes no sense. Why would a cop ask me to do this?"
Posts: 1903 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
I finally finished the article. Looks like they caught the guy making some of the calls.
He kept the calling card. Moron.
This is discouraging, though:
quote:Detectives in other jurisdictions say they didn't press charges because the caller's crime would be a misdemeanor for which he could not be extradited.
There's a possible Federal Travel Act violation, depending on if unlawful imprisonment is a crime of violence. I wonder if any U.S. Attorney's have looked into this.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Perceived authority carries much power, studies show Psychological experts say it is human nature to obey orders, no matter how evil they might seem -- as was illustrated in one of the most famous and frightening human experiments of the 20th century.
Seeking to understand why so many Germans followed orders during the Holocaust, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, took out a classified ad in 1960 and 1961, inviting residents of New Haven, Conn., to take part in what they were told was a study of the relationship between punishment and learning.
A man in a white lab coat introduced the participants to a student, and told them to shock the student each time he made a mistake, increasing the voltage with each error.
In reality, the machine was a prop, and the student was an actor who wasn't shocked. Yet nearly two-thirds of Milgram's subjects gave what they believed were paralyzing jolts to a pitifully protesting victim simply because an authority figure -- the man in the white coat -- had commanded them to do so.
"With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe," Milgram wrote of his results, which were later replicated in nine other countries.
Milgram died in 1984, but his biographer and protege, Dr. Thomas Blass, said in an interview that the behavior of the people duped in the strip-search hoaxes would not have surprised him.
"Once you accept another person's authority, you become a different person," Blass said. "You are concerned with how well you follow out your orders, rather than whether it is right or wrong."
quote:Would you obey if you were told that someone was working for you was suspected of thievery?
Absolutely not. I would ask, as the manager, who reported the suspected thievery and make sure that all proper procedures for reporting and investigating the theft ere observed.
Every large corporation, McDonald's included I'm sure, has procedures and policies in place that must be followed by the management when an employee is suspected of wrongdoing. Anything that deviated from thos policies and procedures should have sent up red flags and they should not have done it.
This is not to exonerate the caller - I believe he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent, but he actually didn't do anything physical to those girls - the people who did are the ones I hold most responsible.
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I agree, although I think that the caller should be held responsible because he was the one with the intent to harm people initially, and the one who came up with and executed the plan to suck people into it.
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I think what you would do is heavily based on what your self-view is and the state you are in at the moment. If you have a strong view of self and the morals that you find acceptable and not acceptable then you are less susceptible to a state dependant decision. If you’re very hungry and I tell you that it’s ok to steal the bread, your justification for the action you take is going to go up much faster than if you’re full. The ice is much thinner and so breaks through easier. Manipulation of people is often bringing desires that are already there past the “no” response. The boyfriend Nix has a naked young girl in front of him. What would his reaction be? Most men would be turned on at some level. How thin does your ice get in that situation? You want to do what the caller is telling you but is your “no” response still strong enough to say No. You’ve sworn off drinking for a week, but on Friday you go out with friend after telling them you can’t drink, peer pressure ensues and how thin does your ice get? Just one? What does it matter anyway, it was just a promise to yourself? The desire was there and he got them past their “no” response. It should also be noted that the article mentioned the caller would have to call numerous places till he got someone will to do what he said.
posted
I think the caller is far more responsible than the managers. His intent was that this happen, he had every reason to expect it to work, and therefore he has all the culpability of the one who executed it plus the additional culpability of the one who sought it.
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But that seems to remove the responsibility of the one who followed "orders" that were both illegal and against company policy, not to mention wrong.
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*compares stack of Liam's school notes to similar stack saved for me by my mother*
While I admit that I HAVE done nonsensical things that people told me to do (usually on the job-- I used to work for the Federal government) I did them only when I could see no harm in it. Otherwise, I'd smile and nod and do what I thought was right as soon as I could get away with it without causing a ruckus.
I have seen my natural contrariness beaaten down somewhat by life, but this is one reason I treasure my son's innate contrariness. Have you ever noticed that most rules in school exist for the convenience of the teacher, and to establish in us a sort of herd mentality?
I find that uncomfortable.
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quote:But that seems to remove the responsibility of the one who followed "orders" that were both illegal and against company policy, not to mention wrong.
Only if you hold culpability to be a zero-sum game, where assigning culpability to party A automatically removes it from party B.
I don't believe that. "All the culpability of the one who executed it" was not quantified in my post. It can be any number you want; to me, it's a very large number.
What I'm saying is that if the manager's culpability is X, the caller's culpability is X+Y, where Y is a positive number.
This does not reduce the value of X at all.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I'd agree with that, mostly. As long as the people who actually did it are fully held accountable for their own actions, as well. (Not treated as victims as they were in some cases.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: In addition to impersonating a police officer, in most states the caller is responsible for everything done at his request. So everything the person who did it can be charged with, the caller can be charged with.
Actually, so far asside from impersonating a police officer, they can only charge him (in kentucky at least) with things like solicitation, coersion, etc. but no felonies asside from impersonating a police officer.
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posted
Also, some of things he got them to do, how could anyone really claim they thaught they were conducting a search for police?
How could a grown adult think that forcing a teenage girl to strip naked, and perform oral sex on him, would some how show if she had, or had not, stolen a purse? They said making the girl kiss him was to check for substances on her breath, nude jumping jacks to see if anything concealed fell from the girl, which are insane ideas for how to check if a person stole something, but what could the manager's fiance have possibly thaught he was checking, by having her perform sex acts on him?
Some of things listed in other articles, or in this one, that people in other cases were convinced to do, are just as bizarre, and also lead me to wonder, what could they have possibly thaught they were checking for? This article,(beware of the language used) describes a Taco bellmanager who performed a cavity search on a 17 year old customer, at the direction of the voice on the phone, claiming to be a police officer, who described a girl who was suspected of stealing a pocket book. Now seriously, a pocket book, requires a cavity search? Maybe i am confused as to the size of a pocket book, but it seems unlikely such methods would be used to conceal one.
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