Allahpundit has a video clip of the fake French game show “Game of Death” that tested whether contestants would administer potentially fatal electric shocks to another contestant when ordered to do so as part of the game — 81 percent did. He matches that with some information about the famous experiment from 1961 by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who was trying to figure out why the Germans followed orders to commit the mass murders of the Holocaust.
However, I think Allah and others overstate the amount of pressure or domination that was applied in the Milgram experiment to induce the 62.5 percent of the participants to deliver painful and potentially lethal electric shocks. Here’s what the authority figure said to gain compliance:
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:
- Please continue.
- The experiment requires that you continue.
- It is absolutely essential that you continue.
- You have no other choice, you must go on.
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.
The above commands do not represent enormous duress. It is sobering enough to imagine that these acts were committed under terrible pressure, but they weren’t. The authority figure just insisted. There were no threats. There were no consequences for quitting.
Obama takes full advantage of whatever it is in the 60 to 80 percent of the population vulnerable to the commands of authority figures to commit atrocities. Whenever Obama cannot gain the support, money and power he wants from other people voluntarily by making them whatever promise they want to hear (with no intention of delivering), he always turns domineering and contemptuous. I hope one day soon people figure out that the best response then is just to laugh in his face and call him on his lie of the moment — and rinse and repeat as necessary.
