Maybe, but the tendency to obey authority is very real and has been exploited in real life. The article that @Brainspore linked to above describes several cases, including the Mount Washington scam, which was more horrific than anything Milgram ever cooked up. It shows what people can be persuaded to do, not to an unseen stranger, but to someone they know who is right in front of them.
The movie I referenced above, Compliance, is a more or less exact retelling of that case. Compliance | Rotten Tomatoes
Trigger warnings apply.
We didnât tip it, because (ahem) we were not vandals, but it only took a few people to pick it up and place it so the front (and only) door was firmly pushed against a large snowbank. Hey, it had a sunroof. No problem.
Oh yeah, people will do all kinds of things. But I also think, as others have pointed out, it has a lot to do with how averse the people were to doing the thing in the first place. Start asking people for money and their scam detectors will turn up a notch. Ask them to do something bad to someone they actually care about and itâll get a lot harder. Not that no one will do these things, but I think the obedience isnât really that blind. Itâs just that a lot of people donât care that much about strangers, a lot of people probably want to smash a window, and a lot of men probably want to strip search a female customer or employee.
Also, we really donât know what the failure rate on these kinds of âpranksâ is. We also donât know how skilled the caller is in many cases, so itâs hard to separate the obedience of authority issue from the con-men-can-get-people-to-do-almost-anything issue. Like I said, I wish we knew the actual results of the Milgram experiments instead of the inflated ones.
I think the point is that they are the same issue. All the con man needs to do is convince his target that he has the authority, then everything follows from that.
So if a caller purporting to be an FBI agent asked you to tip over a Smart car to prevent its use in a terrorist attackâŚ
But I donât think thatâs it. Iâd wager the success of this prank depends on making the person you are calling feel important and needed, rather than making them feel like you have authority. Make them feel like they will be a hero.
Iâd probably say something like, âLook, can you give me a really plausible reason to believe you? I want to do it, but I need to be able to reasonably say I believed in good faith it was for real.â
Oh I either missed that or learned it once but forgot. I still think there is something there but likely less powerful than the original research indicated. People may not shock the hell out of someone but in many situations they will listen to an expert without question (Doctor, lawyer, etcâŚ) or a uniform (Police, EMT, Soldier, etcâŚ).
In highschool we put a guys car on top of a stack of hay bails. It was there for 3 days, and he was about to call a tow service to have them try and hoist it down when i finally felt sorry enough for the guy to tell him to just cut the strings on the bails.
My example was meant to be facetious, of course, and I wasnât suggesting you would fall for it. But in the face of genuine authority, someone with a real uniform/badge/lab coat, many people donât ask a lot of questions.
there was a stand-up routine I saw years ago, the comic was talking about his style of prank calls:
âThis is the drug store, how may I help you?â
âYeah, you got Prince Albert in the can?â
âYesâ
[long pause]
âCan I speak to him?â
I think the main takeaway from the Milgram experiment is that âunder the right social pressures (such as guidance from authority figures), a majority of ordinary people can be manipulated into doing Very Bad Things.â Modern ethical guidelines make it difficult if not impossible to re-create the original experiment exactly, but I think subsequent study has borne that main premise out.
Also remember that even if many of the subjects in the original study werenât willing to flip the âDANGER: POTENTIALLY LETHAL VOLTAGEâ switch themselves itâs also not like they were fleeing en masse to alert the police either.
