people into gross misbehavior. In this experiment, a man posing as an authority

figure, namely a professor governing a respectable experiment, was able to trick

a great many ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to believe

were massive electric shocks that inflicted heavy torture on innocent fellow

citizens. This experiment did demonstrate a terrible result contributed to by

Authority-Misinfluence Tendency, but it also demonstrated extreme ignorance in

the psychology professoriate right after World War II.

 

Almost any intelligent person with my checklist of psychological tendencies in

his hand would, by simply going down the checklist, have seen that Milgram’s

experiment involved about six powerful psychological tendencies acting in

confluence to bring about his extreme experimental result. For instance, the

person pushing Milgram’ s shock lever was given much social proof from presence

of inactive bystanders whose silence communicated that his behavior was okay.

Yet it took over a thousand psychological papers, published before I got to

Milgram, for the professoriate to get his experiment only about ninety percent

as well understood as it would have immediately been by any intelligent person

who used (1) any sensible organization of psychology along the lines of this

talk, plus (2) a checklist procedure. This outcome displaying the dysfunctional

thinking of long-dead professors deserves a better explanation. I will later

deal with the subject in a very hesitant fashion.

 

We can be pleased that the psychology professoriate of a former era wasn’t quite

as dysfunctional as the angler in my next-to-last illustration of

Authority-Misinfluence Tendency.