Conscience vs Obedience, Responsibility vs Authority: a Measure of the Humanoid Potential Trouble Source Horrors, 3

And it’s about to get even more chilling as the ensuing series of experiments discloses further and more detailed statistics. We may call the factor involved here “proximity”, “closeness” or something alike; a factor affecting the actual test subject on three sides: the subject’s “closeness” to his or her peers, to the innocent victim, to the ordering authority.

On the peer side, when the test subject was joined by one or two additional fake “teachers”, their behaviour heavily affected him or her: when they refused to comply, the subject’s compliance in administering the shocks dropped to 10 percent; when on the contrary they complied fully, the subject’s compliance reached 92.5 percent. And when a test subject first saw another test subject refuse to comply, this did not alter the percentage. So much as to how much our being lemmings weighs. And not only we’re prone to trade our responsibility for some herd instinct, but we’ll follow the closest sheep, too.

On the victim side, variations in “closeness” – some may see fit to call them degrees of confronting getting one’s hands dirty or being shielded from it – were enacted in this way: the lesser one meant that the teacher and the student were in separate rooms, almost isolated from one another, and the highest one meant that the teacher on the contrary had to personally hold the student’s arm on the shock plate, with intermediate degrees of teacher more and more exposed and close to the student’s reactions and state. Which were more and more dramatic and shocking as the voltage increased, up to the apparent loss of consciousness. Even though the compliance percentage decreased as the closeness increased, under the greatest closeness a healthy 30 percent managed to hold the student’s arm on the shock plate anyway.