The Milgram Experiment

On reading some of the comments about the 'Verizon service people and math' scenario (see previous post) one struck a particular chord with me. First the background: As a teenager, I had a habit of asking myself strange moral questions like 'If I was living in the southern U.S. in round 1830, would I have contributed to the practice of slavery'? Asking this of other people, I was surprised to find that many people (almost everyone, actually) answered 'no'. Especially since my answer was 'probably yes'. The difference is that most other people seem to believe that people in general (and consequently they) are inherently moral. And consequently that some part of them would, despite their environs and their upbringing, be repelled by slavery and rebel against it. I disagree. And the facts and Orwell are on my side.
The 'facts' is that most people from the dominant class (lets say 80% for the sake of argument) were participants in the practice of slavery meaning that, if you were living then (and you're white), there is an 80% chance that you would as well. That is my answer and it is, in my opinion, the only honest one you can give. This is possibly why I identify so strongly with a quote from Orwell's 1984:

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

Now, being the sadist I am, I extended this question to even to the most disgusting question. It has the same form: 'If you were living in Germany in the late 1930's early 1940's, and were a member of the dominant class, would you have participated in nazi-ism'?. I don't remember asking many other people this question (they do tend to get offended when I suggest to them that they would have been sympathetic to the slave trade, so I usually stop there), but it is disturbing that, if I'm honest, the answer comes out again 'probably yes'. But, being as I couldn't ask anyone else about this, I was lonely in my admission. I was greatly relieved, therefore to hear about the 'Milgram Experiment' in a TV documentary. If you don't want to plough through the Wikipedia article, here's the short version:
Milgram was a Yale psych prof who wanted to understand how so many everyday Germans could have participated in what was so obviously an evil movement. His hypothesis was that the whole thing was a result of the fact that people absolutely cannot question authority, even under the most extreme circumstances. The experiment he designed to test this was as follows: Person A was told that the experiment was about the effect of negative stimulus on the capacity to learn and that he/she has been randomly selected (between the two participants, who do meet each other at the beginning) as the 'teacher'. So Person A would try to teach word associations to Person B (who is actually an actor) and, if Person B got something wrong, Person A was to give them a shock. Every time person B got something wrong, the voltage went up and Person B's complaints got worse and worse. By 450V, person B was saying things that make it quite clear that their life would be in danger if they were to receive another shock (it is actually very hard to watch... good acting). The most important aspect of the experiment was the presence of the 'experimenter' who was an impressive looking man in a lab coat. The job of the experimenter was, if Person A questioned the experiment, to say one of the four specific phrases ranging from 'Please continue' to 'You have no other choice, you must go on'.
The results were this: 65% of people administered the 450V shock, though many felt uncomfortable doing so. Not a single 'Person A' steadfastly refused to go on before 300V.

So what does this all have to do with Verizon? Well, the guy who made the comment is making the argument that the invisible 'boss over the shoulder' authority figure can, in addition to making people do things they wouldn't normally do, also make people willfully stupid. This is a very clearly articulated theme in Orwell and I'm quite sure it's correct (I've even caught myself doing this a couple of times). I'm not sure if it's exactly right to tie Milgram to this whole Verizon thing, but it does give me a good excuse to expound :-)