TURKEYS MIGHT FLY

My son is studying psychology. (Note to self: I'd better watch out or he'll be able to find out what a shit I really am).
He has just come across the famous Milgram experiment. It's a (dare I say it) shocking insight into human responses to authority.
Here's the original video

 

I remember being shown this film when I first became a young brand manager at Unilever, a position demanding influence without authority. It made a real mark on my consciousness. The experiment has, I understand, been repeated a number of times since the original. Somewhere around two thirds of people comply with the authority figure, even into the dangerous range of electrical shocks. What would you do? What would I do?

I remember also repeating for myself the experiment in my own fashion. I had gone to Coventry, and was in a supermarket with a friend of mine. I can't really say why, but I found a relatively innocuous item we needed, say a bag of pasta, and said "here, catch this..." and threw it to her. She caught it. I moved on to butter. The same. Then something like, say, a pot of yoghurt. Also, with growing concern, caught. Finally, I threw a frozen turkey. A big one. Wide eyed with horror, she caught that too. The idea, I guess, of a frozen turkey going slithering down the supermarket aisle was too much to handle.

Sometime later, my friend thought she'd get her own back. "Here," she called, in another town, another supermarket. A frozen chicken arced gracefully towards me. I did not disappoint. I jinxed slightly to one side, and the chicken flew past my ear, landed on the shiny floor, and slithered beneath the wheels of an elderly lady's shopping trolley.

These days, you'd have to do that experiment in a high viz bib.

But I still maintain that the turkey test is as good as any other as a test of character.

Before you run away with the idea, though, that I'd be immune from authority figure compliance, I also recall going to Dachau concentration camp a few years ago. Strangely, although I had great sympathy for the people who had suffered there, the people I found I could most identify with were the fresh faced young German soldiers and their Officers. I had the clear realization, that, given a different time, a different regime, a different media, a different sense of what was supposed to be right and wrong, that could have been me.