In case you haven’t heard of the experiments, or need a reminder, Milgram wanted to investigate obedience to authority: how so many people could have done terrible things and claimed they were just “following orders”. So he brought people into a lab, one by one, introduced them to someone who was supposedly a fellow subject, and then had them test the other person on a list of words, administering increasing electric shocks for every wrong answer. Actually the other person, who was hidden in a booth, wasn’t getting shocks at all. It was just a recording that was answering. The recording would make a lot of mistakes, then start complaining that the shocks really hurt, insist on being released, protest that he had a heart condition, scream, then finally… silence. How far would the unknowing subject go in giving shocks, if the experimenter (in gray lab coat) were sitting nearby and insisting that the experiment must continue?

A whole lot farther than Milgram ever dreamed. Subjects might get very upset as their supposed partner started to complain, then scream, but when the experimenter (the authority) said to continue, most continued. Two-thirds continued all the way to silence.

Now on to the story of the pledge. I’ll keep it very brief. During hazing, a very intoxicated pledge opened the wrong door and fell down a flight of stairs. When he was retrieved, there was blood, apparent head injury, and other signs that he might be seriously injured. The members of the fraternity did not call 911 until twelve hours later, at which point he was unnaturally pale and cold and unresponsive—and even then they waited until they had tidied up a bit.

I’m not going to comment on the terrible things people do in order to cover their own rears. I want to make a different point. While the brothers were “attending” to him initially after his fall, another member came in, saw him, and got very worried. That member insisted they should call for help. He was quite literally pushed away by one of the others.

He was worried enough that he went to a higher authority, the vice president of the chapter, and told him what was happening. His concerns were dismissed and he was told that the other brothers knew what they were doing. And that, apparently, was that.

Now, I want to be clear. This guy is the closest thing to a hero in the entire sad episode. He recognized that the pledge was in danger and he tried to get the brothers in charge to call for help. When they wouldn’t, he went over their heads to someone with more authority. The police who reviewed the tapes (yes, most of what happened was caught on security cameras, no audio) apparently referred to him as the Good Samaritan.

But notice what he didn’t do. When appealing to two levels of authority didn’t get any action, he started to doubt that action was needed—even though he’d been sure enough after seeing the pledge that he went over his brothers’ heads. He didn’t call 911 himself.

Now granted, calling 911 would have been risky. If the pledge wasn’t actually in danger, he would no doubt have gotten his brothers in trouble for nothing (there was surely some underage drinking going on, at the very least.)

But he had been trying to convince them to take that very risk a little while earlier. Instead, he let himself be persuaded that they must know what they were doing by someone who wasn’t even on the scene. He was a good guy, but in the end, he went along with the authority.

Now back to Milgram. I don’t know what Milgram’s subjects were actually thinking, but I imagine some of them may have thought, “This guy is in charge—this is his experiment. He must have taken precautions to ensure no one gets hurt. He wouldn’t let me continue if he thought there was any danger—would he?

“Would he?”

But enough of internal injuries and dangerous electric shocks. Let’s talk about something more ordinary, something a lot of people have experience with: jump-starting a car battery.

The instructions in every manual and on every set of jumper cables tell you to attach the last clip to a metal part of the car, not to the battery. It’s a safety thing. There’s a small chance that vapor from the chemicals in the battery has been collecting above the battery and a nearby spark (such as might be caused by attaching the final clip to the battery) could ignite it. My husband always says never to attach the last clip to the battery.

But no one else I know takes that precaution. I was involved in a jump-start some years back (at least my car was) and the guy who was attaching the cables wanted to attach the last clip to the battery. I protested. He assured me he was a mechanic and had done this many times, … and I caved to his authority. I caved despite having read the instructions clearly printed on the jumper cables, despite having heard my husband tell me repeatedly that the last clip should go on a metal part of the car, and despite the fact that I had absolutely no evidence either that he was a good mechanic or a safety-conscious one.

It’s really hard to resist a (supposed) authority.

Till next post.

[Quick side note: there is less and less metal available to which you can attach the last clip. After the incident with the mechanic, I promised myself I would be firm next time. So the next time I helped someone jump-start her car, I insisted on doing it correctly and we were unable to get the car started, despite trying the clip in several locations. Later she got someone else to help. They attached it to the battery the way you aren’t supposed to do, and her car started right away.]

True. Doing so implies either that the person doesn’t know what’s going on in their own mind, or that the person is lying. Either implication is offensive. So this is a good rule to bear in mind.

You might think that this issue mainly comes up when conversing with someone whose life and experiences have been very different from one’s own.That is certainly an important time to remember the rule. However, even among family members and friends, people’s experiences differ in ways that create conversational blocks. That’s what I want to talk about here.

I’m going to start with something a friend told me. When she was a teen, she told me, she sometimes came downstairs and said to her mother, “I’m cold.” Her mother would reply, “You can’t be cold.”

Not an unusual exchange, but if we take the mother literally, she is denying that her daughter feels cold. By implication, either her daughter doesn’t know how she feels, temperature-wise, or she is lying.

Some mothers might not mean it literally. It might be short for, “I am astounded and mind-boggled to learn that you are cold, because I feel as if I am in a sauna,” or possibly “I think you are really saying that the house is too cold, but 68F is a perfectly reasonable temperature for winter, so go put another sweater on.” My friend was certain that her mother really did not believe that she was cold, and my friend found it infuriating.

Now, I do have to say a word on behalf of parents. When your child is a baby, she doesn’t know how to articulate what she is feeling. Gradually she learns to recognize what word describes what state of her insides, and also what the feelings mean about her body. (“I’m hungry—I need food,” “I’m too hot—I need fewer clothes or cooler surroundings,” “I have a pain in my toe—better see if it’s injured.”)

This learning process is not without error. I remember walking my daughter home from school when she was little and listening to her complain the entire way that her feet hurt, that she couldn’t keep walking,.. and wondering if something was wrong with her shoes. Or maybe something was wrong with her feet? Did I need to take her to the doctor? Then we got home and she went racing around the yard, foot pain forgotten. She hadn’t been lying, but she hadn’t been a very good judge of the condition of her feet, either.

Somewhere between our kids’ babyhood and adulthood, we have to accept that they are just as good at describing their own experience as we are at describing ours. Even if we can’t understand how it is possible that they are feeling cold/hurt/achy or have trouble believing that things could really have gone the way they say, we have to take them seriously.

Besides being insulting, attempting to disagree with someone’s experience is an attempt to deny reality. Denying reality is not a good start to a conversation, and it’s also not a good start to an argument.

I have in mind a situation from many years ago, when a group of friends somehow ended up on the subject of putting the toilet seat down. (Important policy discussion here.) Most of the group were female, if I remember correctly, and someone pointed out that if the seat is left up, women sometimes sit down without looking and fall in. Ick. Wet. And in winter, cold.

The one guy in the group found this impossible to believe. How could women sit down without noticing that the seat was up? He even tried putting a scrap of paper on someone’s chair when she left the room so when she came back and picked it up, he could say, “See, she looked before sitting that time.”

But the fact is, sometimes women do sit down without noticing the seat is up. It happens. You can’t deny the facts. Had he accepted that as a given, he could have gone on to consider the larger situation. He could have argued that even if women do get wet behinds now and again, that isn’t a good enough reason to insist that men put the seat down. Alternatively, he could have suggested that everyone put the lid down, so that both sexes would have to do something and no one would fall in, either. He probably could have come up with a lot of things to say, but instead he got sidetracked by his refusal to accept what we were telling him about our experience.

Finally, I want to add two things. First, I recognize people do sometimes lie or exaggerate. But you should be cautious about coming to that conclusion. Assuming that a person must be lying because what that person is saying doesn’t fit your own experience can have terrible results. (For a drastic example, see the bit about car batteries and fishing in “What We’re Fighting For”, NYT.) Second, there’s a difference between knowledge of one’s own experience and one’s interpretation of other people’s actions. Why did my friend’s mother say that she couldn’t possibly be cold? My friend can make guesses, but only her mother knows for sure.

Till next post.