Field Experiment Hofling et al. [18] studied obedience among nurses. Ninety-five percent of the
nurses (N =22) administered a medicine as ordered by a doctor even though the medicine was
unauthorized, the dosage was twice that listed on the pill box, the doctor who gave the order was
unknown to the nurse, and the ordering of medication by telephone was in violation of hospital policy.
(The medicine was actually a placebo.) A survey of 33 graduate and student nurses supported the
assumption that the act was obviously wrong; 94% of these respondents claimed that they would not
give the medicine under such circumstances.
Attitude Surveys Kelman and Lawrence [33] examined the My Lai incident. A national opinion survey
in the U.S. (N = 989) asked: “What would you do if ordered to shoot all inhabitants of a Vietnamese
village suspected of aiding the enemy, including old men, women and children?” Fifty-one percent of the
respondents said that they would “follow orders and shoot,” and only 33% said they would “refuse to
shoot.”
In a study related to business management, Baumhart [2], in a survey of 1,800 subscribers to the
Harvard Business Review, found that unethical practices were widespread. Only 18% of the
respondents said that there were no “enerally accepted unethical practices in his industry.” The primary
influence in making these unethical decisions was reported to be the behavior of one’s superior. A
survey of managers in the private sector [13] found that 64% of the respondents agreed with the
statement “managers today feel under pressure to compromise personal standards to achieve company
goals.” This study was replicated with managers in the public sector [9].
Krishnan [35] asked subjects what they would do in a case where an engineer was fired for refusing
to “edit” the results of a product liability survey to enable a company to receive an order. The engineer
had also informed the customer on the actual results and this had resulted in the loss of the order.
Almost two-thirds of the respondents said the company should not reinstate the engineer.
Documented Case Histories Assuming that the stockholder role is accepted by many managers and
that blind obedience is a common trait among people, then it should not be difficult to find examples of
socially irresponsible decisions by managers. Indeed, there are many documented cases where
managers have brought serious harm to employees, to the local community, or to the customers. The
conflict between the desires of employees and those of stockholders was strong in the early part of this
century (e.g., see Schultz and Coleman [60] for a description of the Ludlow Massacre where an effort
to unionize was put down by John D. Rockefeller). More recently there has been much conflict between
stockholders and customers. Examples have been documented by Nader [48] in the description of the
Corvair; by Sjostrom and Nilsson [64] in their description of the thalidomide case; and by the various
examples presented in Heilbroner et al. [26], in Mintz and Cohen [46], in Nader et al. [49], and in the
First Report by the National Commission on Product Safety [51]. These cases refer primarily to
managers who felt that they were acting as they should act. They were obedient to their roles.
In summary, the stockholder role encourages socially irresponsible acts. People who believe in this
role may be expected to seriously harm others, and “trying harder,” in the sense of following the role
more faithfully, will increase the level of irresponsibility.