05 October 2007

People = Sheep

So I read that McDonalds has to pay $6.1M to a Kentucky girl who, when she was 18, was strip-searched and ultimately sexually assaulted by her manager and others on the orders of a phone caller pretending to be a police officer. Intrigued, I wanted to find out just what exactly happened. The Louisville Courier-Journal had the scoop. I've just finished reading the article, and I still can't believe what happened to this poor girl.

It's no stretch to compare what happened here to the Milgram Experiment (in fact, the C-J reporter does just that) or Stanford Prison Experiment. Somehow, we're just wired to accept orders from authority figures.

Pretty horrifying. I'd like to think I'm intelligent enough to have seen through something like this, and I probably am, but I'm sure under different circumstances I could be hoodwinked into doing something I wouldn't normally do at the behest of an authority figure.

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