This Saturday is the annual fall festival here on post, so our Squadron is taking the opportunity to do a little fundraising. Occasionally Squadron does...euphemism alert!...ask for FRG volunteers to help out. And since no one likes to give up a Saturday playing bitch to Squadron except Squadron people, said volunteering is generally done by the FRG leader (definition...me). And because we're selling food, I had to take a food handler's course and quiz and get a card signed by someone at the Public Health Building (which is not a real building, but a trailer) on post.
My experience at the Public Health Building was very odd. I walked in and there were three men sitting at a table watching the door...like they were the American Idol judges or something. I said, "I'm here to get my food service card," and one got up and asked for my quiz results. He then told me to hold out my hands (which I did) poured a white powder from a can onto them and told my to rub it into my skin (which I also did).
Then he told me to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. When I returned he had me hold them under some kind of violently purple machine (it looked like those fancy hand dryers that whip all the water off your hands in a curtain of air). The machine connected to a camera, showing my hands to the other two men. He asked me to flip them over. Then he said, "Very good," and gave me my card.
I must have had a look on my face because another man hurriedly got up to explain the process...the powder is called "Glitterbug" and glows under the purple machine if you don't wash your hands properly. I said, "Wow, how CSI of you guys," and left.
As soon as I got back in the car, I thought about how stupid it was to let three men I'd never seen before put powder all over my hands without asking what it was. I get it was, like, a little test but I should have tried to ask what was going on.
Are all human beings this conditioned to take orders from people who simply appear like they know what they're doing?
There have been an number of experiments to explore this...most notably the Milgram Experiment at Yale in the early 1960s. Stanley Milgram, a sociologist, wanted to see how far people would take orders from a man acting as a scientist...his goal was to see if the Holocaust was more of a mob mentality than anything else.
One person would be "strapped" to an electroshock machine in a separate room (after telling everyone he had a heart condition) and one person (the REAL guinea pig) would "control" the shocks. The guinea pig asked the guy strapped to the machine questions and if he got them wrong would "shock" him, the voltage rising each time. No actual shocks were ever administered, except one small one to the guinea pig to show what the shocks felt like.
There were recorded sounds of someone shouting, then screaming if the "shocks" persisted. The person strapped to the machine would bang on the wall and yell about his heart condition; all the while the "scientist" was encouraging and then ordering the guinea pig to continue administering the shocks. Finally, there were no sounds coming from the other room.
Before the experiment, Milgram polled psychology students about how many people he'd study would administer the highest 450 volt shock (that's 30 incorrect questions and can be a lethal dose of electricity), and they estimated less than 2%. After the experiment finished, a total of 65% of participants rendered the 450 volt shock, even if they said they were uncomfortable doing so.
No one, not even the people who refused to administer the high-voltage shocks, demanded the experiment be terminated or insisted on checking on the health of the other "participant."
Of course, this experiment raised a lot of questions as to ethics in human experimentation and the what information is mandatory when participating. Many people experienced PTSD, knowing they were willing to shock someone "to death" because they were told to do so.
When we discussed this experiment in my Psychology 101 seminar in college, I knew I'd be the one to refuse shocking the other person, to question the experiment and to demand to check on the health of the one I was shocking.
But there I was today, letting some guy in ACUs pour white powder all over my hands and not even considering what it could do to my unborn baby.
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