The latest news on the 2 student athletes who hit an unsuspecting football referee a couple week ago in Texas reveal that Mack Breed, an assistant coach, did indeed instruct the kids to carry out the attack. While many people had suspected that the kids did not act alone, Breed’s confession confirms those suspicions, as well as leaves him open to future litigation — not to mention all kinds of difficulties if he ever wants to coach high school football again. But what about the 2 kids who carried out the hit on the referee? Should they face the same kind of consequences, or should we view their actions differently now that we know they were told to make the attack by an authority figure — their coach?
Psychology studies on compliance & obedience to authority
Many people still feel that even though the coach came clean about the referee attack, the kids involved still need to face harsh consequences because they voluntarily carried out the command. It’s actually easy to see why some feel this way, especially after you watch the video and witness firsthand just how deliberate (and violent) the attack really was. With that said, it is important that we place this incident within the context of what we know about human thinking and behavior when within a group, particularly when there are strong, “expert” leaders calling the shots. Fortunately, there have been countless psychology studies on this very exact subject — and the results from these studies might “shock” you (pun intended).
Stanley Milgram conducted a number of studies examining just how compliant and willing humans would be to do the most extreme things if instructed to do so by an authority figure. Originally Milgram hypothesized that few subjects, if any, would actually follow the relatively passive orders given to them by an “expert” to deliver shocks to another subject in the study who failed to answer questions correctly. Much to Milgram’s surprise, not only did the majority of subjects acquiesce to the suggestions, they often carried out the study to the very end when they were lead to believe that they were administering near-lethal shocks! A video clip of Milgram’s original research is provided below:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOYLCy5PVgM[/youtube]
The results from the Milgram study clearly and reliably show that when expert, authority figures make suggestions we almost always stop thinking for ourselves and instead carry out what the expert tells us we should do. These findings go far beyond a 50+ year old study of compliant subjects following a leader’s command to shock subjects, to modern times where most of us willingly comply to what doctors, IT experts, auto mechanics, and police officers tell us to do. In other words, if an expert is talking, we almost always listen and rarely question what the expert is saying.
Applying Milgram’s work to the kids who made the hit…
Now that we know human beings almost always comply to what experts say, is it any stretch at all to accept that the 2 kids who hit the referee were psychologically pressured to do so far beyond what we see on the surface? While it is easy to use hindsight and immediately respond that we would never have done something like that if we were those 2 kids, keep in mind none of Milgram’s subjects would have ever thought they would have been so easily persuaded by an expert to literally believe they were shocking subjects, and sometimes to near-lethal levels.
There are countless social psychology research studies that have consistently revealed when we are in situations like the one the kids from Texas were in that we almost always follow through with what we are told to do — even when it’s uncomfortable and against our core values. Admittedly, this is unsettling for any of us to own, and almost always we deny this being the case with us and only applicable to “others.”
Now what?
Regardless of whether you think the kids were influenced on a psychological-level or not, the question still remains should they be punished for what they did? This is obviously a “teachable moment” for the kids (really, everyone involved, including kids and coaches everywhere), but should their penalty be lighter than the coach’s penalty? The opinion here is “yes,” as I believe the mountains of psychology research that have revealed how vulnerable we are with authority figures should be used as a foundation for this discussion. I believe it would have been highly improbable the two kids would have attacked the referee on their own, and nearly as improbable that they would NOT have carried out the attack after being directly told so by their coach. I do believe there should still be accountability of some kind for their actions, but also an understanding of just how powerful influence and compliance are when it comes to the power of a leader over his followers.
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