We do what we’re told
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a documentary about one of the biggest and most complex bankruptcy cases and business scandals in American history, where Enron Corporation dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year.
If you ask me, the whole story is a bit like the dot-com bubble but with out the . and the com.
As far as I can recall, the movie was OK - I wasn’t overly overwhelmed with surprises and aaaaahha moments. The reason why I’m writing this post is not because I liked the movie, it’s because of a thing they mentioned in the movie that has found a safe place in my brain and memory.
As the movie were explaining how the traders at Enron lost sens of reality and morals, the movie made parallels and mentioned the Milgram Experiment.
From wikipedia:
The Milgram experiment was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology, intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant’s personal conscience.
The experimenter (E) orders the subject (S) to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to another subject (A), who is actually an actor. Many participants continued to give shocks despite pleas for mercy from the actor, as long as the experimenter kept on ordering them to do so.
The interesting fact is not that people do generally obey the authority. Without that ‘feature’ we would probably not have the society we have today.
No, the interesting part was how the experiment was executed (what people were told, and who told them what and what they actually ended up doing), and how many % of the participants that were prepared to betray their personal belief, ethic and morals, and for what.
The experiment was first described in 1963 by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, and later discussed in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
Read more about the Milgram Experiment on wikipedia.org