That result doesn't surprise me at all - I wrote about a similar principle last year, in "Smoothing Out the Rough Edges". I would imagine that most "conventional" religious people are the ones who are most apt to follow authority, to take the path of least resistance, and so they're most susceptible to commands like this. On the other hand, there's an element of non-conformism in either excessive religiosity or in nonbelief, so we'd expect that they'd be more resistant to social pressure to conform.

Thirty subjects selected from a college population were evaluated according to three religious beliefs' scales. They were subsequently exposed to a modified version of Milgram's (1963) procedure in which they were instructed to administer "shocks" to a victim for supposed "errors" on a learning task. Although it was hypothesized that persons scoring in the mid-range of religious scales would be less obedient than extremes, it was in fact found that moderate believers administered significantly more punishment than either the religious or nonreligious extremes.

Hmmm. Perhaps people taking the middle ground of religious belief could be seen as just following the general consensus, and therefore be more susceptible to authority's influence.

One of the things that always stuck with me from the social psych class was from a discussion of the Jonestown mass suicides. Our professor was absolutely positive that he would have drunk the poison had he been there. The point is that these social influences are instinctual, reflexive, and very very strong. None of us can pretend to be completely above them, not even research social psychologists who understand them better than anyone. We are certainly well-advised to be aware of these influences, but we cannot hope to win out over them all the time (I personally fall into the diffusion of responsibility trap more than I care to admit).

So I don't think it's wise to rationalize or speculate about how athiests would perform better in the Milgram experiment, or any such experiment for that matter. I think any group of people who weren't already familiar with the experiment (or something similar) would do just as poorly, regardless of their religious views.

Now, it should be said that there seems to be a lot of "wink-and-nod" that goes on, but at least in the US Military, a soldier who is accused of not following orders gets a court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, where the overseeing tribunal will be most interested in the unlawful nature of said orders.

P.S. I believe Milgram had followed up this famous study with several others varying on the same theme.

Who, knowing about this study, would not think twice if they ever found themselves in a similar situation?

Of course, lots of people like to think that they would. But short of repeating the experiment, how can we know for sure? They might be fooling themselves just as much as the original researchers who expected very few people to obey.

I'm sure the original subjects would have predicted that they would never do something they thought was wrong just because an authority figure told them to. But they did exactly that.

Keeping in mind the limitations of anecdotes, I think Wedge's illustrates this point pretty well. Even with the example of WWII Germany in front of him, that person displays similar blind deference to the authorities in his own life. I bet I can guess whether or not that person is standing up to what is going on *now* in *this* country (well, assuming that he is from the US, which I suppose I shouldn't assume on the Internet.)

Polly: I think that would be quite likely. Any atheist in the present-day US is already resisting considerable social pressure or they wouldn't *be* an atheist in the present-day US. If they can resist one kind of social pressure it's not that unlikely that they could resist another. But of course that's only speculation without data (and may be self-serving bias, since as an atheist myself, of course I want to believe we're more resistant to that kind of manipulation).