Disclaimer: I'm not currently reading this book (I might still, but for the moment I'd rather concentrate on our other non-fiction selection), so my statements in this post are strictly in reply to Seeker's comments and are made without the benefit of having read Zimbardo's evidence.
seeker wrote:That example not withstanding, the universality of willingness to obey authority figures leads me to believe that this trait is a component of human nature (as opposed to human nurture).
I'm not so sure. For one thing "obey authority" seems like something of an artificial construct, and I'm not sure it really holds up at the biological level. Other social animals -- wolves, for example -- don't so much obey authority as they respond in particular ways to recognized dominance. The two may seem similar, but they're not identical. The wolf equivalent of an Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, wouldn't really be possible. Humans differ in the regard that they'd still respond to the instructions of a man who was physically incapable of asserting dominance.
Nor does it strike me that we've sublimated dominance, such that an FDR dominates by intelligence of political power. What seems to happen in the hierarchy of an animal pack is that an alpha establishes its dominance explicitly by besting the previous alpha in combat. Then, for awhile at least, it's dominance is implicit, meaning the others in the pack need no demonstration to take that dominance as a given. But moments of tension will come along when it becomes necessary for the alpha to make that dominance explicit.
It doesn't seem to me that we need to understand our responses to an instruction by someone like FDR as conditioned by dominance, either explicit or implicit. Which isn't to say that humans are free of dominance-submission behaviors. As I understand it, the whole Nixonian approach to foreign affairs was built on a notion of "credibility" that is basically assimilable to that of implicit dominance -- hence victory in Vietnam was necessary as an explicit show of dominance that would stand in support of recognition of American dominance even at times when it was only implicit. (Incidentally, some political commentators have noted that the Bush administration seems to have modelled their foreign affairs policy on the Nixonian model, if that explains anything for you.)
Maybe the best way to understand the difference between the two is to look at the dynamic between the authority figure and the recepient of instruction. In a dominance-submission scenario, the "authority" is the source of the threat, preferably implicit, because that's least risky for the authority, but explicit if need be. There may still be a threat in the case of an FDR, but it doesn't come from the authority figure. An FDR is capable of saying "we" and meaning it. He might say, "If we don't do this, there will be hell to pay," but unless there's some serious cognitive disjunction going on, it's probably recognized that he's not the one dishing out the hell.
So, yes, we do generally respond to dominance -- I think there's a good conflict-management rationale for why it's often safest to do so -- but I don't think that alone explains human responsiveness to authority. I'd say that generally there's a process that supercedes it, and that the dominance model only comes to the fore when that process fails. And it may be that the authority process fails quite often, but I'd say there's at least anecdotal evidence to support the idea that it's the first resort in most cases.
That process consists mostly of an estimation of one's own competancy to handle a particular situation, an estimation of the presumed authority figure's competancy to handle the same situation, and then a comparison of the two. In other words, I yield to the authority of Richard Hofstadter on historical questions because I've estimated his competancy higher than my own. Those estimations are not always (often?) logical or even reasonable -- we're often basing them on cues rather than real evidence, or on observations that don't really have much to do with the matter at hand -- but if you reflect on actual situations in which you've yielded to someone else's authority, I think you'll recognize that they happen, and automatically in most cases. And that thought process usually takes precedent (if not chronologically, then at least behaviorally) over the though process that asks, "If I don't agree, will there be a fight? If there is a fight, am I likely to win? Are the odds such that it's worth the risk?"
That is to say, providing the previous hypotheses are true, that institutions should be structured to produce "good" behavior from the human norm--the majority of us. Of course, we should also use our culture (nurture) to teach people how to resist nature's instinct to submit to authority.
I'm opposed. In the first place, I'm not sure you can really structure society one way, and then teach society another. I see the same sort of implicit contradiction in American society -- institutionally, it's built on the premise that human self-interest will always tend towards rapine and exploitation, while popular thought tends to support the notion that we are all good and generous or, at the very least, patriotic enough to behave as though we were -- and I'm not at all sure that American society has successfully navigated those contradictions. And in the second place, institutions that become truly deft at circumventing human nature lend themselves all too easily to totalism and tyranny.