In a previous post, I talked about the fact that the Milgram Experiments of the 60′s have been really misinterpreted and used as a “Oh, woe is humanity!” justification for any number of wrong-headed fictional projects. A couple of comments encouraged me to take another look at the strip search phone scams that were the inspiration for the movie COMPLIANCE, and I’ve spent the last little while reading news reports and court documents about these cases.
I still stand by what I said: COMPLIANCE is probably a good movie, but whenever people bring in the Milgram Experiments as some kind of rationale for what the movie depicts, it quickly devolves into bad science.
But here are the facts:
Over a course of 10 years, a man claiming to be a police officer made 130 reported calls, mostly to fast food restaurants, cajoling managers and assistant managers into strip searching employees, and sometimes customers. It’s hard to get a handle on exactly what happened in a lot of these cases. Some are involved in litigation, and others are sensationalized by the local press. However, there are about 11 cases I read about that clearly show that the caller was able to convince someone in power at a fast food restaurant to force an employee to strip, and often there was some kind of physical activity afterwards (jumping up and down, bending over) to ensure they weren’t hiding anything.
The most-documented case is the one that occurred at a Mount Washington McDonald’s in 2004. Louise Ogborn, an 18-year-old employee, was called into the office of assistant manager, Donna Summers (no kidding), and ordered to surrender her cell phone, car keys, and to strip because she was suspected of theft. The man on the phone claimed that he was a police officer and that the manager of the McDonald’s was on the other line with him. Summers, 51, did this, but then left the office. She ordered another employee, Jason Bradley, 27, to supervise Ogborn in her absence. Bradley spoke with the caller, refused his orders, and left the office. Summers was then told to get her husband to supervise Ogborn in her absence. She was unmarried, but called her fiance, Walter Nix, 43, a man with seemingly no criminal record, to come to her office. He did so. While he supervised Ogborn, over the course of 2 hours, he spanked her, forced her to do jumping jacks, and ordered her to perform oral sex on him. Summers was also told to get another responsible employee, and she turned to Thomas Simms, 58, a maintenance worker. He saw the scene in the office and refused to comply. At that point, Summers called her manager and found her at home, leading her to conclude that the manager was unaware of the call. She ended the interrogation.
Ogborn later sued McDonald’s, won a hefty settlement, had it reduced on appeal, and settled with McDonald’s for a little over a million bucks. This incident prompted Mt. Washington police to start an investigation and it led them to Dave Stewart, 38, a father of five in Panama City, FL. He was charged and tried, but was acquitted after 40 minutes of jury deliberation. Prosecutors speculate that it was the lack of direct evidence that led to his acquittal, but they also point to the fact that no calls were reported after Stewart’s arrest as evidence that they charged the right man.
Now that’s enough to build a movie on, and the director of COMPLIANCE has no obligation to go further than dramatizing that situation, which is what he did. And there were at least 11 similar cases that I tracked down with a bit of clicking that seem to be substantiated from multiple sources. All told, it seems 30 lawsuits have been filed over similar strip search phone scam cases at fast food restaurants (although even that number is suspect: other articles claim McDonald’s was involved in 30 incidents resulting in 10 lawsuits – but for the sake of argument we’ll stick with the 30 lawsuits number). (Oh, on a similar note, 130 calls were reported in some articles, but most seemed to say that it was 70 calls. I’m not sure which is correct, but let’s go with the lower number for the purposes here).
But there’re some real problems here from the point of view…of Science! Just as it’s faulty logic to assume the calls stopped when Stewart was arrested because he was the perpetrator (the case was widely publicized so the caller may have chosen to lie low and let Stewart take the rap, or there may have been calls made during that period that went unreported) it’s tough to link all of these cases.
1) Details are slim in a lot of the cases, so it’s hard to tell what the rate of compliance was, and that was the point of Milgram’s experiment. In Hinesville, GA there is a well-documented case of the same thing happening, and compliance seems to be 100% (the manager ordered the employee to strip, the employee did so, another employee was told to assist, the other employee did so – you can read court papers about it here) but during the Mount Washington McDonald’s incident, compliance was only 50% (one maintenance worker and one other employee refused to participate). In a large number of the cases I read about, the strip search was ended by an outside party (parent, partner, friend) who encountered the scene and demanded that it stop. But there were also several in which an employee, or even the people perpetrating the search demanded that it stop after it reached a certain point.
2) The cases vary wildly. In some, a manager or assistant manager orders an employee to strip. In others, the manager or assistant manager is told that they need to strip. In some, the target is an employee. In others, it’s a customer. Given the small number of cases (about 30) and the large number of variables within those cases, it’s hard to draw too many firm conclusions here.
3) There was some initial speculation among law enforcement that some of these cases involve a caller and an employee collaborating to set up a lawsuit against the fast food franchise. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Mount Washington, and it doesn’t change the behavior of the managers and assistant managers who perform the search, but it’s a real problem in terms of the behavior of the employee being searched. It may or may not be true, but it throws a wrench in the whole thing.
4) Even if we assume that 70 calls were made, and we assume that they resulted in 30 credible lawsuits being brought (“credible” meaning the lawsuits were for strip searches, not demands for strip searches that were refused which might also be the case), then that’s a compliance rate of below Milgram’s initial 65%, however it’s well over his compliance rate of 21% for situations in which the experimenter delivered instructions over the phone. So the story should be about the higher compliance in these fast food restaurants. Instead, more often than not, the story seems to be about how people in general follow authority.
5) We’re assuming that those 70 calls represent the totality of the incidents, but one law enforcement officer says that the rate of compliance was 1 in 10, half of Milgram’s 21% compliance number. That’s pure speculation but it raises the issue of whether or not the story here is that more people complied than Milgram found, or less, or the same amount.
None of this is to say that COMPLIANCE is a bad movie (I haven’t seen it) or that it fudged the facts. I’ve read enough of these reports to feel like at least in 11 incidents, something roughly like what the movie depicts did happen. And let’s face it, directors and producers will always choose to make a movie about the singular John Wayne Gacy rather than the 2,999,999 other citizens of that Chicago who never dressed as a clown and murdered children. But while attempts to link this behavior to the Milgram Experiment are accurate to some extent, but they are also wildly simplifying the findings of the experiment and representing it as depicting something it really didn’t, looking at its results from a glass half empty rather than glass half full perspective in an attempt to sensationalize its results. Then again reporting science sucks, and nuance is an alien concept in the news.
(Wikipedia is a good place to start reading about these cases)
Probably because this guy has been in prison, right?
“Wait…there’s no science behind this movie?”
The Milgram Experiment layout.
Except there probably won’t be any.
Believe it or not, GIGLI was not very realistic.
Greatest album title ever.
Ghost!
Or maybe not.
Someone buys a keychain in a Chris Ware comic.
Malcolm Long.
Tyler Perry as “Dad.”
Tyler Perry can knock
