INSTITUTE FOR

future escalation of commands the subjects can be led, as in the Milgram experiment, to
deliver ever higher levels of shock. They plan to disobey in the future if the experiment
continues, but not currently. While planning future disobedience, if escalation continues, at
the same time these subjects are continuing to raise the level of shock required to induce
them to disobey. The dependence of norms of behavior on previous actions does not just
cause continued poor decision-making due to postponement, but also to escalating errors in
decisions.
While V may be the function that subjects maximize in the heat of the moment, under
the conditions of the Milgram experiment, a more accurate expression of their true
intertemporal utility function might be
(6) Vo =Z f-bDk - cWkl.
k
where Vo
is their intertemporal utility and k sums over all the trials.
Such a utility function is reflected in the post-experiment interviews and follow-up
questionnaires. Most of the subjects were, in retrospect, extremely regretful of their decisions
in the experiment. For example one subject, who was a social worker, wrote in a follow-up
questionnaire a year later
"What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance
to a central idea, i.e. the value of a memory experiment, even after it became clear that
continued adherence to this value was at the expense of the violation of another value,
i.e. don't hurt someone else who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, 'You
can call yourself Eichmann'."
(Milgram, 1975, p. 54)
The preceding models of procrastination and obedience concern actions which occur
because individuals possess cognitive structures of which they are less than fully aware. The
assumption that such structures influence behavior is unfamiliar in economics, but central to
other social sciences. A major task of psychology is to discover such unperceived behavioral
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