Releasing The Beast Analysis

The article “Releasing the beast: A study of compliance with orders to use race as a selection criterion” sought to explore the influence of an authority figure’s directions and actor observability on the usage of race as a selection criterion in employment. This study was done to generalize the findings of Stanley Milgram in his obedience studies. The hypotheses stated that subjects who were told to consider race when considering employees would do so, and that the subjects would obey commands to use race as a selection criterion more when there was high actor observability than when there was low actor observability (Brief, Buttram, Elliott, Reizenstein, & McCline, 1995). The rationale was that it was already known that people submit to authority.

There were 84% white, 6% Hispanic, 6% Asian, and 4% American Indian; 42% of the participants were female and 30% were employed. The mean age was 20.5 years, and the participants were undergraduates in business courses at a private Southeastern university (Brief et al., 1995).

The experiment was done through an in-basket exercise labeled as a managerial decision. In-basket exercises are replications of the forms that are delivered to a typical manager. These exercises are able to capture what managers do in their jobs and represent actual management well (Brief et al., 1995). The participants were to make hiring recommendations. The independent variables were pro-white vs pro-black vs none (control) and observability (high or low). Thus some participants were told by a superior to consider specific races when making the hiring decision. In order to manipulate actor observability, subjects in the high observability group were given more pressure in their decision making and told to sign their name on their decision while those in the low observability group did not have as much pressure and did not have to sign their forms (Brief et al.,