ABSTRACT
A blind man who sees is better than a seeing man who is blind. Persian proverb
Never believe on faith, see for yourself! What you yourself don’t learn, you don’t know.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)—German playwright
SOME TIME AGO we were conducting a comparative Russian-American study on the perception of obedience. Aer we translated the survey questions from English to Russian, made a thousand copies of the questionnaire, and videotaped testing materials, we ew to Russia to gather our research data. We studied a wide variety of samples, from schoolchildren to construction workers, from engineers to psychology majors. ere was only one challenge to surmount. We needed to get access to Russian police ocers but couldn’t get permission from a county police chief. To our elation, however, aer a few days of delays, we nally were allowed to interview 100 police ocers. We rushed to the police station, met with a local police chief, and handed him cash as compensation for “using” his ocers as research subjects.
