The Haworth Press This 164-page book by a sociologist at Rutgers University combines the literature on obedience with the research on children's suggestibility. Meyer's thesis is that how children are questioned to learn what they have witnessed is crucial to the effects the questioning sessions may have on their eventual court testimony. She argues that the research on obedience (the Milgram studies) has been overlooked in the literature on children's susceptibility to leading and suggestive interviews. In the first chapter Meyer reviews the research on children's memories, using the McMartin and Michaels cases as examples. Chapter two addresses the effects of stress, prompting, and imagination on children's recall. In the third chapter she reviews the suggestibility research for both children and adults. The fourth chapter discusses this research in terms of its generalizability to the events outside of the laboratory and the difficulties in staging events that more closely approximate real life situations. In this chapter she also discusses situational sources of suggestibility, including the authority of the interviewer. In chapter five, Meyer reviews the research on authority in terms of whether this research can help explain children's testimony. This famous research, performed in the 60s and 70s by Stanley Milgram, could not be performed today because of ethical concerns regarding human subjects. (In 1981 the American Psychological Association banned research involving stress of human subjects.) Milgram's findings were disturbing — two-thirds of subjects that he asked to inflict painful electric shocks on another person obeyed and pressed levers to administer increasingly intense shocks all the way to levels that should have been recognized as extremely harmful. Eighteen variations of his basic experiment yielded similar results. In general, large percentages of subjects did what the authority told them to do, even if it could be viewed as harming another. Other researchers from around the world have replicated Milgram's results. Studies using children have found that children obey authority at as high and at higher levels than adults. Meyer points out that children easily perceive nonauthority adults as authorities in terms of the adult's ability to induce compliance in the child. In the sixth chapter Meyer discusses Milgram's theory of why people obey authorities, even when the orders may harm another person. She then presents Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development as an alternate explanation. The last chapter addresses how children's testimony can be improved and offers suggestions as to how to interview children in ways that will increase accuracy. The book ends with 11 pages of references and an index. This book presents a valuable perspective in its integration of two important lines of research and is an important source of information for those dealing with children as witnesses. Reviewed by LeRoy G. Schultz, Emeritus Professor, West Virginia University.
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