Yesterday, the story of a French bulldog dying aboard a United Airlines flight flooded social media. An idiot flight attendant “forced” the family to put the dog in the overhead bin, and the entire flight listened to the dog suffocating in the bin until, upon landing, discovered it had died over the course of the flight.

After the incident, United said they would take “full responsibility” for the death of the puppy. Make no mistake, the flight attendant (and the others on board as well) should all be fired; their lapse in judgment makes you wonder just how competent they are in other areas of their job. But is United really fully responsible for this death? A fellow passenger wrote:

“They INSISTED that the puppy be locked up for three hours without any kind of airflow,” another Flight 1284 passenger, June Lara, wrote in a Facebook post early Tuesday. “They assured the safety of the family’s pet so wearily, the mother agreed.”

“This little guy fought hard for his life, filling our flight with his cries until he finally ran out of breath,” Lara wrote in his post. “United Airlines does not care about the safety of their furry travelers. This poor family paid $125 for their pet to be murdered in front of them. There is no excuse for the pain this family is suffering.”

I’m never one to blame the victim when tragedy strikes, but it’s ridiculous to assert that the family watched “their pet murdered in front of them.” This woman put her dog into the overhead bin and listened to him suffocate; as did everyone in the immediate vicinity. There were any number of steps this family could have and should have taken: ask to speak to the head flight attendant, ask to speak to the pilot, call United Airlines from their seat, Google the regulations for flying with pets in the main cabin, or simply, refuse to comply and deplane.

Flying with kids is stressful, flying is stressful, that we all know. But ultimately, nobody can force you to kill your own dog. United deserves the latest PR disaster at their feet, but our society should also acknowledge the importance of not blindly listening to authority. The story is reminiscent of the Milgram Experiment at Yale, one of the most famous psychology studies in history.

One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’  The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.

Stories like these should spark conversations not just about how terrible airlines are, but also about personal responsibility and conscience. Maybe that’s asking too much.