Due to its title and the content of the video, the song is frequently assumed to be either an animal rights song or a reference to the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram described in his book Obedience to Authority.
Stanley Milgram | thought experiment | Milgram experiment | New York State Agricultural Experiment Station | Anne Milgram | The Spoony Experiment | The Sontaran Experiment | The Quatermass Experiment | The Final Experiment | Liquid Tension Experiment | International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment | Dr. Heidegger's Experiment | Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment | D0 experiment | ATLAS experiment | An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump | Waterways Experiment Station | University of California Citrus Experiment Station | Tuskegee syphilis experiment | Transplant experiment | This painting, ''An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump | The Experiment | The Dosadi Experiment | The Beckham Experiment | Single-grain experiment | Schiehallion experiment | Renninger's negative-result gedanken experiment | Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation | Pilot (experiment) | Pilot experiment |
Baumrind (1964), criticizing the use of deception in the Milgram (1963) obedience experiment, argues that deception experiments inappropriately take advantage of the implicit trust and obedience given by the subject when the subject volunteers to participate (p. 421).
According to Jonathan Glover's book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Ridenhour took part in the Princeton version of the Milgram experiment.
German philosopher and anthropologist of law Axel Montenbruck wrote that dehumanization is inextricably linked with both the “techniques of neutralization” (David Matza/Gresham Sykes) and to the obedience aspects of the Milgram-experiment and in a wider sense with Zimbardo's Stanford prison-experiment.
In 2008, folk musician Dar Williams released a song called "Buzzer", in which the narrator participated in the Milgram experiment.