Authority, obedience and fear | Milgram’s experiment
Project Armannd
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. ~ Thomas Huxley
Obedience is defined as receiver compliance to source authority. The classic example of obedience is the officer giving orders to the soldier. The soldier complies with the officer because the officer has legitimate, organizational power. The compliance does not occur because the soldier likes the officer or necessarily respects his judgment and expertise, but rather simply because the the officer has power and the soldier was trained to obey.
As demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures.
Stanley Milgram carried out his experiments to discover how the Nazis had managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murder of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that compliance to authority was the norm and not the exception.
In “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View” Stanley Milgram writes:
“Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action which is spontaneous.The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders. … Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time. It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have been originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders. … Though such prescriptions as “Thou shalt not kill” occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty. Even the forces mustered in a psychology experiment will go a long way toward removing the individual from moral controls. Moral factors can be shunted aside with relative ease by a calculated restructuring of the informational and social field.” |
Why are people (so) obedient?
There are two general reasons for this.
The first reason is simple: people often do not think about what they are doing – see the article on self-confidence. People are either systematic thinkers or heuristic thinkers. And we know that depending on which state a receiver is in, different variables (arguments and cues) will have very different effects. We also know that most of the time, most people do not think very thoroughly or carefully about what is going on. So from this perspective, obedience is the path of least thinking and least resistance; it is mentally easy. It is easier for a person to assume that the authority knows what is best – again, see the article on self-confidence. Milgram’s research and the violent human record all stand as evidence for how far this lazy thinking can go.
The second reason is survival: humans are not biologically well-equipped for survival in a cold, cruel world. We are not the strongest, the biggest, the fastest, or the meanest creatures on the planet. We cannot handle the large variations in climate and weather that many other animals have little problem with. Thus, as individuals, most people have very little chance of surviving alone. Therefore, one of the primary reasons humans have survived is their ability to form groups. By banding together we can pool our resources and translate our individual abilities into powerful tools and weapons. It becomes imperative, then, that we do what it takes to make groups survive. The next step in this logic is obvious. Group members become obedient to the hierarchy of the group.
Milgram’s experiment
Milgram puts out a newspaper advertisement offering male Americans around the vicinity of Yale University to participate in a psychology experiment about memory and learning. Upon arriving at Yale, the participant is introduced to a tall, sharp and stern looking experimenter (Milgram) wearing a white lab coat. The participant is also introduced to a friendly co-participant, who is actually a confederate (a person pretending to be a participant, like a rigged audience for a magician). Milgram explains that the experiment investigates punishment in learning, and that one will be the “teacher”, and one will be the “learner.” Rigged lots are drawn to determine roles, and it is decided that the true participant will be the “teacher.”
The confederate is strapped to a chair and his arm is dotted with electrodes. Milgram instructs the teacher to read out word pairs from a list, such as “clear” goes with “air”, or “dictionary” goes with “red”. Afterwards, when the teacher says a word, the learner must regurgitate the other word that goes with the teacher’s word. If the learner recalls the correct word, we move to the next word pair. Otherwise, he is given a voltage shock. These shocks increase in amplitude as more mistakes are made. However, Milgram assured the teachers that “no permanent tissue damage will occur.” Shocks start at 15 volts, and grow in 15 volt increments.
Milgram’s responses to the teachers objection and refusal to continue were, in this order:
1. He’s fine, go on.
2. The experiment requires you to go on.
3. It is absolutely essential to go on.
4. You have no choice. You must go on.
The results of the experiment: all 40 of the participants obeyed up to 300 volts, at which point 5 refused to continue. Four more gave one further shock before refusing; two broke off at the 330 volts level and one each at 345, 360 and 375 volts. Therefore, a total of 14 participants defied the experimenter, and 26 obeyed. Overall, 65% of the participants gave shocks up to 450 volts (obeyed) and 35% stopped sometime before 450 volts.
Conclusion
In the words of Dostoevsky: Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. It is people whose minds were severely damaged by compulsory state education, who easily succumb to authority. The cognitive connection between their behavior and the consequences of their behavior was greatly weakened in school. And it is these dependent, obedience-trained, powerless weaklings who submit to authority.
Even though the word “weakling” may be insulting for some, it shouldn’t be. Babies are weaklings, and no one criticizes them for being so. Weak people just haven’t evolved too much from that stage.
The consequences of obedient behavior extend to every aspect of life, from school to work, from blogs to scientific magazines, from window-cleaners to politicians, and those who mindlessly obey authority can be considered to be potentially more dangerous than the legendary Bin Laden.
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Source: http://www.armannd.com/authority-obedience-and-fear.html Illustration: http://www.thepsychfiles.com/images/milgram_thumb.jpg
