Stanley Milgram's experiments in obedience to authority were mentioned in several forums r
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Stanley Milgram's experiments in obedience to authority were mentioned
in several forums recently, impelling me to follow up. Below is a
passage from the first chapter of his book, _Obedience to Authority_
(Harper & Row, New York: 1974). I urge you to read this text, and I
suggest that you follow up by locating and reading the book. In
addition to the passage below, I am entering the basic descriptions of
the experiment and the results, [NOTE: I am not posting the rest of two
articles on alt.atheism. If interested, let me or edp know. -patel]
but Milgram's book has quite a bit more material in it which is
interesting. There is analysis and explanation, description of the
stress the subjects undergo and the psychological mechanisms involved,
the fact that the subjects are not aggressive, and more. Milgram's
writing is very readable.
-- edp
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The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import,
but an empirically grounded scientist eventually comes to the point
where he wishes to move from abstract discourse to the careful
observation of concrete instances. In order to take a close look at
the act of obeying, I set up a simple experiment at Yale University.
Eventually, the experiment was to involve more than a thousand
participants and would be repeated at several universities, but at the
beginning, the conception was simple. A person comes to a
psychological laboratory and is told to carry out a series of acts that
come increasingly into conflict with conscience. The main question is
how far the participant will comply with the experimenter's
instructions before refusing to carry out the actions required of him.
But the reader needs to know a little more detail about the experiment.
Two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of
memory and learning. One of them is designated as a "teacher" and the
other a "learner." The experimenter explains that the study is
concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is
conducted into a room, seated in a chair, his arms strapped to prevent
excessive movement, and an electrode attached to his wrist. He is told
that he is to learn a list of word pairs; whenever he makes an error,
he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.
The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the
learner being strapped into place, he is taken into the main
experimental room and seated before an impressive shock generator. Its
main feature is a horizontal line of thirty switches, ranging from 15
volts to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. There are also verbal
designations which range from SLIGHT SHOCK to DANGER--SEVERE SHOCK.
The teacher is told that he is to administer the learning test to the
man in the other room. When the learner responds correctly, the
teacher moves on to the next item; when the other man gives an
incorrect answer, the teacher is to give him an electric shock. He is
to start at the lowest shock level (15 volts) and to increase the level
each time the man makes an error, going through 30 volts, 45 volts, and
so on.
The "teacher" is a genuinely naive subject who has come to the
laboratory to participate in an experiment. The learner, or victim, is
an actor who actually receives no shock at all. The point of the
experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and
measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain
on a protesting victim. At what point will the subject refuse to obey
the experimenter?
Conflict arises when the man receiving the shock begins to indicate
that he is experiencing discomfort. At 75 volts, the "learner" grunts.
At 120 volts he complains verbally; at 150 he demands to be released
from the experiment. His protests continue as the shocks escalate,
growing increasingly vehement and emotional. At 285 volts his response
can only be described as an agonized scream.
Observers of the experiment agree that its gripping quality is somewhat
obscured in print. For the subject, the situation is not a game;
conflict is intense and obvious. On one hand, the manifest suffering
of the learner presses him to quit. On the other, the experimenter, a
legitimate authority to whom the subject feels some commitment, enjoins
him to continue. Each time the subject hesitates to administer shock,
the experimenter orders him to continue. To extricate himself from the
situation, the subject must make a clear break with authority. The aim
of this investigation was to find when and how people would defy
authority in the face of a clear moral imperative.
There are, of course, enormous differences between carrying out the
orders of a commanding officer during times of war and carrying out the
orders of an experimenter. Yet the essence of certain relationships
remain, for one may ask in a general way: How does a man behave when
he is told by a legitimate authority to act against a third individual?
If anything, we may expect the experimenter's power to be considerably
less than that of the general, since he has no power to enforce his
imperatives, and participation in a psychological experiment scarcely
evokes the sense of urgency and dedication engendered by participation
in war. Despite these limitations, I thought it worthwhile to start
careful observation of obedience even in this modest situation, in the
hope that it would stimulate insights and yield general propositions
applicable to a variety of circumstances.
A reader's initial reaction to the experiment may be to wonder why
anyone in his right mind would administer even the first shocks? Would
he not simply refuse and walk out of the laboratory? But the fact is
that no one ever does. Since the subject has come to the laboratory to
aid the experimenter, he is quite willing to start off with the
procedure. There is nothing very extraordinary in this, particularly
since the person who is to receive the shocks seems initially
cooperative, if somewhat apprehensive. What is surprising is how far
ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter's
instructions. Indeed, the results of the experiment are both
surprising and dismaying. Despite the fact that many subjects
experience stress, despite the fact that many protest to the
experimenter, a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on
the generator.
Many subjects will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the
pleading of the person being shocked, no matter how painful the shocks
seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to be let out.
This was seen time and time again in our studies and has been observed
in several universities where the experiment was repeated. It is the
extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the
command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study
and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
A commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at
the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society.
But if one considers that almost two-thirds fall into the category of
"obedient" subjects, and that they represented ordinary people drawn
from working, managerial, and professional classes, the argument
becomes very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue that
arose in connection with Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, _Eichmann in
Jerusalem_. Arendt contended that the prosecution's effort to depict
Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came
closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and
did his job. For asserting these views, Arendt became the object of
considerable scorn, even calumny. Somehow, it was felt that the
monstrous deeds carried out by Eichmann required a brutal, twisted, and
sadistic personality, evil incarnate. After witnessing hundreds of
ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must
conclude that Arendt's conception of the _banality of evil_ comes
closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person
who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation -- a
conception of his duties as a subject -- and not from any peculiarly
aggressive tendencies.
This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary
people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility
on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become
patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible
with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the
resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against
disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in
his place.
Sitting back in one's armchair, it is easy to condemn the actions of
the obedient subjects. But those who condemn the subjects measure them
against the standard of their own ability to formulate high-minded
moral prescriptions. That is hardly a fair standard. Many of the
subjects, at the level of stated opinion, feel quite as strongly as any
of us about the moral requirement of refraining from action against a
helpless victim. They, too, in general terms know what ought to be
done and can state their values when the occasion arises. This has
little, if anything, to do with their actual behavior under the
pressure of circumstances.
If people are asked to render a moral judgment on what constitutes
appropriate behavior in this situation, they unfailingly see
disobedience as proper. But values are not the only forces at work in
an actual, ongoing situation. They are but one narrow band of causes
in the total spectrum of forces impinging on a person. Many people
were unable to realize their values in action and found themselves
continuing in the experiment even though they disagreed with what they
were doing.
The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less
effective than social myth would have us believe. 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
information and social field.
What then, keeps the person obeying the experimenter? First, there is
a set of "binding factors" that lock the subject into the situation.
They include such factors as politeness on his part, his desire to
uphold his initial promise of aid to the experimenter, and the
awkwardness of withdrawal. Second, a number of adjustments in the
subject's thinking occur that undermine his resolve to break with the
authority. The adjustments help the subject maintain his relationship
with the experimenter, while at the same time reducing the strain
brought about by the experimental conflict. They are typical of
thinking that comes about in obedient persons when they are instructed
by authority to act against helpless individuals.
One such mechanism is the tendency of the individual to become so
absorbed in the narrow technical aspects of the task that he loses
sight of its broader consequences. The film _Dr. Strangelove_
brilliantly satirized the absorption of a bomber crew in the exacting
technical procedure of dropping nuclear weapons on a country.
Similarly, in this experiment, subjects become immersed in the
procedures, reading the word pairs with exquisite articulation and
pressing the switches with great care. They want to put on a competent
performance, but they show an accompanying narrowing of moral concern.
The subject entrusts the broader tasks of setting goals and assessing
morality to the experimental authority he is serving.
The most common adjustment of thought in the obedient subject is for
him to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. He divests
himself of responsibility by attributing all initiative to the
experimenter, a legitimate authority. He sees himself not as a person
acting in a morally accountable way but as the agent of external
authority. In the postexperimental interview, when subjects were asked
why they had gone on, a typical reply was: "I wouldn't have done it
by myself. I was just doing what I was told." Unable to defy the
authority of the experimenter, they attribute all responsibility to
him. It is the old story of "just doing one's duty" that was heard
time and time again in the defense statements of those accused at
Nuremberg. But it would be wrong to think of it as a thin alibi
concocted for the occasion. Rather, it is a fundamental mode of
thinking for a great many people once they are locked into a
subordinate position in a structure of authority. The disappearance of
a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of
submission to authority.
Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to
violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he
loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different
focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he
performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of
how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of
him. In wartime, a soldier does not ask whether it is good or bad to
bomb a hamlet; he does not experience shame or guilty in the
destruction of a village: rather he feels pride or shame depending on
how well he has performed the mission assigned to him.
Another psychological force at work in this situation may be termed
"counteranthropomorphism." For decades psychologists have discussed
the primitive tendency among men to attribute to inanimate objects and
forces the qualities of the human species. A countervailing tendency,
however, is that of attributing an impersonal quality to forces that
are essentially human in origin and maintenance. Some people treat
systems of human origin as if they existed above and beyond any human
agent, beyond the control of whim or human feeling. The human element
behind agencies and institutions is denied. Thus, when the
experimenter says, "The experiment _requires_ that you continue," the
subject feels this to be an imperative that goes beyond any merely
human command. He does not ask the seemingly obvious question, "Whose
experiment? Why should the designer be served while the victim
suffers?" The wishes of a man -- the designer of the experiment --
have become part of a schema which exerts on the subject's mind a
force that transcends the personal. "It's _got_ to go on. It's _got_
to go on," repeated one subject. He failed to realize that a man like
himself wanted it to go on. For him the human agent had faded from the
picture, and "The Experiment" had acquired an impersonal momentum of
its own.
No action of itself has an unchangeable psychological quality,. Its
meaning can be altered by placing it in particular contexts. An
American newspaper recently quoted a pilot who conceded that Americans
were bombing Vietnamese men, women, and children but felt that the
bombing was for a "noble cause" and thus was justified. Similarly,
most subjects in the experiment see their behavior in a larger context
that is benevolent and useful to society -- the pursuit of scientific
truth. The psychological laboratory has a strong claim to legitimacy
and evokes trust and confidence in those who come to perform there. An
action such as shocking a victim, which in isolation appears evil,
acquires a totally different meaning when placed in this setting. But
allowing an act to be dominated by its context, while neglecting its
human consequences, can be dangerous in the extreme.
At least one essential feature of the situation in Germany was not
studied here -- namely, the intense devaluation of the victim prior to
action against him. For a decade and more, vehement anti-Jewish
propaganda systematically prepared the German population to accept the
destruction of Jews. Step by step the Jews were excluded from the
category of citizen and national, and finally were denied the status of
human beings. Systematic devaluation of the victim provides a measure
of psychological justification for brutal treatment and has been the
constant accompaniment of massacres, pogroms, and wars. In all
likelihood, our subjects would have experienced greater ease in
shocking the victim had he been convincingly portrayed as a brutal
criminal or a pervert.
Of considerable interest, however, is the fact that many subjects
harshly devalue the victim _as a consequence_ of acting against him.
Such comments as, "He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get
shocked," were common. Once having acted against the victim, these
subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual,
whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of
intellect and character.
Many of the people studied in the experiment were in some sense against
what they did to the learner, and many protested even while they
obeyed. But between thoughts, words, and the critical step of
disobeying a malevolent authority lies another ingredient, the capacity
for transforming beliefs and values into action. Some subjects were
totally convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing but could
not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. Some
derived satisfaction from their thoughts and felt that -- within
themselves, at least -- they had been on the side of the angels. What
they failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely
irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not
transformed into action. Political control is effected through action.
The attitudes of the guards at a concentration camp are of no
consequence when in fact they are allowing the slaughter of innocent
men to take place before them. Similarly, so-called "intellectual
resistance" in occupied Europe -- in which persons by a twist of
thought felt that they had defied the invader -- was merely indulgence
in a consoling psychological mechanism. Tyrannies are perpetuated by
diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs.
Time and again in the experiment people disvalued what they were doing
but could not muster the inner resources to translate their values into
action.
A variation of the basic experiment depicts a dilemma more common than
the one outlined above: the subject was not ordered to push the
trigger that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a subsidiary act
(administering the word-pair test) before another subject actually
delivered the shock. In this situation, 37 of 40 adults from the New
Haven area continued to the highest shock level on the generator.
Predictably, subjects excused their behavior by saying that the
responsibility belonged to the man who actually pulled the switch.
This may illustrate a dangerously typical situation in complex society:
it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an
intermediate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final
consequences of the action. Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured
the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only
to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the
camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into the gas chambers was able to
justify _his_ behavior on the grounds that he was only following orders
from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no
one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its
consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for the act
has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of
socially organized evil in modern society.
The problem of obedience, therefore, is not wholly psychological. The
form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do
with it. There was a time, perhaps, when men were able to give a fully
human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it
as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor among
men, things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of
society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes
away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to
see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable
to act without some kind of over-all direction. He yields to authority
but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.
George Orwell caught the essence of the situation when he wrote:
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying
overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity
against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are
only "doing their duty," as the saying goes. Most of them, I
have no doubt, are kind-hearted law abiding men who would
never dream of committing murder in private life. On the
other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces
with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse
for it.
--------------------------end of article by edp --------------------------
IMHO, the Theists are more likely to follow [religious] orders blindly
and tend to be more cruel because:
(1) Their values are based on books or imaginations about the entity
called god which they rarely question.
(2) Theism creates many [religious] leaders. Opinion and orders of
those leaders are carried by the Theists without paying any
attention to his/her consciousness. For example, I heard Church
leader telling Christians to pray for the victory in the Gulf war.
Theists would overlook millions of people killed simply because
the Church leaders said that it was the victory which mattered.
-Sandy Patel
(patel@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM)
E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank