March 28, 2023 by Donald Gorassini, howinfluenceworks.com
In this blog, my concern is with what the famous Milgram studies on the psychology of obedience have to tell us about ourselves. I describe the studies’ methods and findings, and then go through some of the lessons we can learn about how obedience to authority works.
Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was interested in a particular form of influence, that in which an authority gives an order to a citizen. How willing would the a citizen be to comply? Would the citizen obey even when this was sure to cause the suffering of someone else? In these studies, participants were instructed as part of their voluntary role in a scientific study at a reputable university to deliver a series of 30 painful electric shocks to a fellow participant. These were not mild shocks. It was apparent that they were extremely painful and potentially deadly.
In these studies, everyday adults, sampled from various age and occupational groups, delivered the entire series of shocks in many cases. The conduct was nothing short of a brutal assault. Why did people do it? We can rule out obeying out of fear of losing a job or being thrown in jail. The only justification participants had for the extreme punishment they inflicted on another human being was that it was for science.
The Milgram Studies
Milgram conducted his obedience research at Yale University in 1961 and 1962. His most famous investigation, the New Baseline study (Milgram, 1963), I describe here. It illustrates the readiness of people to go along with morally corrupt orders. Several variations on the investigation provide insights into why obedience was so high (see Milgram, 1974).
Recruitment for the New Baseline study consisted of a newspaper ad seeking participants for a one-hour investigation of memory (for which $4.50 could be earned). Forty men from all walks of life took part in the investigation. The same study was later run with all women participants and yielded the same results. After arriving at the Yale laboratory, a participant was greeted by an experimenter wearing a white lab coat and introduced to a fellow participant, who secretly was working for the researchers. Someone acting in this role is referred to as a confederate of the experimenter. The experimenter described the study as an examination of the impact of punishment on learning and memory. One person would have to serve as a teacher and the other as a learner. A rigged draw placed the real participant into the teacher role and the confederate into the learner role. I shall refer from here on to the experimenter, the teacher, and the learner.
All three persons then went into a small room, where the learner would reside alone during the procedure. The experimenter strapped the learner to a chair, attached wires to his arm, and gave the teacher a shock for illustration purposes. This was labelled 75 volts and it stung. In an ominous feature of the procedure, the learner mentioned that he had a heart condition.
Leaving the learner behind, the experimenter led the teacher away and seated him at a console in an adjacent room. Both the experimenter and teacher remained there for the remainder of the procedure. The console contained 30 switches, each one purportedly capable of sending an electric shock to the learner. The switches differed in the strength of the shock they unleashed, lower to the left (beginning at 15v) and higher to the right (in increments of 15, ending at 450v). The location of the 75-volt switch, number 10, which the teacher now knew hurt, was on the lower end of the voltage scale. Designations associated with the switches on the higher end included, “Danger: Severe Shock” and “XXX.” The teacher could hear any learner vocalizations through speakers.
The learning task consisted of the learner studying a list of words and then taking a memory test. Each answer was given by lighting a number, one to four, on the teacher’s console. Based on a pre-arranged schedule, the learner answered wrongly to three-quarters of the questions. The teacher’s task in these instances was to declare the answer wrong, state the correct answer, and give a shock. In a key feature of the procedure, escalating punishments, the teacher was instructed to begin at the lowest shock level (i.e., the leftmost lever) and to increase the shock intensity by one switch for each wrong answer. Given the many wrong answers built into the confederate’s routine, it did not take long for shock intensities to exceed the stinging 75-volt demonstration shock that the teacher had experienced earlier. There would be a sufficient number of wrong answers for the teacher to use all 30 switches.
The researchers went to great lengths to convince participants that the investigation concerned the impact of punishment on learning and that flipping switches sent painful shocks to the learner. In reality, the investigation comprised an assessment of obedience to a ruthless authority. The confederate playing the learner role received no shocks.
The study procedure contained many standardized learner reactions and statements, all on audiotape, which the teacher could hear clearly and thought were real. At 150 volts, the learner reverses his earlier consent to take part in the study and demands to be freed. He complains of heart symptoms. Things then go from bad to worse. If shocks continue, expressions of pain and protest become extreme. Demands to be freed continue to be made. The learner, more than once, screams at the top of his lungs. After the 330-volt shock, the learner falls silent and does not respond to any more memory questions—which could mean a refusal, or an inability, to go on. Teachers were instructed to interpret a non answer as a wrong answer and so apply a shock. Imagine that you were the victim of this treatment, demanded to be freed, felt pain and panic, fainted or had a heart attack, and at no time could get the experimenter to halt proceedings. Your last hope would be that your peer, the teacher, would refuse orders and save you.
Did teachers actually obey the experimenter and continue to shock the learner up to or even past the 150-volt landmark of reversed consent (Switch 10)? Did anyone go past 330 (Switch 22), the point at which the learner went silent? Heaven forbid, would anyone go to 450 volts, the 30th and last switch on the console? Before the study, Milgram described his New Baseline procedure to people of two separate samples, Yale undergraduates and practicing psychiatrists, and asked each person of each group to estimate how many people would display full obedience, namely agreeing to proceed to shock level 30. The students predicted that 1 in 100 people would trip all 30 switches (Milgram, 1963). The psychiatrists predicted that 1 in 1000 people would do so (Milgram, 1965). The more “pessimistic” prediction was thus 1%.
A stunning 65% of the teachers went all the way to level-30, this despite the litany of protests, the frequent complaints of pain, the heart complaint, the screams, and ultimately the silence in the next room. In a replication of the New Baseline procedure using 40 women participants, an equal number of teachers displayed full obedience. Of people who stopped participating, the majority did so at the 150-volt level (Burger, 2009; Packer, 2008). Most participants displayed considerable stress during the procedure (Milgram, 1965). Teachers also commonly hesitated during the task, sought guidance from the experimenter in view of the learner’s behaviour, and continued with prompting.
The New Baseline studies demonstrated an authority effect: the sheer power of an apparently authorized person to elicit obedience even when orders required helping imprison and violently attack an innocent victim. An experimenter residing within the authority structure provided by a scientific laboratory of a prestigious university was sufficient to elicit considerable obedience despite the protests and evident suffering and harm to the victim.
Why Such Pronounced Obedience?
The Power of Authority
When someone in authority asks us to do something, we tend to do it. A program in the back of our minds runs on the mere presence of an apparently legitimate authority. The logic dictates that, given that this is an authority, carry out what they say. Our mental energy is devoted to successful execution of the demanded act. Little if any effort is spent evaluating the good sense of performing the act. Milgram referred to the readiness to translate an authority’s orders into acts as the agentic action state.
To test for the readiness of human beings to obey authority, Milgram made sure to refrain from coercing obedience. Participants would not lose their jobs or be thrown in jail if they disobeyed. At worst, they would be known for wasting the experimenter’s time for an hour and slowing scientific progress a little. They had the opportunity to render much needed aid to the learner and be known for having done so. It seems that the hands-down moral choice was disobedience. There is evidently something about orders from an authority that can get people to behave readily whether the behaviour is good or ill.
Milgram also found that authority must be unified to be effective. In some variations of his procedure, two experimenters conducted proceedings. When they worked together in giving the orders to shock the learner, obedience was high. When one of the experimenters dissented, ordering the teacher to halt the procedure, while the other remained adamant that the teacher continue, the rate of obedience dropped to zero. Evidently, teachers will choose humanity if the authority structure provides a conduit for mercy.
In a similar vein, if scientific authority is contradicted by legal authority, obedience goes down. In versions of the procedure in which the experimenter advised participants that they bore legal responsibility for consequences to the learner, there was a decrease obedience rate.
The Limited Power of a Suffering Victim
In the early phases of his research, Milgram found that teachers readily ignored the learner’s plight. Originally, Milgram arranged for the learner to be remote and silent during the procedure. It was expected that the numbers and verbal designations on the shock machine would be sufficient to deter obedience. Under these conditions, every teacher administered all 30 shocks.
This kind of baseline was unsatisfactory as a research method. Some level of disobedience was needed to make it possible to test conditions that could lower or raise obedience levels and also allow individual differences in punitiveness to emerge. Milgram’s solution was to make victim suffering highly salient. To this end, the New Baseline condition, outlined above, was introduced.
The history of baseline development might also tell us something highly interesting about obedience: It is easy to ignore the victim. When we cannot see or hear a victim’s suffering, but we know that they must be suffering, the tendency toward destructive obedience is complete. Remoteness from the victim is typical of many obedience situations; as examples, consider long range warfare; any number of actions undertaken within a bureaucracy, government, or political party; a teacher’s impact on not only students but students’ families. When the victim is remote, obedience is complete.
It is possible that a more mundane process was in play. The teachers in the remote learner baseline studies might not have believed that there were real shocks being delivered and simply humoured the experimenter by going along with the procedure. It is difficult to know.
What is clear, when it comes to the New Baseline procedure, participants did believe that the learner was experiencing severe pain and a threatening heart condition. Teachers showed pronounced stress reactions during the procedure, retrospectively reported that they had experienced high levels of stress during the procedure, and exhibited relief after the experiment when they learned that shocks and learner reactions were not real.
Even when teachers observed pungent displays of victim suffering, as in the New Baseline condition, the rate at which the full series of shocks was given was high, at 65%. In two further variations of the study, we can see further the sheer difficulty of using displays of victim suffering to remove all obedience. In one version, the proximity condition, all the ingredients of the New Baseline condition were present plus the learner was located in the same room, close to, and within sight of the teacher during the procedure. Here, 40% of participants delivered all 30 shocks. In the other version, the touch proximity condition, all the ingredients of the proximity condition were present plus the teacher was required to hold the learner’s hand down on a shock delivery plate throughout the procedure. Here, 30% of participants delivered all 30 shocks.
Some Lessons to Take Away from the Milgram Findings
We Obey Authority Readily, So be Humble, Careful, and Prepared
The finding most associated with the Milgram obedience studies is that we human beings are prone to obey the orders of a unified authority. This can lead to seriously flawed conduct, as when we hurt other people in the name of science.
The built-in readiness of the citizen to obey orders of an authority is a phenomenon every citizen should take some quiet moments to ponder. The tendency makes every one of us, no matter how good we try to be, highly vulnerable to complying without hesitation. This is not usually a problem, but on the occasions when the order is for a destructive act, we become the instruments of tyranny. The idea, then, would be for everyone who seeks goodness to take precautions. Recognize that this vulnerability exists. Be vigilant for questionable orders and requests. Have a role-play partner give you unjust orders. In response, rehearse ways to delay acting, disobey skillfully, and escape with minimal cost.
We Disobey Authority Readily if We Have Help
It is interesting that another finding of Milgram that I’ve described above has received little attention, namely that people can be fully resistant to the orders emanating from authority. It happens when there are contradicting authorities. As noted, in some versions of his study, Milgram used two experimenters. In one case they formed a unified front in administering the plan to punish wrong answers whereas in the other case one experimenter dissented from the plan while the other remained steadfast. Obedience was high under the unified front but dropped to nil under dissent. When the experimenters agreed, the science narrative prevailed, punishment was liberally applied, and learners suffered. Under dissent, science as the agenda was contradicted by a compassion agenda. The existing inclination of participants was kindness, so this was expressed.
Multiple authorities, where at least one endorses humane treatment, is a highly effective antidote to the hazards posed by tyrannical authority. Tyrants know this, which is why they go to great lengths to remove dissenting voices.
I have gone on long enough, but one question I have not fully addressed and leave for you to answer and I hope share here can be summed up as follows: Why do people need help to disobey authority but no help to obey authority? Put another way: Why is it so easy to obey authority and so difficult to disobey authority?
References
Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American psychologist, 64(1), 1.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. The Journal of abnormal and social psychology, 67(4), 371.
Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human relations, 18(1), 57-76.
Milgram, S. (1974), Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, London: Tavistock Publications.
Packer, D. J. (2008). Identifying systematic disobedience in Milgram’s obedience experiments: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(4), 301-304.
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