The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority

An Empirical Tribute to Stanley Milgram

Dariusz Dolinski, Tomasz Grzyb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000077858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This rich volume explores the complex problem of obedience and conformity, re-examining Stanley Milgram's famous electric shock study, and presenting the findings of the most extensive empirical study on obedience toward authority since Milgram's era.

Dolinski and Grzyb refer to their own series of studies testing various hypotheses from Milgram's and others' research, examining underlying obedience mechanisms as well as factors modifying the degree of obedience displayed by individuals in different situations. They offer their theoretical model explaining subjects' obedience in Milgram's paradigm and describe numerous examples of the destructive effect of thoughtless obedience both in our daily lives as well as in crucial historical events, stressing the need for critical thinking when issued with a command.

Concluding with reflections on how to prevent the danger of destructive obedience to authority, this insightful volume will be fascinating reading for students and academics in social psychology, as well as those in fields concerned with complex social problems.

1

INTRODUCTION

It Happened in New Haven!

 

It was December 20, 1984. New York was preparing for Christmas. Christmas trees were out everywhere, people in shopping centers were being encouraged to spend money by thousands upon thousands of adverts and countless Santa Clauses whose characteristic red cap and suit were made tradition years ago by the Coca-Cola company. While the majority of New Yorkers were shopping or wrapping up presents, a certain 51-year-old man was heading towards the reception desk at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Apart from his beard, there was little that distinguished him. He was of average height and average weight. When he finally reached the receptionist, he placed a piece of identification on the counter, calmly introduced himself, and said that he suspected he had just experienced his fifth heart attack. He was not mistaken. Despite coming to one of the world’s best cardiological centers, and despite the fact that he was immediately placed under a doctor’s care, a half-hour later he was dead. That was how the life ended of a man whose experiments had shocked not only the psychology community, and the scientific community, but, in fact, the entire world.

Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933, as the second child of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe. During World War I, his father emigrated to the USA from Hungary, and his mother from Romania. A combination of chance, talent, and hard work led him in his youth to come into contact with numerous famous psychologists. As a student at James Monroe High School, one of his classmates was Philip Zimbardo, who achieved fame two decades later as the author of the Stanford prison experiment. Milgram himself began his university education with a BA in political science, but had already taken an interest in psychology. Pursuing his master’s degree, he worked as research assistant to the team led by Solomon Asch, author of classic studies of conformity. Milgram was fascinated by Asch and his approach to psychology, and Asch’s experiments on group conformity left a particularly strong impression on him. It was Milgram’s dream to join Asch’s group and conduct experiments on conformity under his tutelage, but Asch, known for his coldness and introverted nature, very rarely took on collaborators. Owing to Asch’s lack of interest in working with him, Milgram sought another scientific mentor and made contact with Gordon Allport, another giant in the field of social psychology, under whose direction he wrote a PhD dissertation. Milgram received his PhD in 1960 (Blass, 2004).

Milgram’s scientific career was a dizzyingly rapid rise from the very start. He undertook an entire series of creative experiments concerning various issues in psychology. However, global fame came to him thanks to a study that he began at least somewhat by accident (more on this in the next chapter). And it is about this very experiment, about what Milgram did and did not discover, about what the experiments of other researchers have shown, and also about what we decided to explore over a half-century after his famous experiment that we have written this book.

Let us begin with a description of the famous experiment itself. Try to imagine the United States at the beginning of the 1960s. Imagine, dear reader, that you are living in New Haven, a modest-sized town that is home to one of the world’s most famous institutions of higher education, Yale University. Browsing a local newspaper, you see an advertisement telling you that the university’s psychology department is looking for people ready to participate in studies concerning memory. Participation is rewarded with a payment of $4 as well as an additional 50 cents to cover travel expenses. Don’t forget about inflation: back then a loaf of bread cost 20 cents, a half-gallon of milk cost 52 cents, and a new house could be bought for an average of $18,890. Let’s assume this proposition sparked your interest, so you call and schedule a meeting. You arrive at the psychology department building. In the hallway you encounter a middle-aged man who, as it turns out, has come for the same experiment. The experimenter invites both of you to the psychology laboratory and explains that the experiment concerns the impact of punishment on the speed and accuracy of learning. It requires you to take on roles – one of you will be a student, and the other a teacher. Which one will you be? As it turns out, fate will decide. You draw from two pieces of paper, and yours says you will be the teacher. The experimenter explains to the other person that his tasks consists in learning pairs of words by rote, such as “blue – box,” or “clear – day,” and then, during the main portion of the experiment, he will hear only the first word in the pair (such as “blue”). After this, he will select from one of four words (for example, “sky,” “box,” “sheet,” “almonds”). Of course, the right answer is “box.” What happens if the student makes a mistake and chooses the wrong word? Then, he will be punished, because the experiment is designed to examine the influence of punishment on processes of learning and memorization. Administering punishment is, of course, the job of the teacher. You will impose the penalty, but … you will not decide what kind of penalty it is. The experimenter shows you a device that generates electric energy. There are 30 switches on it. The first is labeled 15 V, the second 30 V, the third 45 V.… Each switch is 15 volts more than the one before it. The last one reads 450 volts. Each group of four switches is also accompanied by a description: SLIGHT SHOCK, MODERATE SHOCK, STRONG SHOCK, VERY STRONG SHOCK, INTENSE SHOCK, EXTREME INTENSITY SHOCK, DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK. The last two are not described by any words. There is only the symbol “XXX.” The front of the device also has a rating plate with the words “SHOCK GENERATOR, TYPE ZLB, DYSON INSTRUMENT COMPANY, WALTHAM, MASS. OUTPUT 15 VOLTS – 450 VOLTS” written on it, as well as an on/off switch, a few lights, and some measuring device with a needle.

The experimenter now attaches electrodes to your hands and presses the third switch, marked 45 V. You feel an electric shock. It is unpleasant, but you wouldn’t exactly call it seriously painful. The experimenter shows you that the wires from the generator lead through an opening in the wall to the neighboring room, where your partner is now sitting and learning word pairs. You go up to him together. The experimenter attaches the electrodes to his forearm and renders it immobile by fastening it to the chair. You help him in these activities. You and the experimenter return to the room where the electric generator is located. You sit beside this device, and the experimenter sits at his desk. Now the main part of the experiment begins. Initially, the student answers flawlessly. But then he makes a mistake, and the experimenter instructs you to press the first switch. You do so, and the experiment continues. Another error by the student, and you are told to press the second switch; a third error, and you are supposed to press switch number three. Further mistakes occur, and you as the teacher react by pressing successive switches. When you press switch number five, the student lets out a small grunt; then, with the pressing of successive switches he begins to moan from the pain, quietly at first, but increasingly louder and louder. Later on, he begins screaming. How do you behave? You don’t know that the person behind the wall is not, in fact, a participant. He is a confederate of the experimenter, playing the role of a student making a series of mistakes. The drawing for roles was a sham – both pieces of paper said “teacher,” so there’s nothing odd in the fact you were assigned that role. While the second person did say that his paper said “student,” that was a lie. In fact, the student is also not being zapped with electricity, but you are convinced that you are causing him increasing amounts of pain. If you seem like you might quit, the experimenter encourages you to continue the experiment, but, of course, he cannot force you to do anything. You took the money at the beginning of the experiment and found out that it is a reward for simply showing up. You were also told unequivocally that you can end your participation at any moment of your choosing. So, how do you behave now? Maybe you refuse at the very beginning; after all, isn’t it immoral to zap an innocent person with electricity? Perhaps you press the first few switches, but then refuse when the person sitting behind the wall starts grunting? Or maybe you stop when he starts yelling? How loud? Let us add here that, in accordance with the experiment scenario, after the participant presses the tenth button (marked with the symbol “150 V”), the person sitting on the other side of the wall not only screams with pain, but also demands that the experiment be halted and he be allowed to leave the laboratory. Yet the experimenter ignores these shouts. Maybe now you would decide that you won’t press the next switches? Can you imagine that you would be capable of pressing all 30 switches? Including the one labeled “450 V,” which could actually kill the person sitting behind the wall? This is what piqued the interest of Stanley Milgram. How obedient are people when an authority, or their superior, gives them an order that would be highly immoral to carry out?

Stanley Milgram conducted an entire series of experiments of this type, slightly modifying the conditions in each successive one. The scenario we described above is one of the more frequently cited in social psychology textbooks. It is officially referred to as Experiment No. 2. You’ve had the opportunity to consider how you might behave in that situation. Now try to guess what percentage of people refused to participate in the experiment at the very beginning, and how many pressed all of the switches, including the last one, which is the one that could very likely lead to the death of the person sitting in the other room.

This is probably a good moment to reveal the answers. Milgram performed the experiment with a total of 40 participants. These were normal, everyday residents of New Haven – men aged between 20 and 50 years old, engaged in all sorts of professions. None of them refused to press the first switch, just like none of them refused when the supposed student made his second mistake. Nor when he made the third… Nor when he started grunting, moaning, or even screaming from pain. One (one!) person refused to press the tenth switch, marked “135 V,” while five others withdrew after they pressed that switch and then heard the student demand the experiment be ceased and he be allowed to leave the laboratory. More importantly, however, was that 25 people (62.5% of the participants) carried out all of the experimenter’s instructions, meaning they pressed all 30 switches, including the one labeled 450 V. Participants clearly did this in spite of themselves, they voiced numerous doubts, they wavered. Sometimes they lost control over themselves, laughed nervously, their hands shook, they blushed, or their faces went white. The experimenter had to encourage them, to overcome their resistance. When the participant’s first doubts arose, the experimenter said “Please continue” or “Please go on,” and the next time he said “The experiment requires that you continue”; then, he said “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and the final argument was “You have no choice, you must go on.” But the participants had been told very clearly at the beginning that they may abandon their participation in the experiment. After all, the experimenter did not exercise any power over them, he could not punish them nor force them to do anything. After all, they were normal people, not degenerate psychopaths serving long sentences for severe crimes (Milgram, 1974).

So why, then, did they behave as they did? This is the question that everybody asks themselves when they first hear about Milgram’s studies. First-year psychology undergrads learning about the behavior of people instructed to administer an electric shock to a person sitting behind a wall are, to put it simply, shocked. After all, “obviously” everything depends on personality and character, and “obviously” bad people do bad things, while good people do good things … The circumstances of the situation are certainly of some importance sometimes, but can “the situation” really exercise such sway over people? Meanwhile, the shortest summary of Milgram’s discovery is that it constitutes an unusually definitive and spectacular demonstration of the power of the situation. The situation that, in certain conditions, means that one need not be a bad person to engage in evil acts.

Stanley Milgram once confided in his assistant (today a prominent professor emeritus of psychology) Alan Elms that he dreamt of his experiments being discussed in a hundred years’ time. Over half of that period has already elapsed. No other social science studies are discussed in social psychology textbooks as thoroughly and in such detail as Milgram’s experiments on obedience. And no other such studies are as shocking, delivering results so highly divergent from the predictions of lay people. None of them show nearly as well that research psychology can prove things that are entirely unexpected and highly surprising.

Milgram carried out his experiments over 50 years ago. Yet we still do not know why people in some of the situations he arranged behaved the way they did. If we pose the question today of where the roots of such pervasive obedience lie, it should be said that there is no simple answer, and that ever since the publication by Milgram of his shocking experimental results, not only first-year psychology students continue to ask, but they are accompanied in their inquisitiveness by experienced researchers around the world. We have also been wondering about this for many years now, and in recent years we have begun to explore this issue in our experiments. Truth be told, we had only planned to do one study. But in the middle of it, new questions, issues, uncertainties, and doubts arose. As a result, we undertook what was the most expansive – since the times of Milgram’s experiments – empirical program of studies of obedience conducted in his paradigm of “ostensible electric shocks.” We present this program in later chapters of this book, but we first invite you to read about some other, more fundamental questions.

2

THE WHAT AND WHY OF STANLEY MILGRAM’S EXPERIMENTS

In the history of science, a great deal of discoveries have been made by accident. The most well-known – and, it can be said, trite – example is that of the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming, a terribly messy man who left a pile of dirty scarves lying around, which he later found covered in mold. Looking at them, he observed that the dull colony of staph bacteria near the mold was turning transparent, which led him to the conclusion that the mold must contain a germicidal substance that was harmless to the mold itself. He then quickly – this time intentionally – discovered that the substance was also harmless to the tissue of other organisms. He gave this mysterious substance the name “penicillin,” and although he was unable to isolate and purify it, the discovery gave him eternal fame.

There was also a great deal of chance in Ivan Pavlov’s discovery of the principles of classical conditioning, of such great importance to psychology. Pavlov was conducting studies on the physiology of digestion. An important aspect of this process was that the animal subjects, in chewing their food, were mixing it with their saliva. However, a problem arose in the course of the study. A lab worker who was bringing food to the dogs had a habit of wearing wooden clogs, and a few days after the experiment began the dogs began to salivate upon hearing the pounding of the clogs on the floor, even before being given their bowls of food. Pavlov was intrigued by what had been causing him so much difficulty in studying the process of digestion – why, exactly, were the dogs salivating even before they had any food in their mouths? He wrote about this to Charles Sherrington, a famed British physiologist who later discovered the functions of neurons and was awarded the Nobel Prize. Sherrington told Pavlov to forget about it and continue with his study of digestion, already in its advanced phase. Following the advice of his British colleague, Pavlov continued his studies on digestion, but – thankfully for us – ignored the suggestion to discontinue his investigation of why the dogs were salivating upon hearing the sound of the wooden clogs (to be more precise, in the presence of any stimuli that immediately preceded in time the food stimulus evoking salivation). This led him to the discoveries that brought him far greater fame than studies on digestion processes, or other studies of temperament he later undertook that were of great importance to physiology. There is, however, a certain paradox in the fact that he was given the Nobel Prize for studies on digestion, but not for the discover of classical conditioning. It is an even greater paradox that he first received the Nobel Prize, and only after that was made a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The world is full of paradoxes, and the world of science is no exception.

As for the experiments that brought Milgram eternal fame, the fortunate vicissitudes of fate also played a significant role. In the previous chapter we wrote that Milgram was fascinated by Solomon Asch and his studies on conformity. Asch (1951) conducted his experiments in groups of several participants. In fact, only one member of the group was a real participant, and the remaining people were merely pretending to have been invited to participate in a psychological experiment. They were confederates of the experimenter and behaved in accordance with instructions they had previously been given. The experiment was presented as a study on the perception of lengths of lines. Two boards were presented multiple times to the participants. One of them always contained a single line, while the other contained three lines of varying lengths. The participants’ task consisted in responding each time when asked to say which of the three lines was closest in length to the single line. Participants responded in turn. In many cases, the sole real participant was asked to express an opinion only after all the other “participants” had given theirs. Those people, in turn, in accordance with the instructions they had been given would from time to time supply wrong answers. In addition, they agreed with one another when doing so. The real participant then experienced a dilemma: should they give the answer that they themselves believed to be correct at the start (and which, perhaps, continued to seem correct), or rather give the answer that was provided previously by other participants? As it turned out, 76% of the participants opted for the latter course in at least one sample.

The study by Solomon Asch is universally cited in the psychological literature as an illustration of people’s tendency to conform. But contrary to contemporary convictions and the content of the majority of social psychology textbooks, Asch interpreted the results of his famous study in an entirely different manner: as proof of the independence of people’s judgements in conditions of clear pressure to make them uniform. For example, he emphasized that around two-thirds of the responses given by participants were independent and inconsistent with the direction of the external pressure, and that only around 5% of participants behaved at all times in a uncritically conformist manner, while as many as a quarter of experimental participants did not submit to the pressure of the group a single time (Asch, 1951, see also discussion by Friend, Rafferty, & Bramel, 1990).

These studies and their innovative originality made a tremendous impression on Milgram. It became his dream to be taken under Asch’s scientific wing and to undertake studies of conformity at his direction, but Asch, known for his coldness and introverted nature, admitted very few people into his circle of collaborators. Milgram was unable to break into that circle but remained undiscouraged in his desire to explore conformity. He went to Europe and began studying some very interesting issues. First, he explored the role of culture, comparing the conformist behaviors of French and Norwegians; next, he examined the extent to which conformity depends on the seriousness of its consequences. He developed a procedure based on one of Asch’s experiments, but he replaced the lines of various lengths with sounds distinguished by particular parameters. He then told a portion of the participants that some of the tested sounds would be used as aviation alarm signals. That remark (which at least implicitly means “the right answer can mean saving human life in the future”) actually reduced conformity among participants (Milgram, 1961). Milgram’s achievements in the field of studies on conformity and independence made such an impression on Asch that he offered to cooperate with him on a book dedicated to the subject. Yet a misunderstanding quickly arose as to whether Milgram was supposed to be only a paid laborer, or a full co-author, which led the scholars terminating their cooperation (Blass, 2004).

Milgram, planning to undertake more studies on conformity, began wondering whether the sight of people pressing switches on an electric shock generator, thereby causing pain to another individual,...