Classic and Contemporary Research into Obedience

8 Key excerpts on "Classic and Contemporary Research into Obedience"

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  Encyclopedia of Leadership

  • George R. Goethals, Georgia J. Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns, George R. Goethals, Georgia J. Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Much of what is known about obedience rests on the classic and controver-sial research of Stanley Milgram during the 1960s. CONFORMITY, COMPLIANCE, AND OBEDIENCE Research on social influence makes a distinction between conformity and compliance. Conformity is not based on power or obedience to authority; rather, it is a process through which people internalize group norms as guides for their own actions, often because they identify strongly with the group that defines the norm. Conformity involves genuine and enduring attitudinal change that underpins behavior. Conformity does not require surveillance—people conform because they feel they belong. In contrast, compliance is a superficial and tran-sient change in behavior and expressed attitudes in order to satisfy a request or order from someone else. There is no genuine underlying change in attitudes and behavioral intentions. Compliance requires sur-veillance, because if no one is watching, one reverts to one’s true attitudes and behavior. Compliance O 1105 describes what happens when we agree to do some-one a favor or accede to a request. But compliance also describes what happens when we obey a com-mand or an order. Although obedience is a form of compliance, it can be differentiated from compliance with a request. Compliance with a request is based on fac-tors such as liking for the person making the request and the desire to reciprocate some small favor received from the person making the request. In con-trast, obedience is based on the fact that the person issuing the orders has power over you—what Bertram Raven has called reward power, coercive power, and legitimate power based on authority. LEADERSHIP AND OBEDIENCE The relationship between leadership and obedience is a complex one. Most organizational science defi-nitions of leadership view it as operating within the context of conformity.

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  The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies

  • Susanne C. Knittel, Zachary J. Goldberg, Susanne C. Knittel, Zachary J. Goldberg(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The ongoing fascination with Milgram’s studies can be seen to arise from the use of laboratory experimentation to provide a dramatic and powerful illustration of the way in which people might respond to the demands of authority. The initial controversy generated by the experiments has shown little sign of abating and if anything has intensified in recent years. Nevertheless, the received view of the obedience experiments remains dominant in textbook accounts and makes the continued attempts to develop new perspectives on Milgram’s work all the more important. Indeed, there are signs that these new perspectives are now crystallizing themselves into a key message concerning the wider implications for our understanding of the experiments and of the concept of obedience itself.

  Perhaps the most important change in the way in which we now think about Milgram’s experiments concerns the nature of obedience and the extent to which Milgram’s studies can be said to stand as examples of this phenomenon. We have become so used to referring to the studies as “the obedience experiments” that perhaps we have failed to consider whether they really are demonstrations of obedience at all. A number of scholars from a variety of conceptual and methodological traditions have noted that the scripted prods are not particularly effective at eliciting more shocks from participants anyway (Burger et al. 2011; Gibson 2013a; Haslam et al. 2014), which leads to questions as to whether Milgram’s experiments are in fact demonstrations of people following orders at all. Moreover, given that social psychologists tend to define obedience as a form of social influence elicited in response to orders/commands (e.g., Burger 2017; Kassin et al. 2017), there is a legitimate question mark over whether Milgram’s “obedience” experiments are in fact studies of obedience.

  However, this would be to accept uncritically the standard definition of obedience. Instead, we might be wise to reflect on whether this definition has ever really been adequate. The requirement that the specific social act of an order or command be observed before we can classify something as obedience seems overly restrictive. In everyday life, when we refer to obeying the law, we are not typically describing situations in which we are under direct orders from an authority figure. Rather, we “obey” by observing social norms that proscribe certain actions. More formally, we might draw on the influential work of the social theorist Michel Foucault (1979), who noted that authority in modern liberal societies is rarely exercised bluntly. Instead, obedience is elicited through more subtle means and indeed is most effective when people come to regulate their own behaviors. We might, therefore, suggest a revised definition of obedience as simply submission to the requirements of authority (Gibson 2019b). These requirements might be stated explicitly in the form of an order, but they need not be. Indeed, when we return to the audio recordings of Milgram’s experimental sessions, we find that not only are participants able to resist the experimenter’s increasingly strident demands that they continue, but those participants who do go all the way to the end of the procedure typically do so without the need for the experimenter to use the prods (Gibson 2019a, 2019b). We are thus left with the conclusion that this hugely influential and controversial set of studies does not stand as a demonstration of people’s propensity to follow orders. Rather, it shows us that when participants are obedient, it is not because they have been issued with orders, and when orders are issued participants are able to resist them. The experiments thus can no longer be used to warrant claims about perpetrator behavior arising because of people following orders. If they tell us anything, it is that perpetrators are—as numerous scholars have noted (e.g., Bauman 1989)—part of a wider system. If this system “works,” no direct orders are needed. In Milgram’s study, the experimenter only had to resort to issuing orders when the experimental set-up had failed to do its job in convincing people to keep going. We can still identify those who continued as having been obedient, but this did not mean that they followed orders. The authority of Milgram’s obedience situation lay elsewhere in its design and execution. If the experimenter had to resort to orders, it was not, in fact, a demonstration of authority but rather an indication of its failure

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  Research Skills for Management Studies

  • Alan Berkeley Thomas(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  If codes of ethics give the impression of being rather half-hearted, this may be because they have been produced less from moral conviction than from professional expediency (Homan, 1991). At worst they might be seen as public relations exercises which give the appearance of ethical propriety to research while actually ruling little or nothing out. More charitably, it is often the case that ethical problems in social research are complex and that there is no consensus among professionals about appropriate courses of action. If, as some philosophers have argued, right conduct cannot be guaranteed by following general moral rules but is situationally determined, it is no wonder that the professional associations’ ethics committees have so much difficulty in formulating clear-cut codes of practice for social and management research.

  A case study in research ethics: Milgram’s research on obedience to authority

  One of the best-known examples of social research to have given rise to ethical controversy is that carried out in the 1960s by the American psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University. His work has been variously described as ‘classic’, ‘famous’, ‘controversial’ and ‘notorious’ (Miller, 1986).

  Milgram conducted a series of experiments that were intended to illuminate the processes associated with obedience to authority. In part these studies were motivated by a desire to understand the kind of behaviour which resulted in the systematic extermination of millions of people in the Nazi death-camps during the Second World War. This activity required the obedience of ‘ordinary people’ to the murderous commands of their superiors. Milgram (1963, p. 371) described the project as follows:

  This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naïve S[ubject] to administer increasingly severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment. Punishment is administered by means of a shock generator with 30 graded switches ranging from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The victim is a confederate of the E[xperimenter]. The primary dependent variable is the maximum shock the S is willing to administer before he refuses to continue further.

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  Great Ideas in Psychology

  A Cultural and Historical Introduction

  • Fathali M. Moghaddam(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  2   Imagine living in the seventeenth century rather than the twenty-first century. What are some ways in which you would experience less individual rights and be expected to show greater obedience to authority?

  THE EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF OBEDIENCE

  Before 1960, two ground-breaking series of studies on conformity were conducted by psychologists, the first initiated by Muzafer Sherif in the 1930s and the second by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. Both of these series of studies were conducted in contexts involving issues that had little real-world significance: estimating the movement of a spot of light (in the case of Sherif’s studies) and estimating lengths of lines (in the case of Asch’s studies). During 1959–60 Stanley Milgram was working in Asch’s laboratory and thinking about what would happen if instead of the movement of a spot of light, judgments of line lengths, or the like, issues of greater human significance were introduced into the laboratory. Would the individual still bend to the will of the majority? This question was the point of departure for Milgram’s studies on obedience to authority, and it eventually led to the question of how far individuals would obey an authority figure.

  Milgram recruited participants by advertising for volunteers aged 20–50 to take part in a study on the effect of punishment on learning. Participants were told that a goal of the research was to discover how much punishment is good for learning, how much difference it makes whether an older or younger person is giving the punishment, and similar such questions. From the pool of applicants he was able to select a sample of participants with varied ages and backgrounds. In each experiment, the participants were forty percent skilled and unskilled workers, forty percent white-collar, sales, and business, and twenty percent professionals. All those selected had been screened to ensure that they had a normal psychological profile. When the selected participants arrived at Milgram’s laboratory, they were introduced to another person who was supposedly also a participant but was actually a middle-aged accountant selected to act as Milgram’s confederate. It was explained to the participants that this learning experiment required a teacher and a student. The two participants drew lots to decide who would play the role of the teacher and who would play the role of the student, but the outcome was pre-arranged so that the confederate would always play the role of student. There was also a scientist in a white laboratory coat in the room, purportedly in charge of the “learning study.”

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  The Art of Followership

  How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations

  • Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen, Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Jossey-Bass

    (Publisher)

  It was an ambi-tious piece of research, requiring spending almost two years in Europe comparing conformity levels in France and Norway using a modification of the Asch confor-mity paradigm. And indeed Milgram succeeded in making his mark with the obedience research. Although he had just begun his academic career, and would go on to do other innovative research, it would always be overshadowed by the obedience work. Of the 140 or so talks he gave during his career, more than a third dealt with obedience. He was still giving invited talks on obedience in 1984, the year he died. It remains his best-known and most widely discussed work; many consider it one of the most important psychological works of the latter half of the twentieth century. Some have equated the importance of his work with that of Sigmund Freud. But Milgram was no Freud. He did not attempt an all-encompassing theory of human behavior. No “school” of thought bears his name. Whereas Freud, of course, focused on childhood and intrapsychic determinants of human behav-ior, for Milgram—following in the footsteps of Kurt Lewin, the father of experi-mental social psychology—the primary causal explanation for a person’s actions was to be found in the here and now—in the immediate, concrete social situation. However, Milgram was similar to Freud in that both of them have led to profound alterations in our thinking about human nature. 2 What Can Milgram’s Obedience Experiments Contribute? 197 As many, if not most, readers probably know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects—average and presumably normal community residents—were willing to give a series of increasingly painful and perhaps harmful electric shocks to a protesting, scream-ing victim simply because they were commanded to by an experimental authority.

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  Arguing, Obeying and Defying

  A Rhetorical Perspective on Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

  • Stephen Gibson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This general movement away from ambitious but potentially stressful experimental designs has been lamented by some in the discipline (e.g. Zimbardo, 1999), whilst others have attempted to come up with ethically more acceptable ways of conducting ambitious research designs (e.g. Reicher & Haslam, 2006). As we will see in Chapter 2, many researchers have more recently sought to follow the example of Meeus and Raaijmakers (1986, 1987, 1995) in developing paradigms with which to study obedi- ence that involve less stress for participants. However, there are still examples of experimental studies of obedience that rely on both deception and extremely stressful situations (Beauvois, Courbet & Oberlé, 2012). So, we can perhaps say that the first generation of scholarship gener- ated by the obedience experiments led to a consensus that (a) Milgram’s empirical findings were powerful and robust; (b) there were important question marks over the meaning of these findings, and in particular general agreement that Milgram’s theoretical account was inadequate and (c) that, regardless of one’s own position on the ethics of Milgram’s experiments, social psychologists had moved away from conducting research that relied on experimental designs that combined deception with stressful situations. As Blass (2012) has noted, attempts to directly engage with the empir- ical phenomena of Milgram’s experiments petered out in the mid-1980s and didn’t really get going again until the mid-2000s. The combination of increased ethical restrictions on researchers, coupled with the rise of the social cognition perspective which led research attention in different Conclusions 39 directions, undoubtedly played a key role in this hiatus. But also I suspect that, despite the heated debate around Milgram’s studies, the relative lack of attention given to them for a period of (roughly) 20 years is due in part to a sense in which we thought we knew what they were about, and what the relevant debates were.

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  Stanley Milgram

  Understanding Obedience and its Implications

  • Peter Lunt(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  However, the experiments have captured the public imagination beyond the boundaries of academia. Blass (2004) documents how Milgram’s obedience experiments have become part of popular culture reflected in songs such as Peter Gabriel’s ‘We do what we’re told (Milgram’s 37)’ on his album So. Conceptual artist Rod Dickinson presented a detailed stage re-enactment of the Milgram experiments at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow in 2002. A number of plays have been written inspired by the obedience experiments including Dannie Abse’s play ‘The Dogs of Pavlov’ (Blass, 2004). Like a film or a book, Milgram’s experiment offers a setting and a cast of characters and allows the action to unfold as a narrative offering us the chance to think through general questions of human nature and society. In this chapter I will explore the discussion of Milgram’s findings in writings in the history of psychology, moral theory, sociology and media studies which creates an impression of the manifold interpretations afforded by his research. The intellectual range of these questions also reflects Milgram’s eclecticism. We read Milgram today through the lens of the way that subsequent writers take up, rework, contest and elaborate the underlying questions and concerns in his work. This sharpens the analysis of the assumptions made by Milgram in framing and writing about his research. Conceptions of what counts as critical social science, of individuality and individualism, of the morality of virtue and of the operations of power have all changed significantly since Milgram’s day

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  Psychology

  Selected Papers

  • Gina Rossi(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  For example, homosexuals often conform to the norms of the group they belong to but turn out to be non-conformist compared with the remaining society of heterosexuals. Reference to homosexuals enables us to remember how, next to the influence of the majority, precisely in the studies of Asch, there is also an influence of the minority (Moscovici, 1976). Assigning a central role to social conflict, the minority, as for example illustrated by the history of the homosexual movement, have shown that it is possible to induce a change in the majority. 3. Obedience If for the studies of Asch we can speak of a conformism in words the research conducted by Stanley Milgram (1974) on obedience describes instead how conformity comes to involve conduct. Obedience is a particular form of conformity: it manifests itself when the “majority” is not a quantitative dimension but qualitative. At the bottom of this there is a difference of status: the one who exercises a power superior to others operates a direct explicit pressure on them, who adapt to his will. 3.1 Immoral orders and dilemmas of conscience “We will pay you $4.00 for one hour of your time. People needed for a study of memory”. With this announcement published in a local newspaper participants were recruited to the first of a series of experiments which signalled the story of social psychology (Milgram, 1974). Those who had responded to the announcement were invited to a laboratory to carry out actions which became more and more in contrast with their moral conscience. What interested the experimenters was to understand to what point the participants would obey Psychology – Selected Papers 280 to orders and when or how they would rebel. To make the prearranged situation credible a particular strategy was used: staging an experiment which had as its fictitious objective the study of processes of memory and learning; two participants were assigned the roles of teacher and learner.

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