The Obedience Experiments

Yale University psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted a seminal series of experiments between 1960 and 1963 which examined how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to do so by an experimental scientist. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study. Although people were instructed to do something that they fundamentally did not want to do, their resulting anxiety and tension did not predict disobedience, underscoring the power of authority to override the dictates of conscious. In his 1986 publication, The Obedience Experiments, Arthur G. Miller presents and evaluates these experiments, providing a summary of empirical support and appraisals that have developed amongst social psychologists and other professionals as a result of this landmark work.

The study itself encompassed over one thousand individual participants, each experiment using a similarly balanced distribution of subjects according to age and socioeconomic status. The construction of the experiments was such that each subject believed they were involved in a study of "learning and punishment". An experimenter ordered the participant (assigned as a "teacher") to give what the subject believed were painful electric shocks to a "learner", who was actually a confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving increasingly severe electrical shocks as administered by a series of leavers at the subject's disposal. In actual fact, there were no real shocks involved. Obedience was measured in terms of the average maximum shock level administered by the subjects, as well as the percentage obeying to the maximum (450-volt) level against clear protests from the learner. If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of increasingly persistent verbal prods by the experimenter. If the subject still wished to stop after four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

Variations in the specific setting in terms of status, position, peer influence, and experimenter proximity to the subject were all associated with the largest influence on obedience. Other seemingly important factors, such as gender, personnel characteristics, locale, and the presence of a contractual agreement proved to have little effect. In general, it was not the substance of the setting or command, but the source of authority that was the decisive factor. That is, participants appeared to focus almost exclusively on who was giving the instruction.

Milgram's central concept was that of the agentic shift describing the tendency of people to deny responsibility when they define themselves as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others. Certain background factors such as the socialisation of obedience and contextual settings (including the "look" of an authority figure and the "authenticity" of the institution he/she inhabits) add to the extent to which one tunes into an agentic state, binding that individual to a hierarchical structure and enhancing the likelihood of obedience. Appraisal of Milgram's work has been widespread and mixed, focussing both on methodological and theoretical/conceptual aspects. In general, while the originality and scope of the experiments is highly regarded, there still remains controversy over the objectivity and ethics of the methodology as well as the empirical support for his theory. As Miller notes, the status of the agentic shift must certainly be regarded as "unproven".

I agree that Milgram's experiments were undoubtedly influential in casting light onto the Nazi atrocities discovered after World War II. Milgram himself suggested that one of the major factors accounting for the Holocaust was the ready propensity of human beings to obey authorities even when obedience is wrong. The Nazi regime operated under a fiercely intense social structure whereby ordinary people quickly became agents in a terribly destructive process without any particular hostility on their part. In fact, the Germans who ran the death camps were often reported as ordinary "decent" citizens, with consciences no different from those of any of us. Yet even when the destructive effects of their work became patently clear, and they were asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few Nazi's were found to possess the resources needed to resist their clearly defined authority.