Stanley Milgram, a prominent social psychologist of the mid-20th century, conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments that challenged our perception of human behaviour in the face of authority. Milgram’s work, known as the Milgram Experiment, shed light on the power of obedience, conformity, and the potential for individuals to commit unethical acts under the influence of authority figures. In this blog post, we will explore the key concepts behind Milgram’s experiments and their lasting impact on our understanding of human behaviour.
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1. The Milgram Experiment
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram set out to investigate how ordinary individuals could willingly commit acts that contradicted their moral principles. The Milgram Experiment involved a participant, known as the “teacher,” who was instructed to administer electric shocks to another participant, the “learner,” in the presence of an authoritative figure, the “experimenter.” The shocks were, in reality, harmless, and the learner was an actor pretending to experience pain. The experiment aimed to study to what extent individuals would obey orders, even if it meant causing harm to others.
Summary from Experiment
1.1. Stanley Milgram recruited participants who believed they were taking part in a study on memory and learning.
1.2. The participants were assigned the role of a “teacher” and were instructed to administer electric shocks to another person, who was actually an actor.
1.3. The shocks increased in intensity with each incorrect answer given by the actor.
1.4. The participants were observed to measure their obedience and willingness to continue shocking the actor despite their discomfort.
1.5. Milgram found that a significant number of participants were willing to administer potentially harmful shocks when instructed to do so by an authority figure.
2. Obedience to Authority
One of the key concepts that emerged from Milgram’s experiments was the striking power of authority over individuals. Despite expressing discomfort and moral dilemmas, participants often continued to administer shocks when urged by the experimenter. Milgram found that around 65% of participants were willing to administer the maximum shock level simply because they were told to do so. This revealed the innate tendency of people to comply with authority figures, even against their better judgement.
3. Proximity and Legitimacy
Milgram also found that the physical proximity between the teacher and the learner heavily influenced obedience levels. When the teacher had to administer shocks by directly placing the learner’s hand on an electric plate, compliance dropped significantly compared to when the teacher only had to issue verbal commands. Additionally, the presence and legitimacy of the experimenter played a crucial role in determining obedience rates. Milgram’s research showed that individuals were more likely to obey if the authority figure was perceived as legitimate and carried an air of expertise.
4. Conformity and Personal Responsibility
Milgram’s experiments demonstrated the profound impact social pressure can have on individual decision-making. Participants often expressed a sense of relief and justified their actions based on the assumption that others would also act similarly under the given circumstances. This phenomenon indicates the significant role conformity plays in dictating behaviour, and highlights a tendency to relinquish personal responsibility when surrounded by a group engaging in questionable actions.
5. Ethical Considerations
While Milgram’s experiments provided valuable insights into human behaviour, they also raised ethical concerns regarding the potentially harmful psychological effects on participants. The experiments induced stress, anxiety, and even feelings of deep remorse in individuals who believed they had harmed another person. These ethical considerations have prompted researchers to adopt more rigorous guidelines and safeguards to protect participants in subsequent studies.
Conclusion
Stanley Milgram’s experiments revolutionised our understanding of obedience, authority, conformity, and the human capacity for both good and evil actions. His research challenged long-held assumptions about individual autonomy, shedding light on the powerful influence exerted by authority figures. Milgram’s work continues to shape our understanding of obedience and serves as a cautionary reminder of the potential dangers of blindly following authority, urging us to remain vigilant and critical of our actions in the face of perceived authority.
Human beings have a natural inclination to follow authority, often complying with requests or orders from those perceived as superior. This propensity to obey has fascinated psychologists for decades, leading to experiments and studies aimed at understanding the intricate psychology behind obedience. From Stanley Milgram’s controversial obedience experiments to real-life scenarios, it is crucial to explore how obedience emerges and its potential consequences for society. In this blog post, we delve into the fascinating psychology of obedience to shed light on this complex aspect of human behaviour.
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1. The Milgram Experiments: The Power of Authority
Stanley Milgram’s famous series of experiments conducted in the 1960s aimed to comprehend individuals’ willingness to obey authority figures, even when their actions conflicted with their conscience. The results were shocking, with a significant majority of participants complying with orders to deliver potentially lethal electric shocks to innocent individuals. Milgram’s findings revealed the considerable influence authority figures possess over ordinary individuals and how obedience can override one’s moral compass.
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2. Factors Influencing Obedience
Numerous factors contribute to our willingness to obey authority. First and foremost, the perceived legitimacy and credibility of an authority figure play a crucial role. Their status, expertise, and reputation influence our trust and inclination to comply. Additionally, individuals with a strong need for social approval may be more likely to obey, seeking validation and acceptance from authority figures and their peers. The sense of responsibility for one’s actions can also diminish when obeying orders, as individuals may shift blame to the authority rather than taking personal accountability.
3. The Power of Conformity
Obedience often goes hand in hand with conformity, emphasising the significant impact society and peers have on our behaviours. The fear of standing out or being ostracised often drives individuals to obey, even if they may feel uncomfortable doing so. Peer pressure, societal norms, and cultural expectations can strongly influence our obedience to authority.
4. The Dark Side of Obedience
While obedience can serve as a pillar of societal order and cooperation, it can also have detrimental consequences. History bears witness to numerous instances where obedience to authority led to horrific acts, such as the atrocities of the Holocaust or the Milgram experiments themselves. Blindly following orders without ethical considerations can perpetuate social injustices, highlighting the importance of fostering critical thinking and moral reasoning alongside obedience.
5. Resisting Obedience: The Role of Dissent
Understanding the psychology of obedience also involves exploring the counterforce of resistance. Whether it be whistleblowers, activists, or everyday individuals, dissenters play a vital role in questioning authority and shedding light on potential abuses of power. By encouraging critical thinking, empowering individuals to challenge authority, and fostering collective accountability, societies can strike a balance between obedience and the need for moral consciousness.
Conclusion
The psychology of obedience is a multi-faceted phenomenon whose study sheds light on the complex dynamics of human behaviour. Through experiments like Milgram’s, we observe how individuals can become agents of harm under pressure from authority. While obedience can have positive implications, such as maintaining societal order, it is crucial to foster critical thinking skills, individual autonomy, and a sense of responsibility for one’s actions. Only by understanding the forces that drive obedience can we strive for greater awareness and a shared commitment to ethical conduct.
When I began this journey in Forensic Psychology, I did not expect to learn as much as I have. The main tenet of this career consists in understanding psychopathy, and psychopathology.
It does make me question authoritarianism and the ways in which it can manifest. For instance, Milgram and Adorno et al. studied the psychology of obedience under pressure, and how following orders led to the holocaust. An aspect that has been questioned little is how scarcity or the fear of scarcity has led to similar phenomena due to how people have been conditioned to see money as an enabler of everyday behaviour. For instance, when Milgram conducted his obedience experiments during the 60s, he monetarily rewarded his participants for taking part in the studies. Modern psychologists have attempted to re-examine the dynamics at Yale’s laboratory and what might have led the participants to show that they were capable of being sadistic under such conditions. An example is Gibson’s (2013) work which meticulously examines the prods given by the experimenter. In a way, Gibson seeked to understand how the orders and requests given by the authority figure contributed to the decision-making processes of the participants. However, I have not come across much research highlighting the role of the monetary incentive in everyday behaviour; or how being given a monetary incentive places a subconscious obligation on individuals to comply with requests, even if such requests at times make them feel uncomfortable.
The c/s/x movement, also known as ‘the psychiatric survivors movement‘ (Wikipedia, n.d.) explores how a large number of individuals report feeling or having felt dehumanised by the mental health system. For the unstigmatised person, it is often more common to assume that all these people expressing dissatisfaction with the system are crazy, than to understand the nature of what it means to respect a person’s dignity and human rights. It is quite a complex situation, because it is unclear what reinforces and keeps some mental health settings from actively listening to their patients’ concerns.
According to Turner (2015), signal detection theory (SDT) “describes processes whereby information that is important to the perceiver (known as the ‘signal’) is distinguished from other information that is unimportant and potentially distracting (known as the ‘noise’). It is my hypothesis that some of the inherently dehumanising behaviours occurring in the mental health system happen as a result of the hyper-normalisation of object-relations with patients. As I mentioned on my post ‘Investigating the neuropsychopathologyof prejudice‘, people can at times perceive those with stereotyped and stigmatised characteristics as non-human objects. This would of course increase the chance of mental health settings staff processing signals coming from clients as background noise, rather than as worth-listening-to human signals. Such established conscious and unconscious behaviours leading to the dehumanisation of many clients are reinforced through monetary incentives, and through an intragroup, mob-like co-validation of such unconscious biases. Like Eichmann, many live their lives constantly affirming to themselves that they were just following procedures and orders, or just doing their job; and therefore they believe it is not their responsibility to reflect on how clients are impacted by this. But the signals coming from mental health patients often stand in stark contrast to the common belief that these dehumanising, and at times non-empathic methods are appropriate, or even de facto acceptable.
I do think everyone deserves to be paid for their labour, and that having access to a basic form of income is an important foundation in any society; and I also think that mental health settings need to be encouraged or trained appropriately to detect clients’ signals as more than just background noise (i.e. as more than non-human objects signals) in order to reduce risk outcomes. The situation is problematic, persistent, and pervasive with these manifestations of authoritarianism in mental health settings. It would indeed be arrogant to assume that all the patients/clients expressing dissatisfaction with the service are wrong, or to culturally pathologise reasonable dissent. It would also be irresponsible and de jure unacceptable to fail to take steps towards alleviating feelings of ‘being dehumanised’ in civil society, especially if such feelings of dehumanisation have the potential to lead to never events, such as suicide.
Turner, J. (2015) ‘Making sense of the world’, in Turner, J. and Barker, M. J. (eds) Living Psychology: From the Everyday to the Extraordinary, Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 7-45.
Nazi Germany was a true source of critical inquiry for academics worldwide. The work of Adorno et al. about authoritarianism through psychoanalytic theory, and the work of Stanley Milgram about obedience influenced by situational factors are at the core of modern forensic psychology practice. Authoritarianism can be described as an attitude spectrum encompassing all types of prejudices, that is, xenophobia; as well as extreme ideologies in regards to discipline and traditions, that is, conventionalism (McAvoy, 2012). This essay seeks to explore the studies conducted by the mentioned above pioneers of forensic psychology during the post-war period in relation to the holocaust events.
Xenophobic conventionalism was the main motivation driving the mass assassination of innocent people during WWII. This inspired Sanford to invite Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik and Levinson to join his psychological investigation project in the US, and they became a team often cited as “Adorno et al.” due to Harvard alphabetical referencing rules. They were interested in uncovering the unconscious psychopathology of war criminals, and this led them to create the F-scale (McAvoy, 2012). Based on psychoanalytic theory, they administered questionnaires and interviews to the masses in order to validate their hypotheses which drew a correlation between extreme childhood trauma and overboard adult attitudes to authority (McAvoy, 2012). The trials being held at Nuremberg, Germany, were a powerful motivator behind social psychology research after the war (Bayard, 2012). Stanley Milgram studied Adorno et al.’s work meticulously and was interested in understanding authoritarian obedience and how it related to irresponsible cruelty. After watching the globally broadcasted trial of Adolf Eichmann in television during 1961, Milgram realised that ordinary people were capable of committing great acts of violence when following orders (Banyard, 2012). Through systematic procedures and pressure from authoritarian figures, a death toll that today approximates seventeen million minority individuals was achieved. Homosexuals, dissenters, jews, activists, disabled people, and foreigners; all brutally discriminated against and murdered (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2019). Milgram designed a social experiment in order to better understand the link between conscience, executive obedience, and authority in organised war crimes.
Adorno et al. (1950, p. V) saw prejudice as a mental health virus: “Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence during which the social scientists […] can study it […] to prevent or reduce the virulence of the next outbreak”. They devised the F-scale with its subscales of ethnocentrism, politico-conservatism, and antisemitism (McAvoy, 2012). They used both, quantitative and qualitative methods: “Individuals were studied by means of interviews and special clinical techniques for revealing underlying wishes, fears, and defenses; groups were studied by means of questionnaires” (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 12).Tests had statements with predetermined scores that individuals could agree or disagree with. The interviews allowed the researchers to double-check whether a participant’s general demeanor matched the anti-democratic scores.Nevertheless, the overall study was not enough to determine the direction of the effect of authoritarianism, nor could this predict whether someone with the potential for fascism would actually act on their attitudes and join a fascist movement (McAvoy, 2012). “The modification of the potentially fascist structure cannot be achieved by psychological means alone. The task is comparable to that of eliminating neurosis, or delinquency, or nationalism from the world” (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 975).
Social psychologist Stanley Milgram was impacted by such results. He modified the F-scale that Adorno et al. had created (Milgram, n.d.). After witnessing the trial of ordinary-looking Adolf Eichmann, Milgram (1962) wanted to understand the difference between free and forced obedience in everyday life. He (Milgram, 1965, p. 57) reported: “In its more general form the problem may be defined thus: If X tells Y to hurt Z, under what conditions will Y carry out the command of X and under what conditions will he refuse [?]”. Questions like these had led him to design the base condition to test 40 normal-looking young males in 1962. They each would arrive at Yale University and would be greeted by an experimenter wearing a white coat. An actor played the role of fellow participant. Everything was standardised, from the laboratory, to the confederates, and the apparatus (Banyard, 2012). Participants were asked to administer potentially lethal electric shocks to the actor playing learner. The electric shock machine looked realistic, but was only a prop. Milgram found that indeed normal people had the potential to harm with some pressure from an authority figure. Milgram (1963, p. 371) called this phenomena “destructive obedience in the laboratory”. He then administered the questionnaires to ratify the participants’ valence.
The studies conducted by Adorno et al. (authoritarianism) and Stanley Milgram (obedience) gave forensic psychologists much detail in terms of personality, situational factors/influences, authority, and compliance in the system (Byford, 2017). Monetary incentives were offered to participants in both studies: “This was the only way to insure that the staff of the Study would not be conscience-stricken” (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 26). WWII was a common theme in both approaches: “Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances […] Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose” (Milgram, 1963, p. 371). Both experiments were carried out in the US, made use of pen and paper questionnaires, and included qualitative assessments; although the conditions, apparatuses, and procedures were completely different. The results were controversial enough to elicit a lot of attention from the general public in both cases. Adorno et al.’s work was criticised for being based on psychoanalytic theory, and for the risk of acquiescence response bias (McAvoy, 2012). Milgram’s work got him in serious ethical trouble due to what he was able to uncover about his subjects; and how this impacted their real life, identities, and reputations (Banyard, 2012). Both teams reported their findings through writing, although Milgram also created a documentary about his experiment (Obedience, 1962).
As it can be observed, there are many substantial similarities between Adorno et al.’s and Milgram’s experiments, even if these are different when it comes to structure. One preceded the next, and one added to the other. Authority and its relation to obedience can be better appreciated by drawing a correlation between the two approaches studied above. The results shed light on personality, and how adult behaviour can be a result of individual differences, as well as of contextual circumstances. Adorno et. al studied the master, and Milgram studied the slave. The general conclusion? Both sides are equally dangerous.
References
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. and Sanford, R.N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, New York, Harper.
Banyard, P. (2012) ‘Just following orders?’, in Brace, N. and Byford, J. (eds) Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 61-95.
Byford, J. (2017) ‘The importance of replication’, in McAvoy, J. and Brace, N. (eds) Investigating Methods, Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 47-82.
McAvoy, J. (2012) ‘Exposing the Authoritarian Personality”, in Brace N. and Byford, J. (eds) Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 14-56
