The perils of obedience
"Be quiet! Write this down." How often have you heard this, or something like it? We hear or come across commands, instructions, directions and orders every day. What is it that makes us obey (or disobey) them?
Millions of people were killed in Nazi Germany in concentration camps but Hitler couldn't have killed them all, nor could a handful of people. What made all those people follow the orders they were given? Were they afraid, or was there something in their personality that made them like that? In order to obey authority, the obeying person has to accept that it is legitimate (i.e. rightful, legal) for the command to be made of them.
Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way.
Obedience occurs when you are told to do something (authority), whereas conformity happens through social pressure (the norms of the majority). Obedience involves a hierarchy of power / status. Therefore, the person giving the order has a higher status than the person receiving the order.
Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962 for his part in organizing the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people, as well as gypsies, communists and trade unionists were transported to death camps and murdered in Nazi Germany and surrounding countries under Nazi control.
Eichmann was a logistical genius whose part in the Holocaust was the planning of the efficient collection, transportation and extermination of those to be killed. At his trial in 1961, Eichmann expressed surprise at being hated by Jewish people, saying that he had merely obeyed orders, and surely obeying orders could only be a good thing. In his jail diary Eichmann wrote 'The orders were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question'.
Eichmann was declared sane by six psychiatrists, he had a normal family life and observers at his trial described him as very average. Given that there appears to be nothing particularly unusual about Eichmann, we must face the uncomfortable possibility that his behaviour was the product of the social situation in which he found himself, and that under the right circumstances we may all be capable of monstrous acts.
Following the Second World War - and in particular the Holocaust - psychologists set out to investigate the phenomenon of human obedience. Early attempts to explain the Holocaust had focused on the idea that there was something distinctive about German culture that had allowed the Holocaust to take place.
Stanley Milgram set out to test the research question 'are Germans different?' at Yale University just one year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.
At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram). They drew straws to determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a white lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).
The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair in another room with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods): please continue, the experiment requires you to continue, it is absolutely essential that you continue and you have no other choice but to continue. 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram found that we are all surprisingly obedient to people in authority. In one of the most famous series of experiments in psychology Milgram demonstrated that most participants would give a helpless victim fatal electric shocks when ordered to. Milgram later ran 18 variations of the basic study, to find out more about the particular factors which might influence obedience.
The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory type conditions and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations. We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience.
Milgram's sample was biased: The participants in Milgram's study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
In Milgram's study the participants were a self-selecting sample. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement they may also have a typical "volunteer personality" – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so. Finally, they probably all had a similar income since they were willing to spend some hours working for a given amount of money.
There are several ethical issues with Milgram’s study the first of which being deception. The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram's. Another issue would be protection of participants. However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.
It is shocking to realise what lines people will cross if subject to an authority figure; as much as we may think that if asked to do something abhorrent we would refuse, that morality would outweigh fear and submission to authority, the truth is that it will probably not yet we do not question a society which relies entirely on this mindless subjugation we just follow the crowd, no question, no demand for reason. No care all responsibility.