Just Following Orders

Just Following Orders: A Genocide in the 90's

Ethnic cleansing: This chilling term, used in the war fought in the fragments of the former Yugoslavia, was employed by Serbian leaders to explain the need to root out people of non-Serbian ancestry. The leaders' arguments: Their country required purification in order to protect the majority from the presumed offenses of the minority. To others, it was an excuse for genocide, a policy in which a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group is destroyed. "Ethnic Cleansing" was used to justify the death and displacement of tens of thousands of people. It was a justification that had its roots in the unbridled hatred of the Nazi regime in Germany. There, millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities were sent to concentration camps and murdered.

Serbian soldiers conducted the ethnic cleansing with a vengeance. They burned homes, murdered, and carried out systematic rapes of Muslim and Croat women - all under the command of their superior officers. And for many of the soldiers who participated, it was their superior officers who provided them with the excuse for their conduct. When asked how they could participate in the ethnic cleansing, they said they had no choice - they were only following orders. (Feldman, 1995)

I. Definition of Obedience

Obedience is in fact, a social pressure as a result of a direct command. It is socially influenced and in the form of demand, by the most direct technique to change another's behavior - which is through ordering. To further differentiate it from compliance and conformity, Feldman (1995) provides us with the following:

Social Influence

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• Most direct: Obedience - a change in behavior due to the commands of others
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• Midway: Compliance - yielding to a direct, explicit appeal meant to produce certain behavior or agreement to a particular point of view
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• Most Indirect: Conformity - change in behavior or attitude brought about by a desire to follow the beliefs or standards of others
  
• 
  

Obedience is quite different from compliance and conformity, although they are all phenomena in relation to social influence. Unlike being gently guided or steered toward a particular position, obedience is a result of a more active approach to social influence. Direct orders are meant to elicit direct submission.

This approach is less common than conformity or compliance. It is proven effective for authority sources with mean of enforcing directives (i.e. reward, and punishment). (Baron & Byrne, 1991)

Obedience occurs when people follow a direct command. From a young age, we are taught to be obedient to parents and teachers. Through experience, we learn that it is wise to obey other authority figures, such as doctors, judges, and employers. In general, obedience is socially useful. For example, the theory behind police officers is that their commands should be followed for the well being of society and an army runs much smoother with obedience from its soldiers. But, when obedience is taken to an extreme, people often perform heinous acts, like the mass killing of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. This tragic result of extreme obedience was a contributing impetus to the most famous and often cited experiment on obedience: Stanley Milgram's Electric Shock Experiment. And this is what this article is all about destructive obedience.

Milgram, a social psychologist from Yale University, performed his initial experiment forty times, each time on a different individual from the New Haven area. The experiment involved two people arriving at the laboratory for what they were told was an experiment to test the effects of punishment on learning. The naive volunteer was to be the teacher, who administered an increasingly strong electric shock each time the learner answered wrong or provided no response to questions testing memory of word pairs. The learner, an amiable, middle-aged man who mentioned a mild heart condition, was actually a professional actor working as a confederate of the experimenter. The experiment will be thoroughly discussed in part III.

Importance of Obedience

Obedience to authority is a basic tenant of any human social organization. Virtually every society has developed some sort of hierarchy in which some individuals exercise a degree of authority over others. For example, teachers have authority over their students; police officers have authority over members of the public.

Basically, its hard to conceive of a society that could function without this type of arrangement. However, there are times when private belief and compliance with those in authority may come into conflict. The resolution of this type of conflict represents one of the oldest problems in philosophy and religion. Abraham, when commanded by God to kill his son, was torn between his love of his son and his obedience to God. Obedience to authority is a form of compliance and as such it has been studied in the laboratories' of social psychologists for 30 years.

II. Theories on Destructive Obedience

When Stanley Milgram began his career at Yale University in 1960 he had a plan to prove, scientifically, that Germans are different. The Germans-are-different hypothesis has been used by historians, such as William L. Shirer, to explain the systematic destruction of the Jews by the Third Reich. One madman could decide to destroy the Jews and even create a master plan for getting it done. But to implement it on the scale that Hitler did meant that thousands of other people had to go along with the scheme and help to do the work. The Shirer thesis, which Milgram set out to test, is that Germans have a basic character flaw which explains the whole thing, and this flaw is a readiness to obey authority without question, no matter what outrageous acts the authority commands.

The appealing thing about this theory is that it makes those of us who are not Germans feel better about the whole business. Obviously, you and I are not Hitler, and it seems equally obvious that we would never do Hitler's dirty work for him. But now, because of Stanley Milgram, we are compelled to wonder. Milgram developed a laboratory experiment which provided a systematic way to measure obedience. His plan was to try it out in New Haven on Americans and then go to Germany and try it out on Germans. He was strongly motivated by scientific curiosity, but there was also some moral content in his decision to pursue this line of research, which was, in turn, colored by his own Jewish background. If he could show that Germans are more obedient than Americans, he could then vary the conditions of the experiment and try to find out just what it is that makes some people more obedient than others. With this understanding, the world might, conceivably, be just a little bit better.

But he never took his experiment to Germany. He never took it any farther than Bridgeport. The first finding, also the most unexpected and disturbing finding, was that we Americans are an obedient people: not blindly obedient, and not blissfully obedient, just obedient. "I found so much obedience," says Milgram softly, a little sadly, "I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany."

Miller in 1986 formulated the "normality thesis" - the idea that evil acts are not necessarily performed by abnormal or "crazy" people. Average individuals who see themselves as mere agents in an organization, carrying out orders of those in command, can behave in destructive ways. (Peplau, Sears, & Taylor, 1991)

The Eichmann Defense - "just obeying orders" is also now a common concept. Adolph Eichmann was a dedicated career bureaucrat under the infamous Adolf Hitler, and through him, Jews from throughout Europe were systematically rounded up and shipped to concentration camps where they were starved, gassed, shot, cremated, and buried in mass graves. He had fled to Argentina after the war where he was ultimately captured. He was tried for murder. His defense was the he was not personally responsible for the deaths of the Jews, because he had simply been following orders. The argument was rejected, and he was held accountable for his crimes and put to death. The "Eichmann defense" has come to stand for the claim that a person is justified in committing terrible actions because he or she is "just following orders." (Peplau, Sears, and Taylor, 1991)

As to why Milgram was effective, the concept of impingement (attempted control of another's overt actions) arose from the part of the experimenter. Crano and Messe (1982) forwarded the following explanations:

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• The subjects' reluctance to ruin an important scientific study, though unhappy about having to deliver painful shocks, they were even less happy about the prospect of impeding scientific progress.
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• Milgram's role as scientist afforded him a great deal of authority and credibility. The subjects believed he knew what he was doing. He was able to apply considerable amount of social pressure as a result of a scientist role. He brought them to bear the whole weight of science, the scientific community, as well as its progress as social pressure
  
• 
  

Solomon Asch (1951) studies in impingement and conformity, together with these facts from Milgram reinforces 3 major conclusions:

1. 
   
2. Social Pressure can be a powerful weapon of behavior control
3. 
   
4. Threatened negative consequences for noncompliance that are integral of many impingement attempts need not be drawn explicitly
5. 
   
6. There are a couple of sources of social pressure - consensus of judgment (Asch), prestige and value of science & authority (Milgram)
7. 
   
8. There is an implying connection between desired behavior and resultant reward
   
9. 
   

III. Studies Conducted on Destructive Obedience (Focus on Milgram)

Milgram's experiment doesn't begin in a laboratory, but rather a lecture theatre where a group of psychiatrists, university students (14 Yale psychology majors) and middle-class adults of various occupations and ages have gathered to listen to a lecture on obedience to authoity. During the lecture, Milgram asks the audience to imagine the following situation (Obedience to Authority, 1997):

In response to a newspaper add offering $4.50 for one hour's work, you turn up at Yale University to take part in a Psychology experiment investigating memory and learning. You are introduced to a stern looking experimenter in a white coat and a rather pleasant and friendly co-subject. The experimenter explains that the experiment will look into the role of punishment in learning, and that one of you will be the teacher and one will be the learner. You draw lots to determine roles, and it is decided that you become the teacher. The three of you then proceed to an adjacent room, where the "learner" is strapped into a chair.

The experimenter explains that this is to prevent excessive movement during the experiment, but its pretty obvious to you that the learner could not escape from the chair if he wished. Then, an electrode is attached to the learners arm, and conductive gel as applied to the electrode. The experimenter explains that this is to prevent burning and blisters. Both you and the learner are told that the electrode is attached to a electric shock generator in the other room, and that electric shocks will serve as punishment for incorrect responses. The learner asks the experimenter if "the shocks will hurt" to which the experimenter replies: "although the shocks will be painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage".
You leave the learner in his room and return to the other room where the experimenter shows you the shock generator. The generator has 30 switches, each is labelled with a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts.

Each switch also has a rating, ranging from "slight shock" to "danger: severe shock". The final two switches are labelled "XXX". You are told that your role is to teach the learner a simple paired associate task, but that you must punish him for incorrect responses. You are told that for every incorrect response you must increase the voltage by 15 volts (ie one more switch). The experimented gives you a 15 volt shock (enough to make you arm tingle) to check that the generator is functioning correctly. Now the experiment begins. The learner finds the task difficult and makes numerous errors. Each error results in a higher voltage shock than the previous one. To begin with the shocks are weak, but soon they become more intense. At 75 volts you can hear the learner "grunt" through the wall. The same thing happens at90 and 105 volts. At 120 volts the learner says the shocks are getting painful. You know, because you can hear him through the wall. At 150 he cries "get me out of here! I refuse to go on!"

His protests continue as the voltage gets higher and higher. If at this point, or any other point, of the experiment you question whether you should be continuing, the experimenter tells you to keep going, using such reasons as "you can't stop now", "he is getting paid to do this experiment" or that "the experiment depends on your continuing compliance". He may even say "you have no choice". As the shocks increase the learner screams out "I can't stand the pain!" At 300 volts he begins pounding on the wall and demands to be let out. After 330 volts there is no longer any noise from the learner. At this point the experimenter tells you that the learner's failure to respond should be interpreted as an incorrect response and to continue increasing the shock level. Soon either the highest shock level is reached or the learning task is completed and the experiment concludes.

Following the lecture (described above), each audience member is asked to privately record how he or she would have acted. All of the audience groups responded similarly. They all saw themselves as disobeying the experimenter somewhere early on in the experiment. On average, the psychologists said they would have stopped when the voltage level reached 120. For the university students it was 135. Remember, this is about the level when the learner would have first protested about the pain. Nobody in any group said they would have continued beyond 300 volts. He put it this way: Out of one hundred persons in the teacher's predicament, how would their break-off points be distributed along the 15-to-450-volt scale? They thought a few would break off very early, most would quit someplace in the middle and a few would go all the way to the end. The highest estimate of the number out of one hundred who would go all the way to the end was three. Milgram then informally polled some of his fellow scholars in the psychology department. They agreed that very few would go to the end. Milgram thought so too.

When asked to explain their disobedience, the audience members responded that they "didn't want to hurt anyone". In other words, the audience saw their disobedience as stemming from their empathy for the subject and compassion for those in pain and a sense of fairness. The psychologists predicted that only 4% of the teachers would progress beyond 300 volts. The students said that 0.1% would reach the highest level on the generator. These latter cases (who would use the highest voltage setting) were described by the psychologists as "pathological sadists".

The experiment described above could have been a hypothetical situation, but in fact the experiment described in the introduction page actually took place! Not only that, but the results were completely different to those predicted by the various audience members to whom the experiment was described.

When Milgram conducted the study, he found that with a little bit of coaxing, the majority (60%) of subjects would administer shocks right through to 450 volts. The people administering the shocks were not "pathological sadists" as the psychologists had described them, but normal everyday people.

This was how Milgram felt about it: "I'll tell you quite frankly," he says, "before I began this experiment, before any shock generator was built, I thought that most people would break off at 'Strong Shock' or 'Very Strong Shock.' You would get only a very very small proportion of people going out to the end of the shock generator and they would constitute a pathological fringe." (Meyer, 1970)

In his pilot experiments, Milgram used Yale students as subjects. Each of them pushed the shock switches, one by one, all the way to the end of the board. So he rewrote the script to include some protests from the learner. At first, they were mild, gentlemanly, Yalie protests, but, "it didn't seem to have as much effect as I thought it would or should," Milgram recalls. "So we had more violent protestation on the part of the person getting the shock. All of the time, of course, what we were trying to do was not to create a macabre situation, but simply to generate disobedience. And that was one of the first findings. This was not only a technical deficiency of the experiment, that we didn't get disobedience. It really was the first finding, that obedience would be much greater than we had assumed it would be and that disobedience would be much more difficult than we had assumed." (Leda, 1990)

As it turned out, the situation did become rather macabre. The only meaningful way to generate disobedience was to have the victim protest with great anguish, noise, and vehemence. The protests were tape-recorded so that all the teachers ordinarily would hear the same sounds, and they started with a grunt at 75 volts, proceeded through a "Hey, that really hurts," at 125 volts, got desperate with, "I can't stand the pain, don't do that," at 180 volts, reached complaints of heart trouble at 195 volts, an agonized scream at 285 volts, a refusal to answer at 315 volts, and only heart-rending, ominous silence after that.

Still, sixty-five percent of the subjects, twenty- to fifty-year-old American males, obediently kept pushing those levers in the belief that they were shocking the mild-mannered learner, whose name was Mr. Wallace, and who was chosen for the role because of his innocent appearance, all the way up to 450 volts.

In detail, this is how the actual experiment went, according to Meyer:

If you were an innocent subject in Milgram's melodrama, you read an ad in the newspaper or received one in the mail asking for volunteers for an educational experiment. The job would take about an hour and pay $4.50. So you make an appointment and go to an old Romanesque stone structure on High Street with the imposing name of The Yale Interaction Laboratory. It looks something like a broadcasting studio. Inside, you meet a young, crew-cut man in a laboratory coat who says he is Jack Williams, the experimenter. There is another citizen, fiftyish, with an Irish face, an accountant, a little overweight, and very mild and harmless-looking. This other citizen seems nervous and plays with his hat while the two of you sit in chairs side by side and are told that the $4.50 checks are yours no matter what happens. Then you listen to Jack Williams explain the experiment.

It is about learning, says Jack Williams in a quiet, knowledgeable way. Science does not know much about the conditions under which people learn and this experiment is to find out about negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is getting punished when you do something wrong, as opposed to positive reinforcement which is getting rewarded when you do something right. The negative reinforcement in this case is electric shock. You notice a book on the table, titled The Teaching-Learning Process, and you assume that this has something to do with the experiment.

Then Jack Williams takes two pieces of paper, puts them in a hat, and shakes them up. One piece of paper is supposed to say, "Teacher" and the other, "Learner." Draw one and you will see which you will be. The mild-looking accountant draws one, holds it close to his vest like a poker player, looks at it, and says, "Learner." You look at yours. It says, "Teacher." You do not know that the drawing is rigged, and both slips say "Teacher." The experimenter beckons to the mild-mannered "learner."

"Want to step right in here and have a seat, please?" he says. "You can leave your coat on the back of that chair...roll up your right sleeve, please. Now what I want to do is strap down your arms to avoid excessive movement on your part during the experiment. This electrode is connected to the shock generator in the next room.

"And this electrode paste," he says, squeezing some stuff out of a plastic bottle and putting it on the man's arm, "is to provide a good contact and to avoid a blister or burn. Are there any questions now before we go into the next room?"

You don't have any, but the strapped-in "learner" does.

"I do think I should say this," says the learner. "About two years ago, I was at the veterans' hospital...they detected a heart condition. Nothing serious, but as long as I'm having these shocks, how strong are they - how dangerous are they?"

Williams, the experimenter, shakes his head casually. "Oh, no," he says, "Although they may be painful, they're not dangerous. Anything else?"

Nothing else. And so you play the game. The game is for you to read a series of word pairs: for example, blue-girl, nice-day, fat-neck. When you finish the list, you read just the first word in each pair and then a multiple-choice list of four other words, including the second word of the pair. The learner, from his remote, strapped-in position, pushes one of four switches to indicate which of the four answers he thinks is the right one. If he gets it right, nothing happens and you go on to the next one. If he gets it wrong, you push a switch that buzzes and gives him an electric shock. And then you go to the next word.

You start with 15 volts and increase the number of volts by 15 for each wrong answer. The control board goes from 15 volts on the one end to 450 volts on the other. So that you know what you are doing, you get a test shock yourself, at 45 volts. It hurts. To further keep you aware of what you are doing to that man in there, the board has verbal descriptions shock levels, ranging from "Slight Shock" at the left-hand side, through "Intense Shock" in the middle, to "Danger: Severe Shock" toward the far right. Finally, at the very end, under 435- and 450-volt switches, there are three ambiguous X's. If, at any point, you hesitate, Mr. Williams calmly tells you to go on. If you still hesitate, he tells you again.

Except for some terrifying details, this is the experiment. The object is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch. (Meyer, 1970)

For the most part, the experiment progresses in a manner parallel to that of Milgram's exposition, except that the "learner," being an amiable, middle-aged man mentioned a mild heart condition. And in the latter part though, when the nice old man repeatedly answered wrong and the teacher required to apply stronger shocks, the learner's response progresses from grunts, to pleas to stop, to complaints of heart pain, to shouting, to agonizing screams, to hysteria (at 330 volts.) At 375 volts there is a thud and no more responses, yet the teacher is prompted to continue the shocks, since no answer is a wrong answer. It might be thought that teachers would certainly stop at 375 volts or long before. Most subjects became visibly distressed and protested with the experimenter, but with simple prods from the experiment, such as "The experiment requires that you continue" and "You have no other choice, you must go on" the teacher was induced to increase the shocks (Milgram, 1874, 21.) Some asked if they would be held responsible, and when the experimenter assumed responsibility, they continued. The result of the experiment was obedience that surpassed even Milgram's predictions: no one stopped at less than 300 volts and 65% of subjects applied the 450 volts.

In a post-experimental interview, Milgram asked the subjects to rate how painful they thought the electric shocks would have been (on a scale of 1 to 14 where 14 is the most painful). The typical response was 14 (extremely painful). Although most of the subjects obeyed the experimenter, there were obvious signs on an intense internal struggle. Many exhibited unusual reactions such as nervous laughter, uncontrollable seizures, trembling and groaning. One of Milgram's observers recorded a particularly insightful and disturbing observation.

Although no one actually received any electric shocks, Milgram's study came under fire for the adverse it had on the "teachers". Milgram's interviews with his subjects tended to confirm the view that ordinary everyday people can cause pain and suffering to another person under the right set of circumstances. Milgram recounts one interview in particular with a devout Catholic married to a plumber... According to Milgram she gave the impression of complete humility. At 225 volts she turned to the experimenter and in a tentative voice said "I hesitate to press these". But when the experimented told her to continue, she did. Later she hesitated again, but once again, when the experimenter insisted that she continue, she did... right up to the maximum 450 volt shock.

Milgram also conducted several follow-up experiments to determine what would mediate the likelihood of maximum shock delivery. He conducted 17 more to be exact from 1965 to 1974. He repeated the experiment described above, except that this time he had four conditions. One condition (the verbal condition) was exactly the same as before, ie the "learner" was in another room but could be heard by the "teacher". In the second condition, the remote-feedback condition, the only feedback on the learner's condition was a pounding on the wall at 300 volts. In the third condition, the proximity condition, the learner was seated right next to the teacher. In the fourth and final condition, the touch-proximity condition, the teacher was required to hold the hand of the learner on a "shock plate" in order to give him shocks above 150 volts. He performed such studies in laboratory simulations, in the Yale University Campus, in a run-down office building, and in several different nations; Jordan, West Germany, and Australia to mention a few, also with children and adults as subjects. (Kilham & Mann, 1974 and Shanab & Yahya, 1977)

Milgram's experiment has been performed many times by himself and other researchers on thousands of subjects to confirm its validity. The confirmed results show that certain situational factors can induce extreme obedience, and the obedience can be so strong that normal people can be made to perform cruel acts against their moral judgment.

Luckily, this sobering conclusion is not the only thing taken from Milgram's experiment. In subsequent experiments, Milgram altered certain variables to determine exactly what were the situational factors that affected obedience. (Peplau, Sears, & Taylor, 1991 and Penner, 1986)

1. 
   
2. Victim Proximity: The closer the teacher to the learner - some were brought into the same room, some were seated right next to the teacher - the lower the obedience. they were a matter of only feet away from each other. The obedience rate of 40% was still high however, participants were clearly more uncomfortable to see the effects of their shocks.
3. 
   
4. Authority Figure Proximity: The closer the experimenter to the teacher, the higher the obedience. When the experimenter communicated via phone, obedience went down. the obedience level dropped to 20.5%.
   
5. 
   
6. Nature of Authority: When the experiment was conducted with no affiliation to Yale, a prestigious institution, obedience went slightly down, but still remained high. When the experimenter left and an assistant was left to prod the teacher, obedience dropped sharply. This shows the importance of authority legitimacy. When the learner is the one demanding to be shocked, obedience is extremely low.
   
7. 
   
8. Group Support: Various situations were setup, in which teachers performed their duties as a group. When a peer first models obedience, the subject's obedience is high. When the subject serves as a bystander and does not even have to apply the shocks, obedience is extremely high. When at least one other teacher dissents, subjects follow suit and so obedience is very low. Two confederate teachers were teamed with the real participant. However they were not to take part in the study any longer at 150 volts, and 210 volts respectively. Only 10% of the participants carried onto 450 volts. In post experiment interviews, many participants revealed that they didn't realize they could withdraw.
9. 
   
10. One suggestion for why people obey is that they use the "just following orders" excuse as a strong rationalization for their behavior. If a legitimate authority figure instructs them to do something, then they can tell themselves that the authority figure is really responsible for their actions. People obeying disconcerting orders may play other mind games to make their behavior seem acceptable. The highest obedience rate was found when the participant only had to read out the word-pairs, while the confederate teacher flicked the switches. The 92.5% obedience rate reveals that the participant found it easy to shift responsibility to the confederate teacher.
11. 
    
12. Also other factors as: the questioning of the experimenter or authority's motives, expertise, and/or judgment would minimize destructive obedience. And not to mention, in our established case, awareness.
    
13. 
    

For example, in Milgram's experiment, teachers likely denied the pain they were causing, which is why obedience dropped with increasing victim proximity - reality became harder to deny. The normative and informational influences (that we have already discussed) likely factor into obedience too. People tend to do what others are doing or requesting in order to be accepted, and in unfamiliar situations, they rely on others for cues as to how to behave correctly, as Zimbardo agreed to. A final explanation for obedience is that it is an ingrained habit, learned from a very young age.

The most amazing thing to note from this follow-up experiment is that 32% of the subjects in the proximity-touch condition held the hand of the learner on the shock plate while administering shocks in excess of 400 volts! I don't know about you, but this result both shocks and intrigues me! Further experiments showed that teachers were less obedient when the experimenter communicated wih them via the telephone versus in person, and males were just as likely to be obedient as females, although females tended to be more nervous.

Milgram's experiment has been repeated in Australia, South Africa and in several European countries. In one study, over 85% of the subjects administered a lethal electric shock to the learner! Milgram felt that his experiments helped provide insight into how behaviors such as the Nazi war crimes and Vietnam massacres. He notes that Nazis frequently described themselves as helpless parts in a big machine. He also notes their tendency to "devalue" their victims... the European Jews were the subject of a massive propaganda campaign designed to make them appear as sub-human. Milgram found a tendency to devalue the "learner" in his experiment... utterances such as "why doesn't the dumb guy get it right" were not uncommon. One "teacher" even claimed the "learner" was "so dumb he deserved to get shocked!"

The experiments carried out by Milgram have given insight into human obedience. While not giving us the complete picture, they are certainly sobering and give us a glimpse of one of the darker sides of human nature - a side that we would probably want to pretend didn't exist.

Ethics (from Obedience to Authority, 1997)

The ethics of Milgram's study have been questioned by many psychologists and in some cases been deemed unethical and unacceptable. Baumrind in 1964 is just one psychologist who has heavily criticised Milgram's study pointing out that

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• Milgram placed his participants under great emotional strain and pressure.
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• His participants were totally innocent and naive and the distress caused during and after the experiment caused psychological damage to them that cannot be justified.
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• It is unacceptable for innocent people to be be put in these conditions just to enhance our knowledge.
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Other psychologists do support Milgram's study and believe that it has provided us with valuable knowledge. e.g. Erikson in 1968 - it improves our understanding of human behaviour, Etzioni also in 1968 and Brown, R., a little recently, 1986 - Milgram should be praised, "for doing research of the highest human consequence while showing great concern for the welfare of his subjects."

Milgram's Defense

1. 
   
2. Participants were debriefed and told the purpose of the experiment.
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4. The participants were introduced to the person they had "given shocks" to and saw that the person was not harmed.
5. 
   
6. The participant was free to leave as they wanted.
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8. All participants were reassured that the shocks they were giving although painful, would not cause any serious harm to the person.
9. 
   
10. Even in the most extreme cases of psychological damage the participants were not permanently harmed.
11. 
    

Milgram sent a summary of the results to the participants and asked if they had any regrets about participating. These are the results:

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• Glad/ very glad: 80%
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• No strong feelings either way: 15%
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• Sorry/ very sorry: Just over 1%
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• 80% said that more research of this kind should be done.
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• 74% said they learned something of lasting value.
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There is, he explained patiently, a critical difference between his naïve subjects and the man in the electric chair. The man in the electric chair (in the mind of the naïve subject) is helpless, strapped in. But the naïve subject is free to go at any time.

"It's quite true," he says, "that this is almost a philosophic position, because we have learned that some people are psychologically incapable of disengaging themselves. But that doesn't relieve them of the moral responsibility."

The parallel is exquisite. "The tension problem was unexpected," says Milgram in his defense. But he went on anyway. The naïve subjects didn't expect the screaming protests from the strapped-in learner. But they went on.

"I had to make a judgement," says Milgram. "I had to ask myself, was this harming the person or not? My judgement is that it was not. Even in the extreme cases, I wouldn't say that permanent damage results."
Sound familiar? "The shocks may be painful," the experimenter says, "but they're not dangerous." (Meyer, 1970)

Why is Philip Zimbardo not here?

Through the entirety of my research, I have come across Philip Zimbardo and his simulated prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University a couple of times, but I have chosen no to include his study. Though his experiment resulted in the expression of destructive behavior, it was not on the condition of a direct command or order, as a result the destructive behavior was not a deed of destructive obedience (it does not fit the operational definition). The students were instead designated to portray "roles." They themselves conjured and devised the cruel acts they performed, being drawn into their roles in a "growing confusion between reality and illusion, between role-playing and self-identity… This prison which we had created… was absorbing us as creatures of its own reality," as stated by Zimbardo. (Myers, 1983)

IV. Summary & Conclusion

Stanley Milgram was born on 1933 in New York City. He grew up during the Second World War, right when the Nazi atrocities were still fresh in the memories of millions. (Obedience to Authority, 1997)

Milgram's classic experiment pitted the subject's moral beliefs against the demands of authority. Of all the psychology experiments I am aware of, Milgram's produces the most startling and disturbing. Remember when this experiment was conducted - people were searching for explanations for how the atrocities of World War II had occurred. Around this time (early 1960's) research was being conducted into the authoritarian traits of Germans in an attempt to explain how the atrocities of World War II could have taken place. Milgram's study demonstrated that these traits were not confined to Germans and were not confined to certain types of situations (e.g. war). This was a profound and extremely thought provoking discovery.

In Milgram's own words, "With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. …A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority." (1963)

Who are more obedient -men or women? Milgram found an identical rate of obedience in both groups-65% - although obedient women consistently reported more stress than men. There are about a dozen replications of the obedience experiment worldwide, which had male and female subjects. All of them, with one exception, also found no male-female differences.

Would Milgram find less obedience if he conducted his experiments today? I doubt it. To go beyond speculation on this question, Prof. Thomas Blass carried out a statistical analysis. Gathered all of Milgram's standard obedience experiments and the replications conducted by other researchers. The experiments spanned a 25-year period from 1961 to 1985. A correlational analysis was performed relating each study's year of publication and the amount of obedience it found. What was found was a zero-correlation - that is, no relationship whatsoever. In other words, on the average, the later studies found no more or less obedience than the ones conducted earlier. (Blass, 2000)

Though most of us like to think of ourselves as highly independent human beings, many social influences affect our behavior. Social norms, normative and informational influences, compliance requests, and demands for obedience all have significant sway over our behavior. This area of social psychology has produced some extremely well-known studies and countless of hours of research, but if the knowledge gained can be used to prevent a tragedy, such as those produced by blind obedience, the work will be paid back many fold.

One thing that happened to Milgram back in New Haven during the days of the experiment was that he kept running into people he'd watched from behind the one-way glass. It gave him a funny feeling, seeing those people going about their everyday business in New Haven and knowing what they would do to Mr. Wallace if ordered to. (Meyer, 1970) Now that his research results are in and you've thought about it, you can get this funny feeling too. You don't need one-way glass. A glance in your own mirror may serve just as well.

From Milgram to the world…

It may be that we are puppets - puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (Blass, 2000)