Re: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram
Posted:
Thu Oct 17, 2013 10:33 pm
by admin
12. Strain and DisobedienceSubjects disobey. Why? At first we are inclined to say that they do so because it is immoral to shock the victim. Yet an explanation in terms of moral judgment is not adequate. The morality of shocking a helpless victim remains constant whether the victim is far or near, but we have seen that a simple change in spatial relations substantially alters the proportion of people who disobey. Rather, it is a more general form of strain that propels the subject to disobedience, and we need to understand what strain means, both from a human standpoint and in terms of the theoretical model that has guided our analysis.
Theoretically, strain is likely to arise whenever an entity that can function autonomously is brought into a hierarchy, because the design requirements of an autonomous unit are quite different from those of a component specifically and uniquely designed for systemic functioning. Men can function on their own or, through the assumption of roles, merge into larger systems. But the very fact of dual capacities requires a design compromise. We are not perfectly tailored for complete autonomy, nor for total submission.
Of course, any sophisticated entity designed to function both autonomously and within hierarchical systems will have mechanisms for the resolution of strain, for unless such resolving mechanisms exist the system is bound to break down posthaste. So we shall add one final concept to our model, representing the resolution of strain. And we shall allow ourselves a brief formula, to summarize behavioral processes we have observed:
O; B > (s — r)
D; B < (s— r)
in which O represents obedience; D, disobedience; B, binding factors; s, strain; and r, the strain-resolving mechanisms. Obedience is the outcome when the binding factors are greater than the net strain (strain as reduced by the resolving mechanisms), while disobedience results when net strain exceeds the strength of the binding forces.
StrainThe experience of tension in our subjects shows not the power of authority but its weakness, revealing further an extremely important aspect of the experiment: transformation to the agentic state is, for some subjects, only partial.
If the individual’s submergence in the authority system were total, he would feel no tension as he followed commands, no matter how harsh, for the actions required would be seen only through the meanings imposed by authority, and would thus be fully acceptable to the subject. Every sign of tension, therefore, is evidence of the failure of authority to transform the person to an unalloyed state of agency. The authority system at work in the laboratory is less pervasive than the prepotent systems embodied in the totalitarian structures of Stalin and Hitler, in which subordinates were profoundly submerged in their roles. Residues of selfhood, remaining in varying degrees outside the experimenter’s authority, keep personal values alive in the subject and lead to strain which, if sufficiently powerful, can result in disobedience. In this sense, the agentic state created in the laboratory is vulnerable to disturbance, just as a person asleep may be disturbed by the impingement of a sufficiently loud noise. (During sleep, a person’s capacity for hearing and sight are sharply diminished, though sufficiently strong stimuli may rouse him from that state. Similarly, in the agentic state, a person’s moral judgments are largely suspended, but a sufficiently strong shock may strain the viability of the state.) The state produced in the laboratory may be likened to a light doze, compared to the profound slumber induced by the prepotent authority system of a national government.
Sources of StrainSources of strain within the experiment range from primitive autonomic revulsion at causing another man pain to sophisticated calculations of possible legal repercussions:
1. The cries of pain issuing from the learner strongly affected many participants, whose reaction to them is immediate, visceral, and spontaneous. Such reactions may reflect inborn mechanisms, comparable to the aversive reaction to chalk squeaking on glass. Insofar as the participant must expose himself to these stimuli through his obedience, strain arises.
2. Further, administering pain to an innocent individual violates the moral and social values held by the subject. These values are for some deeply internalized beliefs, and for others, they reflect knowledge of those humane standards of behavior which society professes.
3. An additional source of strain is the implicit retaliatory threat that subjects experience while administering punishment to the learner. Some may feel they are angering the learner so greatly, that he will try to retaliate after the experiment is over; others, that as part of the experiment, they will somehow find themselves in the learner’s position, even though there is nothing in the procedure to suggest this will happen. Other subjects fear that they are in some degree legally vulnerable for their actions and wonder if they will be named in a lawsuit by the learner. All of these forms of retaliation, potentially real or fantasized, generate strain.
4. The subject receives directives from the learner, as well as the experimenter; the learner’s directive is that the subject should stop. These orders are incompatible with the experimenter’s standing orders; even if the subject were totally compliant, responding exclusively to pressures arising from the field, and were without any personal values whatsoever, strain would still arise, for contradictory demands are impinging on him at the same instant.
5. Administering shocks to the victim is incompatible with the self-image of many subjects. They do not readily view themselves as callous individuals capable of hurting another person. Yet, this is precisely what they find themselves doing, and the incongruity of their action constitutes a powerful source of strain.
Strain and BuffersAny feature that reduces the psychological closeness between the subject’s action and the consequence of that action also reduces the level of strain. Any means of breaking down or diluting the experienced meaning of the act -- I am hurting a man -- makes the action easier to perform. Thus, creating physical distance between the subject and victim, and dampening the painful cries of the victim, reduces strain. The shock generator itself constitutes an important buffer, a precise and impressive instrument that creates a sharp discontinuity between the ease required to depress one of its thirty switches and the strength of impact on the victim. The depression of a switch is precise, scientific, and impersonal. If our subjects had to strike the victim with their fists, they would be more reluctant to do so. Nothing is more dangerous to human survival than malevolent authority combined with the dehumanizing effects of buffers. There is a contrast here between what is logical and what is psychological. On a purely quantitative basis, it is more wicked to kill ten thousand by hurling an artillery shell into a town, than to kill one man by pommeling him with a stone, yet the latter is by far the more psychologically difficult act. Distance, time, and physical barriers neutralize the moral sense. There are virtually no psychological inhibitions against coastal bombardment or dropping napalm from a plane twenty thousand feet overhead. As for the man who sits in front of a button that will release Armageddon, depressing it has about the same emotional force as calling for an elevator. While technology has augmented man’s will by allowing him the means for the remote destruction of others, evolution has not had a chance to build inhibitors against these remote forms of aggression to parallel those powerful inhibitors that are so plentiful and abundant in face-to-face confrontations. [22]
Resolution of StrainWhat are the mechanisms for the resolution of strain?
Disobedience is the ultimate means whereby strain is brought to an end. But it is not an act equally available to all, and the binding forces described earlier kept it out of the reach of many subjects. In view of the fact that subjects experience disobedience as an extreme, indeed a radical form of action within this social occasion, they are likely to fall back on means of reducing strain that are less socially disruptive. Once strain starts to arise, a number of psychological mechanisms come into play to reduce its severity. Given the intellectual flexibility of the human mind, and its capacity for dissipating strain through cognitive adjustments, it is not surprising that this is so.
Avoidance is the most primitive of these mechanisms: the subject screens himself from the sensory consequences of his actions. We have described earlier how subjects turned their heads in an awkward fashion to avoid seeing the victim suffer. Some subjects deliberately read the word pairs in a loud, overpowering voice, thus masking the victim’s protests. These subjects do not permit the stimuli associated with the victim’s suffering to impinge on them. A less conspicuous form of avoidance is achieved by withdrawing attention from the victim. This is often accompanied by the conscious restriction of attention to the mechanics of the experimental procedure. In this way, the victim is psychologically eliminated as a source of discomfort. We are left with the impression of the little clerk, busily shuffling papers, scarcely cognizant of events around him.
If avoidance shields the subjects from unpleasant events, denial reduces strain through the intellectual mechanism of rejecting apparent evidence in order to arrive at a more consoling interpretation of events. Observers of the Nazi epoch (see Bettelheim, The Informed Heart) point out how pervasive was denial among both victims and persecutors. Jews who faced imminent death could not accept the clear and obvious evidence of mass killing. Even today, millions of Germans deny that innocent persons were slaughtered on a massive scale by their government.
Within the experiment some subjects may deny that the shocks they administer are painful or that the victim is suffering at all. Such denial eases the strain of obeying the experimenter, eliminating the conflict between hurting someone and obeying. But the laboratory drama was compelling, and only a fraction of the subjects proceeded on the basis of this hypothesis (see Chapter 14). (Even then, the defensive character of the denial is generally evident, as when a subject who denies the shocks were painful refuses to personally sample a stronger shock.) Most frequently among obedient subjects, we find not a denial of events but a denial of responsibility for them.
Some subjects attempt to reduce strain, while at the same time working within the rules imposed by authority, when they perform the obedient act but “only slightly.” It is to be recalled that the duration of each shock is variable, and under the control of the naive subject. Subjects typically activate the shock generator for a period of 500 milliseconds, but others reduce it to a mere tenth of this duration. They touch the switches gingerly, and the resulting shock sounds like the briefest blip, in comparison with the ordinary half-second buzz. When interviewed, these subjects stress that they “asserted their humanity” by administering the briefest shock possible. Handling strain in this manner was easier than defiance. It permits the maximum expression of individual benignity within the constraints of an oppressive system. But there is an element of self-delusion in this type of minimal compliance. It does not challenge authority. It may diminish but does not nullify the exercise of authority’s will and is chiefly important as a balm to the subject’s conscience.
Of potentially greater significance are the subterfuges that some subjects employ to undermine the cruel aspects of the experiment. Some subjects could be observed signaling the correct answer to the victim by stressing it vocally as they read the multiple-choice words aloud. That is, they attempted to prompt the learner and thus prevent his receiving shocks. These subjects are willing to undermine the experiment but not to cause an open break with authority. They attempt to help the learner without public disobedience. Even when the learner does not take advantage of his cues, the subject sometimes relates to the learner in the post experimental interview how he tried to “tip him off."
Sometimes the subterfuge proves effective (as in Experiment 7, when subjects administered lower shocks to the learner than they reported). But most often, it does not help at all. The subject is unable to act openly on his humane feelings, deflecting them into a trivial subterfuge of no real consequence. Yet “doing something,” even if of only token significance, helps preserve his self-image as a benign man.
The abrogation of personal responsibility, we have pointed out, is the major psychological consequence of yielding to authority. As strain arises, some subjects seek further assurance that they are not accountable for their actions and they may actively solicit it as a means of reducing tension. Consider the following dialogue between subject and experimenter. The subject, under considerable stress, has proceeded to 375 volts.
TEACHER: I think something’s happened to that fellow in there. I don’t get no answer. He was hollering at less voltage. Can’t you check in and see if he’s all right, please?
EXPERIMENTER: (same detached calm): Not once we’ve started. Please continue, Teacher.
TEACHER: (sits down, sighs deeply): “Cool -- day, shade, water, paint." Answer, please. Are you all right in there? Are you all right?
EXPERIMENTER: Please continue, Teacher. Continue, please. (Teacher pushes lever.)
TEACHER: (swiveling around in his chair): Something’s happened to that man in there. (Swiveling back) Next one. “Low -- dollar, necklace, moon, paint.” (Turning around again) Something’s happened to that man in there. You better check in on him, sir. He won’t answer or nothing.
EXPERIMENTER: Continue. Go on, please.
TEACHER: You accept all responsibility?
EXPERIMENTER: The responsibility is mine. Correct. Please go on. (Teacher returns to his list, starts running through words as rapidly as he can read them, works through to 450 volts. )
TEACHER: That’s that.
Once the experimenter has reassured the subject that he is not responsible for his actions, there is a perceptible reduction in strain.
Responsibility may be cast off in other ways: it may be shifted to the victim, who is seen as bringing on his own punishment. The victim is blamed for having volunteered for the experiment, and more viciously, for his stupidity and obstinacy. Here we move from the shifting of responsibility to the gratuitous deprecation of the victim. The psychological mechanism is transparent: if the victim is an unworthy person, one need not be concerned about inflicting pain on him. [23]
Physical ConversionConversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms is a commonly observed phenomenon in psychiatric practice. Ordinarily, there is improvement in the emotional state of the patient as psychic stress comes to be absorbed by physical symptoms. Within this experiment, we can observe numerous signs of stress: sweating, trembling, and, in some instances, anxious laughter. Such physical expressions not only indicate the presence of strain but also reduce it. The strain, instead of eventuating in disobedience, is deflected into physical expression, and the tension is thereby dissipated.
DissentStrain, if sufficiently powerful, leads to disobedience, but at the outset it gives rise to dissent. Dissent refers to a subject’s expression of disagreement with the course of action prescribed by the experimenter. But this verbal dispute does not necessarily mean that the subject will disobey the experimenter, for dissent serves a dual and conflicting function. On the one hand it may be the first step in a progressive rift between the subject and the experimenter, a testing of the experimenter’s intentions, and an attempt to persuade him to alter his course of action. But paradoxically it may also serve as a strain-reducing mechanism, a valve that allows the subject to blow off steam without altering his course of action.
Dissent may occur without rupturing hierarchical bonds and thus belongs to an order of experience that is qualitatively discontinuous with disobedience. Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While disagreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction.
As a strain-reducing mechanism, dissent is a source of psychological consolation to the subject in regard to the moral conflict at issue. The subject publicly defines himself as opposed to shocking the victim and thus establishes a desirable self-image. At the same time, he maintains his submissive relationship to authority by continuing to obey.
The several mechanisms described here -- avoidance, denial, physical conversion, minimal compliance, subterfuge, the search for social reassurance, blaming the victim, and non instrumental dissent -- may each be linked to specific sources of strain. Thus, visceral reactions are reduced by avoidance; self-image is protected by acts of subterfuge, minimal compliance, and dissent; and so forth. More critically, these mechanisms must be seen as subserving an overriding end: they allow the subject’s relationship to authority to remain intact by reducing experienced conflict to a tolerable level.
DisobedienceDisobedience is the ultimate means whereby strain is brought to an end. It is not an act that comes easily.
It implies not merely the refusal to carry out a particular command of the experimenter but a reformulation of the relationship between subject and authority.
It is tinged with apprehension. The subject has found himself locked into a well-defined social order. To break out of the assigned role is to create, on a small scale, a form of anomie. The future of the subject’s interaction with the experimenter is predictable as long as he maintains the relationship in which he has been defined, in contrast to the totally unknown character of the relationship attendant upon a break. For many subjects there is apprehension about what will follow disobedience, frequently tinged with fantasy of the authority’s undefined retribution. But as the course of action demanded by the experimenter becomes intolerable, a process is initiated which in some subjects erupts into disobedience.
The sequence starts with inner doubt, tension that is at first a private experience but which invariably comes to assume an external form, as the subject informs the experimenter of his apprehension or draws his attention to the victim’s suffering. The subject expects, at some level, that the experimenter will make the same inference from these facts as he has: that one should not proceed with the shocks. When the experimenter fails to do this, communication shades into dissent, as the subject attempts to persuade the authority to alter his course of action. Just as the shock series consists of a step-by-step increase in severity, so the voicing of dissent allows for a graduated movement toward a break with the experimenter. The initial expression of disagreement, however tentatively phrased, provides a higher plateau from which to launch the next point of disagreement. Ideally, the dissenting subject would like the experimenter to release the subject, to alter the course of the experiment, and thus eliminate the need to break with authority. Failing this, dissent is transformed into a threat that the subject will refuse to carry out the authority’s orders. Finally, the subject, having exhausted all other means, finds that he must get at the very root of his relationship with the experimenter in order to stop shocking the victim: he disobeys. Inner doubt, externalization of doubt, dissent, threat, disobedience: it is a difficult path, which only a minority of subjects are able to pursue to its conclusion. Yet it is not a negative conclusion, but has the character of an affirmative act, a deliberate bucking of the tide. It is compliance that carries the passive connotation. The act of disobedience requires a mobilization of inner resources, and their transformation beyond inner preoccupation, beyond merely polite verbal exchange, into a domain of action. But the psychic cost is considerable.
For most people, it is painful to renege on the promise of aid they made to the experimenter. While the obedient subject shifts responsibility for shocking the learner onto the experimenter, those who disobey accept responsibility for destruction of the experiment. In disobeying, the subject believes he has ruined the experiment, thwarted the purposes of the scientist, and proved inadequate to the task assigned to him. But at that very moment he has provided the measure we sought and an affirmation of humanistic values.
The price of disobedience is a gnawing sense that one has been faithless. Even though he has chosen the morally correct action, the subject remains troubled by the disruption of the social order he brought about, and cannot fully dispel the feeling that he deserted a cause to which he had pledged support. It is he, and not the obedient subject, who experiences the burden of his action.
Re: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram
Posted:
Thu Oct 17, 2013 10:36 pm
by admin
CHAPTER 14. Problems of MethodIn the minds of some critics, there is an image of man that simply does not admit of the type of behavior observed in the experiment. Ordinary people, they assert, do not administer painful shocks to a protesting individual simply because they are ordered to do so. Only Nazis and sadists perform this way. In the preceding chapters, I have tried to explain why the behavior observed in the laboratory comes about: how the individual makes an initial set of commitments to the authority, how the meaning of the action is transformed by the context in which it occurs, and how binding factors prevent the person from disobeying.
Underlying the criticism of the experiment is an alternative model of human nature, one holding that when confronted with a choice between hurting others and complying with authority, normal people reject authority. Some of the critics are doubly convinced that Americans in particular do not act inhumanely against their fellows on the orders of authority. The experiment is seen as defective in the degree to which it does not uphold this view. The most common assertions with which to dismiss the findings are: (1) the people studied in the experiment are not typical, (2) they didn’t believe they were administering shocks to the learner, and (3) it is not possible to generalize from the laboratory to the larger world. Let us consider each of these points in turn.
1. Are the people studied in the experiment representative of the general population, or are they a special group? Let me begin with an anecdote. When the very first experiments were carried out, Yale undergraduates were used exclusively as subjects, and about 60 percent of them were fully obedient. A colleague of mine immediately dismissed these findings as having no relevance to "ordinary” people, asserting that Yale undergraduates are a highly aggressive, competitive bunch who step on each other’s necks on the slightest provocation. He assured me that when “ordinary” people were tested, the results would be quite different. As we moved from the pilot studies to the regular experimental series, people drawn from every stratum of New Haven life came to be studied in the experiment: professionals, white-collar workers, unemployed persons, and industrial workers. The experimental outcome was the same as we had observed among the students.
It is true that those who came to the experiment were volunteers, and we may ask whether the recruitment procedure itself introduced bias into the subject population.
In follow-up studies, we asked subjects why they had come to the laboratory. The largest group (17 percent) said they were curious about psychology experiments, 8.9 percent cited the money as the principal reason, 8.6 percent said they had a particular interest in memory, 5 percent indicated that they thought they could learn something about themselves. The motives for coming to the laboratory were evidently diverse, and the range of subjects was extremely wide. Moreover, Rosenthal and Rosnow (1966) have shown that volunteers for experiments tend to be less authoritarian than those who do not volunteer. Thus, if any bias was introduced through a volunteer effect, it was in the direction of obtaining subjects more prone to disobedience.
Moreover, when the experiments were repeated in Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa, and Australia, each using somewhat different methods of recruitment and subject populations having characteristics different from those of our subjects, the level of obedience was invariably somewhat higher than found in the investigation reported in this book. Thus Mantell, in Munich, found 85 per cent of his subjects obedient. [24]
2. Did subjects believe they were administering painful shocks to the learner? The occurrence of tension provided striking evidence of the subjects’ genuine involvement in the experimental conflict, and this has been observed and reported throughout in the form of representative transcripts (1963), scale data (1965), and filmed accounts (1965a).
In all experimental conditions the level of pain was considered by the subject as very high, and Table 6 provides these data for a representative group of experiments. In Experiment 5 Voice-Feedback (victim audible but not visible), the mean for obedient subjects on the 14-point scale was 11.36 and fell within the “extremely painful” zone of the scale. More than half the obedient subjects used the extreme upper point on the scale, and at least one subject indicated by a + sign that “extremely painful” was not a strong enough designation. Of the 40 subjects in this condition, two indicated on the scale (with scores of 1 and 3) that they did not think the victim received painful shocks, and both subjects were obedient. These subjects, it would appear, were not successfully exposed to the manipulatory intent of the experimenter. But this is not so simple a matter since denial of an unpleasant action can serve a defensive function, and some subjects came to view their performance in a favorable light only by reconstructing what their state of mind was when they were administering shocks. The question is, was their disbelief a hypothesis or merely a fleeting notion among many other notions?
Table 6. Subjects' Estimates of Pain Felt by VictimThe broad quantitative picture of subjects’ testimony on belief can be examined, among other ways, by scrutinizing responses to the follow-up questionnaire distributed about a year after subjects participated in the study. Item 4 of the questionnaire is reprinted below, along with the distribution of responses to it.
Three-quarters of the subjects (the first two categories) by their own testimony acted under the belief that they were administering painful shocks. It would have been an easy out at this point to deny that the hoax had been accepted. But only a fifth of the group indicated having had serious doubts.
David Rosenhan of Swarthmore College carried out a replication of the experiment in order to obtain a base measure for further studies of his own. He arranged for elaborate interviewing. Among other things, he established the interviewer as a person independent of the experiment who demanded a detailed account of the subject’s experience, and probed the issue of belief even to the point of asking, “You really mean you didn’t catch on to the experiment?” On the basis of highly stringent criteria of full acceptance, Rosenhan reports that (according to the determination of independent judges), 60 percent of the subjects thoroughly accepted the authenticity of the experiment. Examining the performance of these subjects, he reports that 85 percent were fully obedient. (Rosenhan, it must be pointed out, employed a subject population that was younger than that used in the original experiments, and this, I believe, accounts for the higher level of obedience.)
Table 7. Responses to Question on BeliefWhen my experimental findings are subjected to a comparable type of statistical control, they are not altered in any substantial manner. For example, in Experiment 2, Voice-Feedback, of those subjects who indicated acceptance of the deception (categories 1 and 2), 58 percent were obedient; of those who indicated category 1, 60 percent were obedient. Over all experimental conditions, this manner of controlling the data slightly reduced the proportion of obedient to defiant subjects. The changes leave the relations among conditions intact and are inconsequential for interpreting the meaning or import of the findings.
In sum, the majority of subjects accepted the experimental situation as genuine; a few did not. Within each experimental condition it was my estimate that two to four subjects did not think they were administering painful shocks to the victim, but I adopted a general rule that no subject be removed from the data, because selective removal of subjects on somewhat imprecise criteria is the quickest way to inadvertently shape hypotheses. Even now I am not willing to dismiss those subjects because it is not clear that their rejection of the technical illusion was a cause of their obedience or a consequence of it. Cognitive processes may serve to rationalize behavior that the subject has felt compelled to carry out. It is simple, indeed, for a subject to explain his behavior by stating he did not believe the victim received shocks, and some subjects may have come to this position as a post facto explanation. It cost them nothing and would go a long way toward preserving their positive self-conception. It has the additional benefit of demonstrating how astute and clever they were to penetrate a carefully laid cover story.
More important, however, is to be able to see the role of denial in the total process of obedience and disobedience. Denial is one specific cognitive adjustment of several that occur in the experiment, and it needs to be properly placed in terms of its functioning in the performance of some subjects (see Chapter 12).
3. Is the laboratory situation so special that nothing that was observed can contribute to a general view of obedience in wider social life? No, not if one understands what has been observed -- namely, how easily individuals can become an instrument of authority, and how, once so defined, they are unable to free themselves from it. The processes of obedience to authority, which I have attempted to examine in some detail in Chapter 11, remain invariant so long as the basic condition for its occurrence exists: namely, that one is defined into a relationship with a person who one feels has, by virtue of his status, the right to prescribe behavior. While the coloring and details of obedience differ in other circumstances, the basic processes remain the same, much as the basic process of combustion is the same, for both a burning match and a forest fire.
The problem of generalizing from one to the other does not consist of point-for-point comparison between one and the other (the match is small, the forest is extensive, etc.), but depends entirely on whether one has reached a correct theoretical understanding of the relevant process. In the case of combustion, we understand the process of rapid oxidation under conditions of electron excitation, and in obedience, the restructuring of internal mental processes in the agentic state.
There are some who argue that a psychological experiment is a unique event, and therefore, one cannot generalize from it to the larger world. [25] But it is more useful to recognize that any social occasion has unique properties to it, and the social scientist’s task is finding the principles that run through this surface diversity.
The occasion we term a psychological experiment shares its essential structural properties with other situations composed of subordinate and superordinate roles. In all such circumstances the person responds not so much to the content of what is required but on the basis of his relationship to the person who requires it. Indeed, where legitimate authority is the source of action, relationship overwhelms content. That is what is meant by the importance of social structure, and that is what is demonstrated in the present experiment.
Some critics have attempted to dismiss the findings by asserting that behavior is legitimized by the experimenter, as if this made it inconsequential. But behavior is also legitimized in every other socially meaningful instance of obedience, whether it is the obedience of a soldier, employee, or executioner at the state prison. It is precisely an understanding of behavior within such hierarchies that the investigation probes. Eichmann, after all, was embedded in a legitimate social organization and from his standpoint was doing a proper job. In other words, this investigation deals with the obedience not of the oppressed, who are coerced by brutal punishment into compliance, but of those who willingly comply because society gives them a role and they are motivated to live up to its requirements.
Another more specific question concerns the degree of parallel between obedience in the laboratory and in Nazi Germany. Obviously there are enormous differences. Consider the disparity in time scale. The laboratory experiment takes an hour; the Nazi calamity unfolded over more than a decade. Is the obedience observed in the laboratory in any way comparable to that seen in Nazi Germany? (Is a match flame comparable to the Chicago fire of 1898?) The answer must be that while there are enormous differences of circumstance and scope, a common psychological process is centrally involved in both events.
In the laboratory, through a set of simple manipulations, ordinary people no longer perceived themselves as a responsible part of the causal chain leading to action against a person. The way in which responsibility is cast off, and individuals become thoughtless agents of action, is of general import. One can find evidence of its occurrence time and again as one reads over the transcripts of the war criminals at Nuremburg, the American killers at My Lai, and the commander of Andersonville. What we find in common among soldier, party functionary, and obedient subject is the same limitless capacity to yield to authority and the use of identical mental mechanisms to reduce the strain of acting against a helpless victim. At the same time it is, of course, important to recognize some of the differences between the situation of our subjects and that of the Germans under Hitler.
The experiment is presented to our subjects in a way that stresses its positive human values: increase of knowledge about learning and memory processes. These ends are consistent with generally held cultural values. Obedience is merely instrumental to the attainment of these ends. By contrast, the objectives that Nazi Germany pursued were themselves morally reprehensible, and were recognized as such by many Germans. [26]
The maintenance of obedience in our subjects is highly dependent upon the face-to-face nature of the social occasion and its attendant surveillance. We saw how obedience dropped sharply when the experimenter was not present. The forms of obedience that occurred in Germany were in far greater degree dependent upon the internalization of authority and were probably less tied to minute-by-minute surveillance. I would guess such internalization can occur only through relatively long processes of indoctrination, of a sort not possible within the course of a laboratory hour. Thus, the mechanisms binding the German into his obedience were not the mere momentary embarrassment and shame of disobeying but more internalized punitive mechanisms that can only evolve through extended relationships with authority.
Other differences should at least be mentioned briefly: to resist Nazism was itself an act of heroism, not an inconsequential decision, and death was a possible penalty. Penalties and threats were forever around the corner, and the victims themselves had been thoroughly vilified and portrayed as being unworthy of life or human kindness. Finally, our subjects were told by authority that what they were doing to their victim might be temporarily painful but would cause no permanent damage, while those Germans directly involved in the annihilations knew that they were not only inflicting pain but were destroying human life. So, in the final analysis, what happened in Germany from 1933 to 1965 can only be fully understood as the expression of a unique historical development that will never again be precisely replicated.
Yet the essence of obedience, as a psychological process, can be captured by studying the simple situation in which a man is told by a legitimate authority to act against a third individual. This situation confronted both our experimental subject and the German subject and evoked in each a set of parallel psychological adjustments.
A study published in 1972 by H. V. Dicks sheds, additional light on this matter. Dicks interviewed former members of the SS concentration camp personnel and Gestapo units, and at the conclusion of his study relates his observations to the obedience experiments. He finds clear parallels in the psychological mechanisms of his SS and Gestapo interviewees and subjects in the laboratory:
Milgram was ... able to identify the nascent need to devalue the victim ... we recognize the same tendency as, for example, in BS, BT, and GM (interviewees in Dicks’ study).... Equally impressive for an evaluation of the “helpless cog” attitude as a moral defence was Milgam’s recording of subjects who could afterwards declare that “they were convinced of the wrongness of what they were asked to do," and thereby feel themselves virtuous. Their virtue was ineffective since they could not bring themselves to defy the authority. This finding reminds us of the complete split of a man like PF (member of the SS) who afterwards managed to feel a lot of indignation against what he had to do.
Milgram’s experiment has neatly exposed the “all too human” propensity to conformity and obedience to group authority ... His work has also pointed towards some of the same ego defences subsequently used as justifications by his “ordinary” subjects as my SS men ...
The late Gordon W. Allport was fond of calling this experimental paradigm “the Eichmann experiment,” for he saw in the subject’s situation something akin to the position occupied by the infamous Nazi bureaucrat who, in the course of “carrying out his job,” contributed to the destruction of millions of human beings. The “Eichmann experiment” is, perhaps, an apt term, but it should not lead us to mistake the import of this investigation. To focus only on the Nazis, however despicable their deeds, and to view only highly publicized atrocities as being relevant to these studies is to miss the point entirely. For the studies are principally concerned with the ordinary and routine destruction carried out by everyday people following orders.
Re: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram
Posted:
Thu Oct 17, 2013 10:40 pm
by admin
15. EpilogueThe dilemma posed by the conflict between conscience and authority inheres in the very nature of society and would be with us even if Nazi Germany had never existed. To deal with the problem only as if it were a matter of history is to give it an illusory distance.
Some dismiss the Nazi example because we live in a democracy and not an authoritarian state. But, in reality, this does not eliminate the problem. For the problem is not “authoritarianism” as a mode of political organization or a set of psychological attitudes but authority itself. Authoritarianism may give way to democratic practice, but authority itself cannot be eliminated as long as society is to continue in the form we know. [27]
In democracies, men are placed in office through popular elections. Yet, once installed, they are no less in authority than those who get there by other means. And, as we have seen repeatedly, the demands of democratically installed authority may also come into conflict with conscience. The importation and enslavement of millions of black people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese Americans, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience. In each case, voices of morality were raised against the action in question, but the typical response of the common man was to obey orders.
One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of oligarchy includes first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the self-conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special, exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run of mankind as a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This mentality generally goes together with a fascination for eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a means of building a case that one's own family tree and racial stock are indeed superior. These notions of "breeding" are a constant in the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe, especially Britain, towards inclusion in which an individual like Bush must necessarily strive. At the very least, oligarchs like Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a middle ground between the immortals above and the hoi poloi below. The culmination of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders, by themselves directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living deities who have the capability of abrogating and disregarding the laws of the universe according to their own irrational caprice. If we do not take into account this element of fatal and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in regard to the Gulf war, international finance, or the AIDS epidemic must defy all comprehension.
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
As has been stressed throughout this book, U.S. society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. The characteristic way in which an oligarchy functions is by means of conspiracy, a mode which is necessary because of the polycentric distribution of power in an oligarchical system, and the resulting need to secure the cooperation and approval of several oligarchical centers in order to get things done. Furthermore, the operations of secret intelligence agencies tend to follow conspiratorial models; this is what a covert operation means -- coordinated and preplanned actions by a number of agents and groups leading towards a pre-concerted result, with the nature of the operation remaining shielded from public view. So, in an oligarchical society characterized by the preponderant role of secret intelligence agencies -- such as the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century -- anyone who rules out conspiracies a priori runs the risk of not understanding very much of what is going on. One gathers that the phobia against alleged conspiracy theory in much of postmodern academia is actually a cover story for a distaste for political thinking itself.
-- Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley
"Certain it is, that what is called monarchy, always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open -- and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.
In the representative system of government, nothing of this can happen. Like the nation itself, it possesses a perpetual stamina, as well of body as of mind, and presents itself on the open theatre of the world in a fair and manly manner. Whatever are its excellences or defects, they are visible to all. It exists not by fraud and mystery; it deals not in cant and sophistry; but inspires a language that, passing from heart to heart, is felt and understood.
But the case is, that the representative system diffuses such a body of knowledge throughout a nation, on the subject of government, as to explode ignorance and preclude imposition. The craft of courts cannot be acted on that ground. There is no place for mystery; nowhere for it to begin. Those who are not in the representation, know as much of the nature of business as those who are. An affectation of mysterious importance would there be scouted. Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like those of individuals, are always their defects.
In the representative system, the reason for everything must publicly appear. Every man is a proprietor in government, and considers it a necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest, because it affects his property. He examines the cost, and compares it with the advantages; and above all, he does not adopt the slavish custom of following what in other governments are called Leaders.
It can only be by blinding the understanding of man, and making him believe that government is some wonderful mysterious thing, that excessive revenues are obtained. Monarchy is well calculated to ensure this end. It is the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into taxes.
The government of a free country, properly speaking, is not in the persons, but in the laws. The enacting of those requires no great expense; and when they are administered, the whole of civil government is performed -- the rest is all court contrivance."
-- The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine
I am forever astonished that when lecturing on the obedience experiments in colleges across the country, I faced young men who were aghast at the behavior of experimental subjects and proclaimed they would never behave in such a way, but who, in a matter of months, were brought into the military and performed without compunction actions that made shocking the victim seem pallid. In this respect, they are no better and no worse than human beings of any other era who lend themselves to the purposes of authority and become instruments in its destructive processes.
Obedience and the War in VietnamEvery generation comes to learn about the problem of obedience through its own historical experience. The United States has recently emerged from a costly and controversial war in Southeast Asia.
The catalogue of inhumane actions performed by ordinary Americans in the Vietnamese conflict is too long to document here in detail. The reader is referred to several treatises on this subject (Taylor, 1970; Classer, 1971; Halberstam, 1965). We may recount merely that our soldiers routinely burned villages, engaged in a “free-fire zone” policy, employed napalm extensively, utilized the most advanced technology against primitive armies, defoliated vast areas of the land, forced the evacuation of the sick and aged for purposes of military expediency, and massacred outright hundreds of unarmed civilians.
To the psychologist, these do not appear as impersonal historical events but rather as actions carried out by men just like ourselves who have been transformed by authority and thus have relinquished all sense of individual responsibility for their actions.
How is it that a person who is decent, within the course of a few months finds himself killing other men with no limitations of conscience? Let us review the process.
First, he must be moved from a position outside the system of military authority to a point within it. The well-known induction notice provides the formal mechanism. An oath of allegiance is employed to further strengthen the recruit’s commitment to his new role.
The military training area is spatially segregated from the larger community to assure the absence of competing authorities. Rewards and punishments are meted out according to how well one obeys. A period of several weeks is spent in basic training. Although its ostensible purpose is to provide the recruit with military skills, its fundamental aim is to break down any residues of individuality and selfhood.
The hours spent on the drill field do not have as their major goal teaching the person to parade efficiently. The aim is discipline, and to give visible form to the submersion of the individual to an organizational mode. Columns and platoons soon move as one man, each responding to the authority of the drill sergeant. Such formations consist not of individuals, but automatons. The entire aim of military training is to reduce the foot soldier to this state, to eliminate any traces of ego, and to assure, through extended exposure, an internalized acceptance of military authority.
Before shipment to the war zone, authority takes pains to define the meaning of the soldier’s action in a way that links it to valued ideals and the larger purposes of society. Recruits are told that those he confronts in battle are enemies of his nation and that unless they are destroyed, his own country is endangered. The situation is defined in a way that makes cruel and inhumane action seem justified. In the Vietnamese War, an additional element made cruel action easier: the enemy was of another race. Vietnamese were commonly referred to as “gooks,” as if they were subhuman and thus not worthy of sympathy.
Within the war zone, new realities take over; the soldier now faces an adversary similarly trained and indoctrinated. Any disorganization in the soldier’s own ranks constitutes a danger to his unit, for it will then be a less effective fighting unit, and subject to defeat. Thus, the maintenance of discipline becomes an element of survival, and the soldier is left with little choice but to obey.
In the routine performance of his duties, the soldier experiences no individual constraints against killing, wounding, or maiming others, whether soldiers or civilians. Through his actions, men, women, and children suffer anguish and death, but he does not see these events as personally relevant. He is carrying out the mission assigned to him.
The possibility of disobeying or of defecting occurs to some soldiers, but the actual situation in which they now function does not make it seem practical. Where would they desert to? Moreover, there are stringent penalties for defiance, and, finally, there is a powerful, internalized basis for obedience. The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.
He has been told he kills others in a just cause. And this definition comes from the highest sources -- not merely from his platoon leader, nor from the top brass in Vietnam, but from the President himself. Those who protest the war at home are resented. For the soldier is locked into a structure of authority, and those who charge that he is doing the devil’s work threaten the very psychological adjustments that make life tolerable. Simply getting through the day and staying alive is chore enough; there is no time to worry about morality.
For some, transformation to the agentic stage is only partial, and humane values break through. Such conscience-struck soldiers, however few, are potential sources of disruption and are segregated from the unit.
But here we learn a powerful lesson in the functioning of organizations. The defection of a single individual, as long as it can be contained, is of little consequence. He will be replaced by the man next in line. The only danger to military functioning resides in the possibility that a lone defector will stimulate others. Therefore, he must be isolated, or severely punished to discourage imitation.
In many instances, technology helps reduce strain by providing needed buffers. Napalm is dropped on civilians from ten thousand feet overhead; not men but tiny blips on an infrared oscilloscope are the target of Gatling guns.
The war proceeds; ordinary men act with cruelty and severity that makes the behavior of our experimental subjects appear as angel’s play. The end of the war comes not through the disobedience of individual soldiers but by the alteration in governmental policy; soldiers lay down their arms when they are ordered to do so.
Before the war ends, human behavior comes to light that confirms our bleakest forebodings. In the Vietnam War, the massacre at My Lai revealed with special clarity the problem to which this book has addressed itself. Here is an account of the incident by a participant, who was interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS News:
Q. How many men aboard each chopper?
A. Five of us. And we landed next to the village, and we all got on line and we started walking toward the village. And there was one man, one gook in the shelter, and he was all huddled up down in there, and the man called out and said there’s a gook over there.
Q. How old a man was this? I mean was this a fighting man or an older man?
A. An older man. And the man hauled out and said that there’s a gook over here, and then Sergeant Mitchell hollered back and said shoot him.
Q. Sergeant Mitchell was in charge of the twenty of you?
A. He was in charge of the whole squad. And so then, the man shot him. So we moved into the village, and we started searching up the village and gathering people and running through the center of the village.
Q. How many people did you round up?
A. Well, there was about forty, fifty people that we gathered in the center of the village. And we placed them in there, and it was like a little island right there in the center of the village, I’d say … And …
Q. What kind of people -- men, women, children?
A. Men, women, children.
Q. Babies?
A. Babies. And we huddled them up. We made them squat down and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, “You know what to do with them, don’t you?” And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them. And he left, and came back about ten or fifteen minutes later and said, “How come you ain’t killed them yet? And I told him that I didn’t think you wanted us to kill them, that you just wanted us to guard them. He said, “No. I want them dead.” So--
Q. He told this to all of you, or to you particularly?
A. Well, I was facing him. So, but the other three, four guys heard it and so he stepped back about ten, fifteen feet, and he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group.
Q. You fired four clips from your ...
A. M-16.
Q. And that’s about how many clips -- I mean, how many--
A. I carried seventeen rounds to each clip.
Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
A. Right.
Q. And you killed how many? At that time?
A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t --- You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
Q. Men, women, and children?
A. Men, women, and children.
Q. And babies?
A. And babies.
Q. Okay. Then what?
A. So we started to gather them up, more people, and we had about seven or eight people, that we was gonna put into the hootch, and we dropped a hand grenade in there with them.
Q. Now, you’re rounding up more?
A. We’re rounding up more, and we had about seven or eight people. And we was going to throw them in the hootch, and well, we put them in the hootch and then we dropped a hand grenade down there with them. And somebody holed up in the ravine, and told us to bring them over to the ravine, so we took them back out, and led them over to -- and by that time, we already had them over there, and they had about seventy seventy-five people all gathered up. So we threw ours in with there; and Lieutenant Calley told me, he said, “Soldier, we got another job to do.” And so he walked over to the people, and he started pushing them off and started shooting.
Q. Started pushing them off into the ravine?
A. Off into the ravine. It was a ditch. And so we started pushing them off, and we started shooting them, so all together we just pushed them all off, and just started using automatics on them. And then --
Q. Again -- men, women, and children?
A. Men, women, and children.
Q. And babies?
A. And babies. And so we started shooting them and somebody told us to switch off to single shot so that we could save ammo. So we switched off to single shot, and shot a few more rounds....
Q. Why did you do it?
A. Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that, at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing, because, like I said, I lost buddies. I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson, and it was on my conscience. So, after I done it, I felt good, but later on that day, it was getting to me.
Q. You’re married?
A. Right.
Q. Children?
A. Two.
Q. How old?
A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half.
Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind the father of two little kids like that ... how can he shoot babies?
A. I didn’t have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the time.
Q. Uh-huh. How do you shoot babies?
A. I don’t know. It’s just one of these things.
Q. How many people would you imagine were killed that day?
A. I’d say about three hundred and seventy.
Q. How do you arrive at that figure?
A. Just looking.
Q. You say you think that many people, and you yourself were responsible for how many?
A. I couldn’t say.
Q. Twenty-five? Fifty?
A. I couldn’t say. Just too many.
Q. And how many men did the actual shooting?
A. Well, I really couldn’t say that either. There was other ... there was another platoon in there, and but I just couldn’t say how many.
Q. But these civilians were lined up and shot? They weren’t killed by cross fire?
A. They weren’t lined up. ... They [were] just pushed in a ravine, or just sitting squatting ... and shot.
Q. What did these civilians -- particularly the women and children, the old men -- what did they do? What did they say to you?
A. They weren’t much saying to them. They [were] just being pushed and they were doing what they was told to do.
Q. They weren’t begging, or saying, “No ... no,” or ...
A. Right. They were begging and saying, “No, no.” And the mothers was hugging their children, and ... but they kept right on firing. Well, we kept right on firing. They was waving their arms and begging....
( New York Times, Nov. 25, 1969)
The soldier was not brought to trial for his role at My Lai, as he was no longer under military jurisdiction at the time the massacre came to public attention. [28]
In reading through the transcripts of the My Lai episode, the Eichmann trial, and the trial of Lieutenant Henry Wirz, commandant at Andersonville, [29] the following themes recur:
1. We find a set of people carrying out their jobs and dominated by an administrative, rather than a moral, outlook.
2. Indeed, the individuals involved make a distinction between destroying others as a matter of duty and the expression of personal feeling. They experience a sense of morality to the degree in which all of their actions are governed by orders from higher authority.
3. Individual values of loyalty, duty, and discipline derive from the technical needs of the hierarchy. They are experienced as highly personal moral imperatives by the individual, but at the organizational level they are simply the technical preconditions for the maintenance of the larger system.
4. There is frequent modification of language, so that the acts do not, at verbal level, come into direct conflict with the verbal moral concepts that are part of every person’s upbringing. Euphemisms come to dominate language -- not frivolously, but as a means of guarding the person against the full moral implications of his acts.
5. Responsibility invariably shifts upward in the mind of the subordinate. And, often, there are many requests for “authorization.” Indeed, the repeated requests for authorization are always an early sign that the subordinate senses, at some level, that the transgression of a moral role is involved.
6. The actions are almost always justified in terms of a set of constructive purposes, and come to be seen as noble in the light of some high ideological goal. In the experiment, science is served by the act of shocking the victim against his will; in Germany, the destruction of the Jews was represented as a “hygienic” process against “Jewish vermin” (Hilberg, 1961).
7. There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most identified with the “final solution,” it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings (Hilberg, 1961). Subjects in the experiment most frequently experience their objections as embarrassing.
8. When the relationship between subject and authority remain intact, psychological adjustments come into play to ease the strain of carrying out immoral orders.
9. Obedience does not take the form of a dramatic confrontation of opposed wills or philosophies but is embedded in a larger atmosphere where social relationships, career aspirations, and technical routines set the dominant tone. Typically, we do not find a heroic figure struggling with conscience, nor a pathologically aggressive man ruthlessly exploiting a position of power, but a functionary who has been given a job to do and who strives to create an impression of competence in his work.
Now let us return to the experiments and try to underscore their meaning. The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up. And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim. Men do become angry; they do act hatefully and explode in rage against others. But not here. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.
This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.
It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority. [30]
Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.
What is the limit of such obedience? At many points we attempted to establish a boundary. Cries from the victim were inserted; they were not good enough. The victim claimed heart trouble; subjects still shocked him on command. The victim pleaded to be let free, and his answers no longer registered on the signal box; subjects continued to shock him. At the outset we had not conceived that such drastic procedures would be needed to generate disobedience, and each step was added only as the ineffectiveness of the earlier techniques became clear. The final effort to establish a limit was the Touch-Proximity condition. But the very first subject in this condition subdued the victim on command, and proceeded to the highest shock level. A quarter of the subjects in this condition performed similarly.
The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or -- more specifically -- the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. 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.
In an article entitled “The Dangers of Obedience,” Harold J. Laski wrote:
…..civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain. Within the ambit of that definition, those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.
Our business, if we desire to live a life not utterly devoid of meaning and significance, is to accept nothing which contradicts our basic experience merely because it comes to us from tradition or convention or authority. It may well be that we shall be wrong; but our self-expression is thwarted at the root unless the certainties we are asked to accept coincide with the certainties we experience. That is why the condition of freedom in any state is always a widespread and consistent skepticism of the canons upon which power insists.
Re: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram
Posted:
Thu Oct 17, 2013 10:50 pm
by admin
Notes1. Preliminary and regular run. Pretests revealed that the procedure of reading words and administering shocks required some practice before it could be handled smoothly. Therefore, immediately preceding the regular run, the teacher was given a preliminary series of ten words to read to the learner. There were three neutral words in the practice series (i.e., words that the learner answered correctly), so that shocks were administered for seven of the words, with the maximum shock at 105 volts (moderate shock). Almost all subjects mastered the procedure by the time the preliminary run was over.
Subjects are then presented with a second list, and are told that the procedure is the same as for the first list; the experimenter adds, however:
When you get to the bottom of the list, repeat it over again, and continue giving shocks, until the learner has learned all the pairs correctly.
The experimenter instructs the subject to:
Start from 15 volts and increase the shock level one step each time the learner gives a wrong answer.
2. No subject who reached the 30th shock level ever refused to continue using it.
3. David Mark Mantell, "The Potential for Violence in Germany," Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 27, No. 4 (November 4, 1971), pp. 101-12.
4. Within the last decade the effects of physical proximity on behavior have come under critical examination. See, for example, Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension New York: Doubleday, 1966).
5. Recently, I have learned that other experimenters (Sheridan and King, 1972) have replicated the obedience experiments but with this difference: in place of a human victim, they used a genuine victim, a puppy, who actually received the electric shock and who yelped, howled, and ran when he was shocked. Men and women were used as subjects, and the authors found that the women were more compliant than the men. Indeed, they write; "Without exception, females's complied with instructions to shock the puppy all the way to the end of the scale." See also Kilham and Mann, 1972.
6. This is borne out by examining the data on reported nervousness. At the conclusion of his performance, each subject indicated on a scale just how tense or nervous he was at the point of maximum tension. These data are available for twenty-one experimental conditions, including the present one, and obedient women report higher tension than any of the twenty groups of obedient males. This may be due to the fact that the women were more nervous than the men, or simply that they felt freer to report it. In any case, for those women who were obedient, the reported tension exceeded that of any of the twenty other conditions. However, this is not true of the defiant women. Their reports of nervousness fall out just about in the middle of the distribution for male defiant subjects.
7. See study by Hofling et al. on the failure of nurses to question doctors' orders on drug overdoses. Charles K. Hofling, E. Brotzman, S. Dalrymple, N. Graves, C. Pierce, "An Experimental Study in Nurse-Physician Relationships," The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 143, No. 2 (1966), pp. 171-80.
8. The assertion that the content of the command may itself be largely responsible for the effects is not gratuitous. Numerous studies in social psychology demonstrate the effects that peers, lacking any particular authority, may exercise on an individual (Asch, 1951; Milgram, 1964).
9. Conformity is, as de Tocqueville shrewdly observed, the logical regulatory mechanism of democratized relations among men. It is "democratic" in the sense that the pressure it places on the target is not to make him better or worse than those exerting the pressure but merely to make him the same.
Obedience arises out of and perpetuates inequalities in human relationships and thus, in its ultimate expression, is the ideal regulatory mechanism of fascism. It is only logical that a philosophy of government that has human inequality as its touchstone will also elevate obedience as an absolute virtue. Obedient behavior is initiated in the context of a hierarchical social structure and has as its outcome the differentiation of behavior between superior and subordinate. It is no accident that the hallmark of the Third Reich was its emphasis both on the concept of superior and inferior groups and on quick, impressive, and prideful obedience, with clicking boots and the ready execution of command.
10. I have oversimplified. While it is true that nature is rich in hierarchical organizations, it is not the case that men need function within them at all times. An isolated brain cell cannot survive apart from its larger organ system. But an individual's relative self- sufficiency frees him from total dependence on larger social systems. He has the capacity both to merge into such systems, through the assumption of roles, or to separate himself from them. This capacity for dual functioning confers on the species maximum adaptive advantages. It assures the power, security, and efficiency that derives from organization, along with the innovative potential and flexible response of the individual. From the standpoint of species survival it is the best of both worlds.
11. Students of child development have long recognized that "the first social relationship is one of recognizing and complying with the suggestions of authority" (English, 1961, page 24). The initial conditions of total dependency give the child little choice in the matter. And authority generally presents itself to the infant in a benign and helpful form. Nonetheless, it has been commonly observed that at the age of two or three, the infant enters a period of unrestrained negativism in which he challenges authority at virtually every turn, rejecting even its most benign demands. Stogdill (1936) reports that of all behavior problems of social adjustment, parents rank disobedience as the most serious. Frequently, there is intense conflict between child and parent at this point, and maturational processes, abetted by parental insistence, ordinarily bring the child to a more compliant disposition. The child's interminable disobedience, however much it constitutes a rejection of authority and assertion of self, differs from adult disobedience in that it takes place without any conception of individual responsibility on the child's part. Unlike the forms of disobedience we may come to value in the adult, it is an indiscriminate, purely expressive form of defiance that is not grounded in moral concerns.
12. The technical problem of how authority communicates its legitimacy is worth serious thought. Consider that when a young man receives a letter that claims to be from his draft board, what evidence is there that the entire operation is not simply an extended prank? And if we are to carry this further, what is the evidence that when the boy appears at a camp designated by the board, the men in khaki really have the right to take charge of his life? Perhaps it is all a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a contingent of unemployed actors. Genuine authority, because it recognizes the ease with which the appearance of authority may be fabricated, must he extremely vigilant of counterfeit authority, and the penalties for falsely claiming authority are severe.
13. Imagine an experimenter traveling from one house to the next in a private residential district and, with permission, setting up his experiments in the living rooms of those homes. His aura of authority would be weaker without the laboratory setting that ordinarily buttresses his position.
14. For the concept of "zone of indifference," see Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations. New York: The Free Press, 1965.
15. The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk (1952), illustrates this situation well. It is all right for an authority to be stupid. Many persons of authority function exceedingly well even if they are incompetent. The problem arises only when an authority, taking advantage of his position, forces his more competent subordinates to follow a wrong course of action. Stupid authorities can sometimes be very effective and even beloved by their subordinates, as long as they assign responsibility to the talented subordinates. The Caine Mutiny illustrates two additional points. First, how difficult it is to defy authority even when authority is incompetent. Only after great inner stress and turmoil did Willie and Keith take over the Caine, though it was on its way to being sunk because of Queeg's incompetence. Second, despite what appeared to be virtually absolute requirement that the mutiny occur, the attachment to principles of authority was so profound, that the author, through the voice of Greenwald, in a dramatic turn of events, called into question the moral basis of the mutiny.
16. In Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud pointed out that a person suppresses his own superego functions, allowing the leader full right to decide what is good or bad.
17. Koestler notes in his brilliant analysis of social hierarchies: "I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much lesser historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society -- he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity." Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), Part III, "Disorder," p. 246.
18. An interpretation consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. See L. Festinger, 1957.
19. See Erving Goffman, "Embarrassment and Social Organization," The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62 (November 1956), pp. 264-71. See also Andre Modigliani, "Embarrassment and Embarrassability," Sociometry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 1968), pp. 313-26; and "Embarrassment, Facework, and Eye Contact: Testing a Theory of Embarrassment," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1971), pp. 15-24.
20. If embarrassment and shame are important forces holding the subject to his obedient role, we ought to find a sharp drop in obedience when the preconditions for the experience of these emotions are eliminated. This is precisely what occurred in Experiment 7, when the experimenter departed from the laboratory and gave his orders by telephone. Much of the obedience shown by our subjects was rooted in the face-to-face nature of the social occasion. Some types of obedience -- say, that of a soldier sent on a solitary mission behind enemy lines -- require extended exposure to the authority in question and a congruence between the values of the subordinate and his authority.
Both the studies of Garfinkel and the present experiment indicated that the assumptive structure of social life needed to be disrupted if disobedience was to occur. The same awkwardness, embarrassment, and difficulty in being disobedient occurs as in Garfinkel's (1964) demonstrations, in which people are asked to violate suppositions of everyday life.
21. It is the failure to grasp the transformation into a state of agency and an inadequate understanding of the forces that bind the person into it that account for the almost total inability to predict the behavior in question. Those judging the situation think it is the ordinary person, with his full moral capacities operating, when they predict his break off from the experiment. They do not take into account in the least the fundamental reorganization of a person's mental life that occurs by virtue of entry into an authority system.
The quickest way to correct the erroneous prediction of persons who do not know the outcome of the experiment is to say to them, "The content of the action is not half so important as you think; the relationship among the actors is twice as important. Base your prediction not on what the participants say or do, but on how they relate to each other in terms of a social structure."
There is a further reason why people do not correctly predict the behavior. Society promotes the ideology that an individual's actions stem from his character. This ideology has the pragmatic effect of stimulating people to act as if they alone controlled their behavior. This is, however, a seriously distorted view of the determinants of human action, and does not allow for accurate prediction.
22. Konrad Lorenz describes the disturbance in inhibitory mechanisms brought about by the interposition of tools and weapons: "The same principle applies, to even a greater degree, to the use of modern remote-control weapons. The man who presses the releasing button is so completely screened against seeing. hearing, or otherwise emotionally realizing the consequences of his action that he can commit it with impunity -- even if he is burdened with the power of imagination." Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), p. 234.
23. See N. J. Lerner, "Observer's Evaluation of a Victim; Justice, Guilt, and Veridical Perception," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1971), pp. 127-35.
24. In Princeton: D. Rosenhan, Obedience and Rebellion; Observations on the Milgram Three-Party Paradigm. In preparation.
In Munich: D.M. Mantell, "The Potential for Violence in Germany." Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 27, No.4 (1971), pp. 101-12.
In Rome: Leonardo Ancona and Rosetta Pareyson, "Contributo allo studie della aggressione; La Dinamica della obbedienza distruttiva," Archiva di psicologia neurologia e psichiatria, Anna XXIX (1968), fasc. IV.
In Australia: W. Kilham and L. Mann, "Level of Destructive Obedience as a Function of Transmittal' and Executant Roles in the Milgram Obedience Paradigm." In press (1973) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
25. See M. I. Orne and C. C. Holland, for example, and my response to them in: A. G. Miller (ed.) The Social Psychology of Psychological Research. New York; The Free Press, 1972.
26. But we must not be naive on this point. We have all seen how government, with its control of the propaganda apparatus, invariably portrays its goals in morally favorable terms; how, in our own country, the destruction of men, women, and children in Vietnam was justified by reference to saving the Free World, etc. We see, also, how easily the pronouncements are accepted as legitimizing goals. Dictatorships attempt to persuade the masses by justifying their programs in terms of established values. Even Hitler did not say that he would destroy the Jews because of hatred but because of his wish to purify the Aryan race and create a higher civilization free of enfeebling vermin.
27. Bierstedt points out quite correctly that the phenomenon of authority is more fundamental even than that of government: "... The problem of authority rests at the very bottom of an adequate theory of the social structure ... even government, in a sense, is not merely a political phenomenon but primarily and fundamentally a social phenomenon, and ... the matrix from which government springs itself possesses an order and a structure. If anarchy is the contrary of government, so anomy is the contrary of society. Authority, in other words, is by no means a purely political phenomenon in the narrow sense of the word. For it is not only in the political organization of society, but in all of its organization, that authority appears. Each association in society, no matter how small or how temporary it might be, has its own structure of authority." Bierstedt, pp. 68-69.
28. But the plea of "superior orders" was made by Lieutenant William Calley, who commanded the platoon that carried out the action.
The military prosecutor challenged Calley's plea of superior orders. Instructively, the prosecutor did not contest the principle that a soldier must obey orders, but charged that Calley acted without orders, and therefore, was responsible for the massacre. Calley was adjudged guilty.
The reaction of the American public to the Calley trial was studied by Kelman and Lawrence (1972), and their findings are not reassuring. Fifty-one percent of the sample indicated that they would follow orders if commanded to shoot all inhabitants of a Vietnamese village. Kelman concludes:
"Clearly, not everyone finds the demands of apparently legitimate authorities equally compelling. Not all of Milgram's subjects shocked their victims with the highest voltage. Nor did every soldier under Calley's command follow his orders to kill unarmed civilians. Those who resist in such circumstances have apparently managed to retain the framework of personal causation and responsibility that we ordinarily use in daily life.
"Yet, our data suggest that many Americans feel they have no right to resist authoritative demands. They regard Calley's actions at My Lai as normal, even desirable, because (they think) he performed them in obedience to legitimate authority."
We need to ask why Kelman's respondents see themselves as complying with military authority at My Lai (when few-if any- would have predicted submission to the experimenter's authority).
First, the interview response, secured while the country was at war in Vietnam, reflected attitudes toward the war itself and indicated general support for the government's policies. If the questions had been asked in peacetime, a larger proportion would have predicted disobedience. The response also expressed solidarity with an American soldier who most Americans felt should not have been brought to trial. Second, raising the question of obedience in a military context places it in the setting that is most familiar to the average person: he knows that a soldier is supposed to obey orders, and his interview response springs from folk wisdom, hearsay, and knowledge of the military context. Yet, this does not presume any understanding of general principles of obedience, which can only be demonstrated by their correct application to a novel context. People understand that soldiers massacre, but they fail to see that an action such as this, routinely carried out, is the logical outcome of processes that are at work in less visible form throughout organized society. Finally, the response indicates the degree to which the American people had embraced the viewpoint of authority in evaluating the Vietnam War. They had been thoroughly indoctrinated by government propaganda (which, at the societal level, is the means whereby an official definition of the situation is promulgated). In this sense, the respondents to Kelman's question did not reside completely outside the authority system they were asked to comment upon but had already been influenced by it.
29. Henry Wirz, Trial of Henry Wirz (Commandant at Andersonville), House of Representatives, 40th Congress, 2d Session, Ed. Doc. No. 23. (Letter from the Secretary of War Ad Interim, in answer to a resolution of the House of April 16, 1866, transmitting a summary of the trial of Henry Wirz. Dec. 17, 1867 (ordered to be printed).
30. It would seem that the anarchist argument for universal dismantling of political institutions is a powerful solution to the problem of authority. But the problems of anarchism are equally insoluble. First, while the existence of authority sometimes leads to the commission of ruthless and immoral acts, the absence of authority renders one a victim to such acts on the part of others who are better organized. Were the United States to abandon all forms of political authority, the outcome would be entirely clear. We would soon become the victims of our own disorganization, because better organized societies would immediately perceive and act on the opportunities that weakness creates.
Moreover, it would be an oversimplification to present the picture of the noble individual in a continuous struggle against malevolent authority. The obvious truth is that much of his nobility, the very values he brings to bear against malevolent authority, are themselves derived from authority. And for every individual who carries out harsh action because of authority, there is another individual who is restrained from doing so.
31. See Jay Katz, Experimentation With Human Beings: The Authority of the Investigator, Subject, Professions, and State in the Human Experimentation Process, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972). This source book of 1159 pages contains commentaries on the present experiments by Baumrind, Elms, Kelman, Ring, and Milgram. It also includes the statement of Dr. Faul Errera, who interviewed a number of participants in the experiment (page 400). Thoughtful discussions of the ethical issues of this research can be found in A. Miller, The Social Psychology of Psychological Research, and in A. Elms, Social Psychology and Social Relevance.
Re: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram
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Re: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram
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Index
Abse, Dannie, 198
Action, in obedience experiment, 89,
90, 149
Administrative Behavior (Simon), 208
Adorno, T., 204
Agentic state, 132-134, 135, 138, 140.
142, 143-148, 155; binding factors
in, 7, 148--152; and commands, 147148;
and "definition of situation, "
145; responsibility lost in, 145-147;
self-image in, 147; and tuning proc
ess, 144; see also Authority; Disobedience;
Hierarchy; Obedience;
Obedience experiment
Aggression, 165-168
Allport, Cordon W., 178
American Journal of Sociology, 209
American Psychologist. 193
Anarchism, 212
Ancona, Leonardo, 210
Antigone (Sophocles), 2
Anxiety, and disobedience, 152
Arendt, Hannah, 5, 6
Asch, S. E., 114, 115, 207
Ashby, W. R., 125; quoted, 127
Attica Penitentiary, 113
Authoritarian state, 179
Authority, 144, 155, 175, 179, 208, 211;
closeness of, 61; coordination of
command with function of, 141-142;
double, see Two Authorities; entry
into system of, 140-141; perception
of, 138-140; see also Agentic state;
Disobedience; Hierarchy; Obedience;
Obedience experiment
Authority as Victim (Experiment 14),
94-95 (table), 99-104, 110
Automata, 126-127, 128, 129, 131, 132;
see also Cybernetics
Autonomy, vs. agentic state, 133
Avoidance, 158
Batta, Bruno, 45-47
Baumrind, Diana, 193, 209, 212
Berkowitz, L., 167
Bettelheim, B., 158
Bierstedt, R., 211
Binding factors, 148
Brandt, Gretchen, 84-85
Braverman, Morris, 52-54
Breakoff points, in obedience experiment,
28, 29 (table), , 32, 40, 57,
60, 61 (table)
Bridgeport, obedience experiment at,
68, 69, 70, 171 (table)
Brotzman, E., 207
Buffers. 156-157, 183
Bureaucracy, destructive, 121, 122
Buss, A. H., 167
Caine Mutiny, The (Wouk), 208-209
Calley, William, 184, 211
Cannon, W. B., 126
Change of Personnel (Experiment 6),
58--59, 60-61 (table), 171 (table)
Closeness of Authority, see Experiment
7
Cognitive field, denial and narrowing
of, 38
Commands, 146
Conformity: distinguished from obedi
ence, 113-115, 207; as imitation,
114; and voluntarism, 115
Conscience (superego), 127, 128, 129,
132, 146, 165, 209
Control condition, see Experiment 11
Control panel, diagram of, 28
Conversion, 161
Counteranthropomorphism, 8
Crawford, Thomas, quoted, 201
Cybernetics, 125-128, 131, 133; see
also Automata
Dalrymple, S., 207
"Dangers of Obedience, The" (Laski),
189
Debriefing, 24, 191
Delacroix, Eugene, 113
Democracy, 179, 204
Denial, 158, 173-174
Dicks, H. V., 177; quoted, 177-178
Disobedience, 14, 208; and anxiety,
152; in children, 205; strain ended
by, 157, 162-164; see also Agentic
state; Authority; Hierarchy; Obedience;
Obedience experiment
Dissent, 161
Dogs of Pavlov, The (Abse), 198
Dontz, Karen, 77-79
Double authority, see Two Authorities
Dr. Strangelove (film), 7
Ego ideal, 147; group ideal substituted
for, 131
Eichmann, 5, 6, 11, 54, 178, 186
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 5
Elms, Alan, 204, 213; quoted, 203-204
Embarrassment. and obedience, 151,
187, 209
Empathic cues, in obedience experi
ment, 36, 38
English, H. B., 208
Erikson, Milton, quoted, 201
Errera, Paul, 212
Ethics in research, problems of,
193-202
Etiquette, 149, 152
Etzioni, Amitai, quoted, 201
Experiment, obedience, see Obedience
experiment
Experiment 1 (Remote-Feedback), 32,
35 I table), 36, 38, 39, 171 (table)
Experiment 2 (Voice-Feedback), 2223, 34, 35
(table), 36, 57, 173;
Braverman's behavior in, 52-54;
psychiatrists' predictions of behavior
in, 27, 30, 31; Rensaleers behavior
in, 50--52; and subjects' estimates of
pain felt by victim, 171, 171 (table);
Washington's behavior in, 49-50
Experiment 3 (Proximity), 34, 35
(table), 36, 38, 39; subject's
behavior in, 47-49; and subjects'
estimates of pain felt by victim, 171
(table I
Experiment 4 (Touch-Proximity), 34,
35 (table 1, 36, 39, 188; Batta's
behavior in, 45-47; and subjects'
estimates of pain felt by victim,
171 (table)
Experiment 5 (New Base-Line Con
dition), 55-57, 59, 80-61 (table),
Prozi's behavior in, 73-77; and
subjects' estimates of pain felt by
victim, 171 (table)
Experiment 6 (Change of Personnel),
58-59, 60-61 (table), 171 (table)
Experiment 7 (Closeness of Authority),
59-62, 60-61 (table), 159, 209;
Gino's behavior in, 86-88; and subjects'
estimates of pain felt by
victim, 171 (table)
Experiment 8 (Women as Subjects),
60-61 in (table), 62-63; Brandt's
behavior in, 84-85; Dontz's behavior
in, 77-79; Rosenblum's behavior in,
79-84; and subjects' estimates of
pain felt by victim, 171 (table)
Experiment 9 (Victim's Limited
Contract), 60-61 (table), 63-66;
subject's behavior in, 65--66
Experiment 10 (Institutional Context),
60-61 (table), 66-70
Experiment 11 (Subject Free to Choose
Shock Level), 60-61 (table), 70-72,
166
Experiment 12 (Learner Demands to
Be Shocked), 90-92, 94-95 (table)
Experiment 13 (Ordinary Man Gives
Orders), 93, 94-95 (table), 96-97
Experiment 13a (Subject as Bystander),
94-95 (table), 97-99
Experiment 14 (Authority as Victim),
94-95 (table), 99-104, 110
Experiment 15 (Two Authorities: Contradictory
Commands), 94-95
(table), 105-107, 110, 111
Experiment 16 (Two Authorities: One
as Victim), 94-95 (table), 107-110,
111
Experiment 17 (Two Peers Rebel),
116-121; behavior of confederates
in, 117-119; and reactions of naive
subject to defiant peers, 118, 120121;
shocks administered in, 119;
technique for, 116-118, 120-121
Experiment 18 (Peer Administers
Shock), 119 (table), 121-122
Experimentation with Human Beings
(Katz), 211
Explicitness, in obedience, 114-115
F-scale, 201
Family, as antecedent of obedience,
135-136
Fascism, 204
Feinberg, I., 63
Festinger, L., 208
Freud. Sigmund, 113, 131, 208
Gandhi, Mahatma, 113
Garfinkel, H., 208
Generalizing from the experiment, 174178
Ghost in the Machine, The (Koestler),
208
Gino, Pasqual, 86-88
Glasser, R. J., 180
Goffman, Erving, 150, 209
Graves, N., 207
Greece, ancient, 124
Group effects, 113-122
Group formation, 39
Group ideal, substituted for ego ideal,
131
Group Psychology (Freud), 131, 209
Halberstam, David, 180
Hall, Edward T., 206
"Heart problem, " in obedience experiment,
55, 56, 57
Hidden Dimension, The (Hall), 206
Hierarchy: and obedience, 114, 123125,
128-130, 131; survival value
of, 123-125; see also Agentic state;
Authority; Disobedience; Obedience
experiment
Hilberg, R., 187
Hitler, Adolf, 130, 155, 176, 211; see
also Nazism
Hobbes, Thomas, 2
Hofling, Charles K., 207
Holland, C. C., 210
Romans, G. C., 121
Homeostatic model, 126
Hoodlums, predatory, groups of, 121
Imitation, conformity as, 114
Indifference, zone of. 208
Individuals, patterns among, 201-203;
individuals confront authority, 44-54, 73-
88
Informed Heart, The (Bettelheim), 158
Inhibition, passive, 40
Institutional Context (Experiment 10).
60-61 (table), 66-70
Interaction Laboratory, of Yale University,
16, 55
Internalization of social order, 138
International Journal of Psychiatry,
201
Jews, and Nazism, 2, 9, 158, 187, 211
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
207
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
209, 210
Journal of Social Issues, 206, 210
Katz, Jay, 212
Kelman, Herbert, 201, 202, 212; quoted,
211
Kilham, W., 207, 210
King, R. G., ·206
Koestler, Arthur, 209
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 205
Language, modification of, 187
Laski, Harold J., quoted, lS9
Laughter, 52-54
Lawrence, L., 211
Lazarus, R., 193
Learner Demands to Be Shocked
(Experiment 12), 90-92, 94-95
(table )
Legitimacy of authority, how communicated,
205
Lerner, N. J., 210
Lorenz, Konrad, 210
Lynch mob, 121
Mann, L., 207, 210
Mantell, D. M., 171, 206, 210
Marler, P., 123
Methods, general principles, 13f.;
problems of, 169-178
Miller, Arthur C., 202, 212
Miller, N., 42
Modigliani, Andre, 209
Moral judgment, 6, 153, 155
My Lai massacre, 176, 183, 186, 211
Nazism, 2, 9, 52, 85, 158, 175, 176,
177, 178, 179187; see also Hitler,
Adolf
New Base-Line Condition, see Experiment
5
Nuremberg trials, 8, 176
Obedience, 14; and agentic state, see
Agentic state; analysis of, 123-134;
antecedent conditions of, 135-143;
and anxiety, 152; and authority,
perception of, 138-140; binding
factors in, 7, 148-152; conformity
distinguished from, 113-115, 207;
and cybernetic viewpoint, 125-128,
131, 133; and embarrassment, 209;
explicitness in, 114-115; family as
antecedent of, 135-136; and
hierarchy, 114, 123-125, 128-130,
131; ideological justification for, 142;
institutional setting for, 137; and
perception of authority, 138-140;
process of, 135-152; and reward
structure, 137-138; and strain, see
Strain; and variability, 130-132;
and Vietnam War, 180-186, 211, 212;
and voluntarism, 115; see also
Authority; Disobedience; Obedience
experiment
Obedience experiment: and acquired
behavior dispositions, 40; action as
element of, 89, 90, 149; and behav
ior dispositions, acquired, 40; breakoff
points in, 28, 29 (table), 32, 40,
57, 60-61 (table); at Bridgeport,
68, 69, 70, 171 (table); criticisms
of, 169-170, 193 If., 196 ff.; empathic
cues in, 36, 38; and experienced
unity of act, 39; experimenter's
role in, 16, 21; feedback from ex
perimenter in, 21; feedback from
victim in, 22-23; in Germany, 171,
207; and group-formation, incipient,
39-40; "heart problem" in, 55, 56,
57; and incipient group-formation,
39-40; and Interaction Laboratory,
16; learning task in, 19-20, 22;
measures in, for subject, 23-24;
method of inquiry in, 13-26; obedience
analysis applied to, 135-152;
participants obtained for, 14-16,
170; position as element of, 89, 90;
procedure in, 17-19; and psychiatrists'
predictions, 27, 30, 31;
reciprocal fields in, 38-39; sample
shock in, 20; and sequential nature
of action, 149; shock generator
used in, 20, 23, 27, 151, 159; shock
instructions in, 20-21; and situational
obligations, 149-152; special prods
in, 21-22; status as element of, 89,
90; and strain, see Strain; subject's
role in, 17-19, 23-24; tension of
subject in, 41-43; unexpected
behavior in, 40-43; victim's role
in, see Victim in obedience experiment;
see also Agentic state;
Authority; Disobedience; Experiments
1-18; Hierarchy; Obedience
On Aggression (Lorenz), 210
Ordinary Man Gives Orders (Experiment
13), 93, 94-95 (table), 96-97
Orne, M. I., 210
Orwell, George, 11; quoted, 11-12
Pain, subjects' estimate of, 171
Parevson, Rosetta, 210
Passive inhibition, 40
Patterns among individuals, 202-204
Peer Administers Shock (Experiment
18), 119 (table), 121-122
Permutations of roles, 89-112, 167
Pierce, c., 207
Plato, 2
Position, in obedience experiment, 89,
90
Predictions of behavior, 27-31, 207
Proximity, see Experiments 1-4
Prozi, Fred, 73-77
Psychiatrists' predictions, of behavior
in Voice-Feedback Experiment, 21,
30, 31
Reciprocal fields, in obedience experiment,
38-39
Remote-Feedback (Experiment 1), 32,
35 (table), 36, 38, 39, 17l (table)
Rensaleer, Jan, 50-52
Responsibility, 46, 50, 51, 76, 77, 85,
87, 134, 163, 187; loss of, 7-8, 145147
Responsibility clock, 203
Reward structure, and obedience, 137138
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(Shirer), 2
Role permutations, 89-112, 167
Roles, 153
Rosenblum, Elinor, 79-84
Rosenhan, David, 172, 173, 210
Rosenthal, R., 170
Rosnow, R. L., 170
Scott, J. P., 40
Sequential nature of action, 149
Sheridan, C. L., 206
Shirer, William, 2
Shock generator, in obedience experiment,
20, 23, 27, 151, 159
Shock levels; in Experiments 1-4, 35
(table); in Experiments 5-11, 60-61
(table); in Experiments 12-16,
94-95 (table); in Experiments
17-18, 119 (table)
Simon, Herbert A., 208
Situational obligations, 149-152
Snow, C. P., l; quoted, 2
Social order, internalization of, 138
Social Psychology and Social Relevance
(Elm, ), 202, 204, 212
Social Psychology of Psychological
Research (Miller. ed.), 202, 210, 212
Sociometry, 209
Stalin, Joseph, 155
Status, in obedience experiment, 89, 90
Stogdill R. M., 208
Strain, 153-164; and avoidance, 158;
buffers of, 156-157; and denial,
158-159; disobedience as means of
ending, 157, 162-164; and dissent,
161-162: physical expressions of,
161; resolution of, 157-161; sources
of, 155-156; and subterfuges, 159-160
Subject as Bystander (Experiment
13.), 94-95 (table), 97-99
Subject Free to Choose Shock Level
(Experiment 11), 60--61 (table),
70-72, 166
Subjects: how recruited, 14; age and
occupation, 16; representativeness
of, 170
Subterfuges, 159
Superego (conscience), 127, 128, 129,
132, 146, 165, 209
Tables: on breakoff points, 29; on
Experiments 1-4, 35; on Experiments
5-11, 60-61; on Experiments
12-16, 94-95; on Experiments
17-18, 119; on questionnaire in
follow-up study of obedience research,
195; on responses to question
on belief, 172; on responsibility by
defiant and obedient subjects, 203;
on subjects' estimates of pain felt
by victim, 171
Taylor, T., 180
Tinbergen, N., 123
TocqueviIle, Alexis de, 207
Touch-Proximity, see Experiment 4
Trobrianders, 142
Two Authorities: Contradictory Commands
(Experiment 15), 94-95
(table), 105-107, 110, 111
Two Authorities: One as Victim
(Experiment 16), 94-95 (table),
107-110, 111
Two Peers Rebel, see Experiment 17
Variability, 130-132
Victim in obedience experiment, 16, 17;
authority as, 94-95 (table), 99-105;
closeness of, 32-43; devaluation of,
9; feedback from, 22-23, 56-57; as
"learner," 18, 19, 22; and limited
contract, see Experiment 9; live
puppy, 203-204; protests of, 22;
subjects' estimates of pain felt by,
171 (table), 171-172
Vietnam War, 180-186, 211, 212
Voice-Feedback, see Experiment 2
Voluntarism, 115
Wallace, Mike, 183
Washington, Jack, 49-50
Wiener, Norbert, 125
Wirz, Henry, 186, 212
Women as Subjects, see Experiment 8
Wouk, Herman, 208
Yale Interaction Laboratory, 16, 55