Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram

[admin]

13. An Alternative Theory: Is Aggression the Key?

I have explained the behavior observed in the laboratory in the way that seemed to me to make the most sense. An alternative view is that what we have observed in the laboratory is aggression, the flow of destructive tendencies, released because the occasion permitted its expression. This view seems to me erroneous, and I will indicate why. But first let me state the “aggression” argument:

By aggression we mean an impulse or action to harm another organism. In the Freudian view, destructive forces are present in all individuals, but they do not always find ready release, for their expression is inhibited by superego, or conscience. Furthermore, ego functions -- the reality-oriented side of man -- also keep destructive tendencies under control. (If we strike out every time we are angry, it will ultimately bring us harm, and thus we restrain ourselves.) Indeed, so unacceptable are these destructive instincts, that they are not always available to conscious scrutiny. However, they continually press for expression and, in the end, find release in the violence of war, sadistic pleasures, individual acts of anti-social destruction, and under certain circumstances self-destruction.

The experiment creates an occasion in which it becomes socially acceptable to harm another person; moreover, it allows the subject to do this under the guise of advancing a socially valued cause: science.

Thus, the individual, at the conscious level, views himself as serving a socially valued end, but the motive force for his compliance stems from the fact that, in shocking the learner, he is satisfying instinctually rooted destructive tendencies.

This view also corresponds to the typical common-sense interpretation of the observed obedience. For, when the experiment is first described to ordinary men and women, they immediately think in terms of the “beast in man coming out,” sadism, the lust for inflicting pain on others, the outpouring of the dark and evil part of the soul.

Although aggressive tendencies are part and parcel of human nature, they have hardly anything to do with the behavior observed in the experiment. Nor do they have much to do with the destructive obedience of soldiers in war, of bombardiers killing thousands on a single mission, or enveloping a Vietnamese village in searing napalm. The typical soldier kills because he is told to kill and he regards it as his duty to obey orders. The act of shocking the victim does not stem from destructive urges but from the fact that subjects have become integrated into a social structure and are unable to get out of it.

Suppose the experimenter instructed the subject to drink a glass of water. Does this mean the subject is thirsty? Obviously not, for he is simply doing what he is told to do. It is the essence of obedience that the action carried out does not correspond to the motives of the actor but is initiated in the motive system of those higher up in the social hierarchy.

There is experimental evidence bearing on this issue. It will be recalled that in Experiment 11, subjects were free to use any shock level they wished, and the experimenter took pains to legitimize the use of all levers on the board. Though given full opportunity to inflict pain on the learner, almost all subjects administered the lowest shocks on the control panel, the mean shock level being 3.6. But if destructive impulses were really pressing for release, and the subject could justify his use of high shock levels in the cause of science, why did they not make the victim suffer?

There was little if any tendency in the subjects to do this. One or two, at most, seemed to derive any satisfaction from shocking the learner. The levels were in no way comparable to that obtained when the subjects are ordered to shock the victim. There was an order-of-magnitude difference.

Similarly, we may turn to studies of aggression carried out by Buss (1961) and Berkowitz (1962), using a format quite similar to our Experiment 11. The aim of these investigators was to study aggression per se. In typical experimental manipulations, they frustrated the subject to see whether he would administer higher shocks when angry. But the effect of these manipulations was minuscule compared with the levels obtained under obedience. That is to say, no matter what these experimenters did to anger, irritate, or frustrate the subject, he would at most move up one or two shock levels, say from shock level 4 to level 6. This represents a genuine increment in aggression. But there remained an order-of-magnitude difference in the variation introduced in his behavior this way, and under conditions where he was taking orders.

In observing the subjects in the obedience experiment, one could see that, with minor exceptions, these individuals were performing a task that was distasteful and often disagreeable but which they felt obligated to carry out. Many protested shocking the victim even while they were unable to disengage themselves from the experimenter’s authority. Now and then a subject did come along who seemed to relish the task of making the victim scream. But he was the rare exception, and clearly appeared as the queer duck among our subjects.

An additional source of experimental evidence is the role-permutation studies (see Chapter 8). In several of these experiments subjects were given opportunities to shock the victim but did not do so unless the social structure of the situation was appropriately arranged.

The key to the behavior of subjects lies not in pent-up anger or aggression but in the nature of their relationship to authority. They have given themselves to the authority; they see themselves as instruments for the execution of his wishes; once so defined, they are unable to break free.

[admin]

CHAPTER 14. Problems of Method

In 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 Victim

The 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 Belief

When 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.

[admin]

15. Epilogue

The 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 Vietnam

Every 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.

[admin]

Appendix I: Problems of Ethics in Research

The purpose of the inquiry described here was to study obedience and disobedience to authority under conditions that permitted careful scrutiny of the phenomenon. A person was told by an experimenter to obey a set of increasingly callous orders, and our interest was to see when he would stop obeying. An element of theatrical staging was needed to set the proper conditions for observing the behavior, and technical illusions were freely employed (such as the fact that the victim only appeared to be shocked). Beyond this, most of what occurred in the laboratory was what had been discovered, rather than what had been planned.

For some critics, however, the chief horror of the experiment was not that the subjects obeyed but that the experiment was carried out at all. Among professional psychologists a certain polarization occurred. [31] The experiment was both highly praised and harshly criticized. In 1964, Dr. Diana Baumrind attacked the experiments in the American Psychologist, in which I later published this reply:

. . . In a recent issue of American Psychologist, a critic raised a number of questions concerning the obedience report. She expressed concern for the welfare of subjects who served in the experiment, and wondered whether adequate measures were taken to protect the participants.

At the outset, the critic confuses the unanticipated outcome of an experiment with its basic procedure. She writes, for example, as if the production of stress in our subjects was an intended and deliberate effect of the experimental manipulation. There are many laboratory procedures specifically designed to create stress (Lazarus, 1964), but the obedience paradigm was not one of them. The extreme tension induced in some subjects was unexpected. Before conducting the experiment, the procedures were discussed with many colleagues, and none anticipated the reactions that subsequently took place. Foreknowledge of results can never be the invariable accompaniment of an experimental probe. Understanding grows because we examine situations in which the end is unknown. An investigator unwilling to accept this degree of risk must give up the idea of scientific inquiry.

Moreover, there was every reason to expect, prior to actual experimentation, that subjects would refuse to follow the experimenter's instructions beyond the point where the victim protested; many colleagues and psychiatrists were questioned on this point, and they virtually all felt this would be the case. Indeed, to initiate an experiment in which the critical measure hangs on disobedience, one must start with a belief in certain spontaneous resources in men that enable them to overcome pressure from authority.

It is true that after a reasonable number of subjects had been exposed to the procedures, it became evident that some would go to the end of the shock board, and some would experience stress. That point, it seems to me, is the first legitimate juncture at which one could even start to wonder whether or not to abandon the study. But momentary excitement is not the same as harm. As the experiment progressed there was no indication of injurious effects in the subjects; and as the subjects themselves strongly endorsed the experiment, the judgment I made was to continue the investigation.

Is not the criticism based as much on the unanticipated findings as on the method? The findings were that some subjects performed in what appeared to be a shockingly immoral way. If, instead, everyone of the subjects had broken off at "slight shock," or at the first sign of the learner's discomfort, the results would have been pleasant, and reassuring, and who would protest?

A very important aspect of the procedure occurred at the end of the experimental session. A careful post-experimental treatment was administered to all subjects. The exact content of the dehoax varied from condition to condition and with increasing experience on our part. At the very least, all subjects were told that the victim had not received dangerous electric shocks. Each subject had a friendly reconciliation with the unharmed victim, and an extended discussion with the experimenter. The experiment was explained to the defiant subjects in a way that supported their decision to disobey the experimenter. Obedient subjects were assured of the fact that their behavior was entirely normal and that their feelings of conflict or tension were shared by other participants. Subjects were told that they would receive a comprehensive report at the conclusion of the experimental series. In some instances, additional detailed, and lengthy discussions of the experiments were also carried out with individual subjects.

When the experimental series was complete, subjects received a written report which presented details of the experimental procedure and results. Again, their own part in the experiments was treated in a dignified way and their behavior in the experiment respected. All subjects received a follow-up questionnaire regarding their participation in the research, which again allowed expression of thoughts and feelings about their behavior.

The replies to the questionnaire confirmed my impression that participants felt positively toward the experiment. In its quantitative aspect (see Table 8), 84% of the subjects stated they were glad to have been in the experiment; 15% indicated neutral feelings; and 1.3% indicated negative feelings. To be sure, such findings are to be interpreted cautiously, but they cannot be disregarded.

Further, four-fifths of the subjects felt that more experiments of this sort should be carried out, and 74%. indicated that they had learned something of personal importance as a result of being in the study.

The debriefing and assessment procedures were carried out as a matter of course, and were not stimulated by any observation of special risk in the experimental procedure. In my judgment, at no point were subjects exposed to danger and at no point did they run the risk of injurious effects resulting from participation. If it had been otherwise, the experiment would have been terminated at once.

The critic states that, after he has performed in the experiment, the subject cannot justify his behavior and must bear the full brunt of his actions. By and large it does not work this way. The same mechanisms that allow the subject to perform the act, to obey rather than to defy the experimenter, transcend the moment of performance and continue to justify his behavior for him. The same viewpoint the subject takes while performing the actions is the viewpoint from which he later sees his behavior, that is, the perspective of "carrying out the task assigned by the person in authority."

[img]Table%208.%20Excerpt%20from%20Questionnaire%20Used%20in%20a%20Follow-up%20Study%20of%20the%20Obedience%20Research[/img]


Note: Ninety-two percent of the subjects returned the questionnaire. The characteristics of the nonrespondents were checked against the respondents. They differed from the respondents only with regard to age; younger people were overrepresented in the nonresponding group.

Because the idea of shocking the victim is repugnant, there is a tendency among those who hear of the design to say "people will not do it." When the results are made known, this attitude is expressed as "if they do it they will not be able to live with themselves afterward." These two forms of denying the experimental findings are equally inappropriate misreadings of the facts of human social behavior. Many subjects do, indeed, obey to the end, and there is no indication of injurious effects.

The absence of injury is a minimal condition of experimentation; there can be, however, an important positive side to participation. The critic suggests that subjects derived no benefit from being in the obedience study, but this is false. By their statements and actions, subjects indicated that they had learned a good deal, and many felt gratified to have taken part in scientific research they considered to be of significance. A year after his participation one subject wrote: "This experiment has strengthened my belief that man should avoid harm to his fellow man even at the risk of violating authority."

Another stated: "To me, the experiment pointed up the extent to which each individual should have or discover firm ground on which to base his decisions, no matter how trivial they appear to be. I think people should think more deeply about themselves and their relation to their world and to other people. If this experiment serves to jar people out of complacency, it will have served its end."

These statements are illustrative of a broad array of appreciative and insightful comments by those who participated.

The 5-page report sent to each subject on the completion of the experimental series was specifically designed to enhance the value of his experience. It laid out the broad conception of the experimental program as well as the logic of its design. It described the results of a dozen of the experiments, discussed the causes of tension, and attempted to indicate the possible significance of the experiment. Subjects responded enthusiastically; many indicated a desire to be in further experimental research. This report was sent to all subjects several years ago. The care with which it was prepared does not support the critic's assertion that the experimenter was indifferent to the value subjects derived from their participation.

The critic fears that participants will be alienated from psychological experiments because of the intensity of experience associated with laboratory procedures. My own observation is that subjects more commonly respond with distaste to the "empty" laboratory hour, in which cardboard procedures are employed, and the only possible feeling upon emerging from the laboratory is that one has wasted time in a patently trivial and useless exercise.

The subjects in the obedience experiment, on the whole, felt quite differently about their participation. They viewed the experience as an opportunity to learn something of importance about themselves, and more generally, about the conditions of human action.

A year after the experimental program was completed, I initiated an additional follow-up study. In this connection an impartial medical examiner, experienced in outpatient treatment, interviewed 40 experimental subjects. The examining psychiatrist focused on those subjects he felt would be most likely to have suffered consequences from participation, His aim was to identify possible injurious effects resulting from the experiment. He concluded that, although extreme stress had been experienced by several subjects, "none was found by this interviewer to show signs of having been harmed by his experience.... Each subject seemed to handle his task (in the experiment) in a manner consistent with well-established patterns of behavior. No evidence was found of any traumatic reactions." Such evidence ought to be weighed before judging the experiment.

At root, the critic believes that it is not proper to test obedience in this situation, because she construes it as one in which there is no reasonable alternative to obedience. In adopting this view, she has lost sight of this fact: A substantial proportion of subjects do disobey. By their example, disobedience is shown to be a genuine possibility, one that is in no sense ruled out by the general structure of the experimental situation.

The critic is uncomfortable with the high level of obedience obtained in the first experiment. In the condition she focused on, 65% of the subjects obeyed to the end. However, her sentiment does not take into account that within the general framework of the psychological experiment obedience varied enormously from one condition to the next. In some variations, 90% of the subjects disobeyed. It seems to be not only the fact of an experiment, but the particular structure of elements within the experimental situation that accounts for rates of obedience and disobedience. And these elements were varied systematically in the program of research.

A concern with human dignity is based on a respect for a man's potential to act morally. The critic feels that the experimenter made the subject shock the victim. This conception is alien to my view. The experimenter tells the subject to do something. But between the command and the outcome there is a paramount force, the acting person who may obey or disobey. I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.

The experiment is also criticized on the grounds that "it could easily effect an alteration in the subject's ... ability to trust adult authorities in the future." ... However, the experimenter is not just any authority: He is an authority who tells the subject to act harshly and inhumanely against another man. I would consider it of the highest value if participation in the experiment could, indeed, inculcate a skepticism of this kind of authority. Here, perhaps, a difference in philosophy emerges most clearly. The critic views the subject as a passive creature, completely controlled by the experimenter. I started from a different viewpoint. A person who comes to the laboratory is an active, choosing adult, capable of accepting or rejecting the prescriptions for action addressed to him. The critic sees the effect of the experiment as undermining the subject's trust of authority. I see it as a potentially valuable experience insofar as it makes people aware of the problem of indiscriminate submission to authority.

Yet another criticism occurred in Dannie Abse's play, The Dogs of Pavlov, which appeared in London in 1971 and which uses the obedience experiment as its central dramatic theme. At the play's climax, Kurt, a major character in the play, repudiates the experimenter for treating him as a guinea pig. In his introduction to the play, Abse especially condemns the illusions employed in the experiment, terming the setup "bullshit," "fraudulent," "cheat." At the same time, he apparently admires the dramatic quality of the experiment. And he allowed by rejoinder to appear in the foreword to his book. I wrote to him:

I do feel you are excessively harsh in your language when condemning my use of illusion in the experiment. As a dramatist, you surely understand that illusion may serve a revelatory function, and indeed, the very possibility of theater is founded on the benign use of contrivance.

One could, viewing a theatrical performance, claim that the playwright has cheated, tricked, and defrauded the audience, for he presents as old men individuals who are, when the greasepaint is removed, quite young; men presented as physicians who in reality are merely actors knowing nothing about medicine, etc., etc. But this assertion of "bullshit," "cheat," "fraud" would be silly, would it not, for it does not take into account how those exposed to the theater's illusions feel about them. The fact is that the audience accepts the necessity of illusion for the sake of entertainment, intellectual enrichment, and all of the other benefits of the theatrical experience. And it is their acceptance of these procedures that gives you warrant for the contrivances you rely upon.

So I will not say that you cheated, tricked, and defrauded your audience. But, I would hold the same claim for the experiment. Misinformation is employed in the experiment; illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at truths; and these procedures are justified for one reason only: they are, in the end, accepted and endorsed by those who are exposed to them....

When the experiment was explained to subjects they responded to it positively, and most felt it was an hour well spent. If it had been otherwise, if subjects ended the hour with bitter recriminatory feelings, the experiment could not have proceeded.

This judgment is based, first, on the numerous conversations I have had with subjects immediately after their participation in the experiment. Such conversations can reveal a good deal, but what they showed most was how readily the experience is assimilated to the normal frame of things. Moreover, subjects were friendly rather than hostile, curious rather than denunciatory, and in no sense demeaned by the experience. This was my general impression, and it was later supported by formal procedures undertaken to assess the subjects' reaction to the experiment.

The central moral justification for allowing a procedure of the sort used in my experiment is that it is judged acceptable by those who have taken part in it. Moreover, it was the salience of this fact throughout that constituted the chief moral warrant for the continuation of the experiments.

This fact is crucial to any appraisal of the experiment from an ethical standpoint.

Imagine an experiment in which a person's little finger was routinely snipped off in the course of a laboratory hour. Not only is such an experiment reprehensible, but within hours the study would be brought to a halt as outraged participants pressed their complaints on the university administration, and legal measures were invoked to restrain the experimenter. When a person has been abused, he knows it, and will quite properly react against the source of such mistreatment.

Criticism of the experiment that does not take account of the tolerant reaction of the participants is hollow. This applies particularly to criticism centering on the use of technical illusions (or "deception," as the critics prefer to say) that fails to relate this detail to the central fact that subjects find the device acceptable. Again, the participant, rather than the external critic, must be the ultimate source of judgment.

While some persons construe the experimenter to be acting in terms of deceit, manipulation, and chicanery, it is, as you should certainly appreciate, also possible to see him as a dramatist who creates scenes of revelatory power, and who brings participants into them. So perhaps we are not so far apart in the kind of work we do. I do grant there is an important difference in that those exposed to your theatrical illusions expect to confront them, while my subjects are not forewarned. However, whether it is unethical to pursue truths through the use of my form of dramaturgical device cannot be answered in the abstract. It depends entirely on the response of those who have been exposed to such procedures.

One further point; the obedient subject does not blame himself for shocking the Victim, because the act does not originate in the self. It originates in authority, and the worst the obedient subject says of himself is that he must learn to resist authority more effectively in the future.

That the experiment has stimulated this thought in some subjects is, to my mind, a satisfying. consequence of the inquiry. An illustrative case is provided by the experience of a young man who took part in a Princeton replication of the obedience experiment, conducted in 1964. He was fully obedient. On October 27, 1970, he wrote to me:

"Participation in the 'shock experiment' ... has had a great impact on my life...

"'When 1 was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority.... To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself. I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience...."

He inquired whether any other participants had reacted similarly, and whether, in my opinion, participation in the study could have this effect.

I replied:

"The experiment does, of course, deal with the dilemma individuals face when they are confronted with conflicting demands of authority and conscience, and I am glad that your participation in the study has brought you to a deeper personal consideration of these issues. Several participants have informed me that their own sensitivity to the problem of submission to authority was increased as a result of their experience in the study. If the experiment has heightened your awareness of the problem of indiscriminate submission to authority, it will have performed an important function. If you believe strongly that it is wrong to kill others in the service of your country, then you ought certainly to press vigorously for CO status, and I am deeply hopeful that your sincerity in this matter will be recognized."

A few months later he wrote again. He indicated, first, that the draft board was not very impressed with the effect of his participation in the experiment, but he was granted CO status nonetheless. He writes:

"The experience of the interview doesn't lessen my strong belief of the great impact of the experiment on my life....

" ... You have discovered one of the most important causes of all the trouble in this world.... I am grateful to have been able to provide you with a part of the information necessary for that discovery. I am delighted to have acted, by refusing to serve in the Armed Forces, in a manner which people must act if these problems are to be solved.

"With sincere thanks for your contribution to my life."

In a world in which action is often clouded with ambiguity, I nonetheless feel constrained to give greater heed to this man, who actually participated in the study, than to a distant critic. For disembodied moralizing is not the issue, but only the human response of those who have participated in the experiment. And that response not only endorses the procedures employed, but overwhelmingly calls for deeper inquiry to illuminate the issues of obedience and disobedience.

Over the years, numerous statements in support of the experiment have appeared in print.

Dr. Milton Erikson, a well-known clinical psychologist, wrote:

That [Milgram's] pioneer work in this field is attacked as being unethical, unjustifiable, uninformative, or any other derogative dismissal is to be expected, simply because people like to shut their eyes to undesirable behavior, preferring to investigate memory, forgetting of nonsense syllables...

Milgram is making a momentous and meaningful contribution to our knowledge of human behavior .... When Milgram's initial study appeared, he was already well aware that an area of scientific investigation was being opened up which would lead to reproaches and condemnation.... To engage in such studies as Milgram has requires strong men with strong scientific faith and a willingness to discover that to man himself, not to "the devil" belongs the responsibility for and the control of his inhumane actions.

(International Journal of Psychiatry, October 1968, pp. 278-79.)

Dr. Amitai Etzioni, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, wrote:

... Milgram's experiment seems to me one of the best carried out in this generation. It shows that the often stated opposition between meaningful, interesting humanistic study and accurate, empirical quantitative research is a false one. The two perspectives can be combined to the benefit of both....

(International Journal of Psychiatry, October 1968, pp. 278-79.)

Professor Herbert Kelman had written a thoughtful article on ethical problems of experimental research entitled: "Human Use on Human Subjects: The Problem of Deception in Social Psychological Experiments." And Dr. Thomas Crawford, a social psychologist at Berkeley, wrote:

Kelman takes the position that experimental manipulations are legitimate provided that they serve to increase the individual's freedom of choice.... I submit that Milgram's research ... is precisely aimed at achieving the admirable goal which Kelman sets before us. We can hardly read the study without becoming sensitized to analogous conflicts in our own lives.

("In Defense of Obedience Research; An Extension of the Kelman Ethic." In The Social Psychology of Psychological Research, edited by Arthur G. Miller. New York: The Free Press, 1972.)

Dr. Alan Elms of the University of California, Davis, wrote:

Milgram, in exploring the conditions which produce such destructive obedience, and the psychological processes which lead to such attempted abdications of responsibility, seems to me to have done some of the most morally significant research in modern psychology.

(From: Social Psychology and Social Relevance, Little, Brown and Company, 1972.)

[admin]

Appendix II: Patterns Among Individuals

To broaden our understanding of why some people obey and others defy the experimenter, a number of individual tests were given to the subjects. To see whether obedient and disobedient subjects differ in their concept of responsibility, subjects in the first four experimental conditions were exposed to a "responsibility clock." This consisted of a disk which the subject could divide into three segments by means of movable rods rotating from the center. The subject, after performing in the experiment, was asked to "cut slices of pie" proportional to the responsibility of the three participants in the experiment (experimenter, subject, and victim). We asked, "How much is each of us responsible for the fact that this person was given electric shocks against his will?" The experimenter read off the results directly on the back of the disk, which is graduated in the manner of a 360-degree protractor.

On the whole, subjects did not have very much difficulty performing the task. And the results for 118 subjects for whom the test was given are shown in Table 9.

Table 9. Assignment of Responsibility by Defiant and Obedient Subjects



The major finding is that the defiant subjects see themselves as principally responsible for the suffering of the learner, assigning 48 percent of the total responsibility to themselves and 39 percent to the experimenter. The balance tips slightly for the obedient subjects, who do not see themselves as any more responsible than the experimenter, and indeed, are willing to accept slightly less of the responsibility. A larger difference occurs in assigning responsibility to the learner. The obedient subjects assign him about twice as large a share of the responsibility for his own suffering as do the defiant subjects. When questioned on this matter, they point to the fact that he volunteered for the experiment and did not learn very efficiently.

Thus, the defiant subjects, more often than obedient subjects, attribute primary responsibility to themselves. And they attribute less responsibility to the learner. Of course, these measures were obtained after the subject's performance, and we do not know if they constitute enduring predispositions of the obedient and defiant subjects, or whether they were post facto adjustments of thought.


Fig. 20. Responsibility clock

Dr. Alan Elms administered a number of psychological tests to about twenty obedient and twenty defiant subjects who had performed in the proximity series. His major finding is that there was a relationship between obedience in the experiment and score on the F scale. This is a scale developed by Adorno and his associates to measure fascistic tendencies (1950), and Elms found that those subjects who had obeyed showed a greater degree of authoritarianism (a higher F score) than those who refused to obey. Offhand, this sounds somewhat tautological but Elms explains:

The relationship between obedience and some elements of authoritarianism seems fairly strong; and it should be remembered that the measure of obedience is a measure of actual submission to authority, not just what a person says he's likely to do. Too much of the research on authoritarianism ... has been on the level of paper-and-pencil responses, which don't necessarily get translated into behavior. But here we have people either obeying or refusing the demands of authority, in a realistic and highly disturbing situation.... So it does look as if those researchers in the late 40's had something, something which can be translated from abstract tendencies into actual authoritarian behavior: submitting to the man in command, punishing the weaker subordinate. (page 133) (A. C. Elms, Social Psychology and Social Relevance, 1972)

The relationship between the measure on the F scale and performance in the experiment, although suggestive, is not very strong, owing in part, I think, to the imperfection of paper-and-pencil measuring devices. It is hard to relate performance to personality because we really do not know very much about how to measure personality.

Still another effort to find correlates of obedience was undertaken by Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg, a colleague of mine at Yale University. Dr. Kohlberg had developed a scale of moral development, which is based on the theory that individuals pass through a number of stages of moral judgment as they mature. Using a group of 34 Yale undergraduates who had served in pilot studies, he found that those who broke off were at a higher level of moral development than those who remained obedient. Again, the findings are suggestive, though not very strong (Kohlberg, 1965).

I had also collected background information on subjects immediately after participation in the experiment. The findings, although generally weak, pointed in the following directions. Republicans and Democrats were not significantly different in obedience levels; Catholics were more obedient than Jews or Protestants. The better educated were more defiant than the less well educated. Those in the moral professions of law, medicine, and teaching showed greater defiance than those in the more technical professions, such as engineering and physical science. The longer one's military service, the more obedience -- except that former officers were less obedient than those who served only as enlisted men, regardless of length of service. These were the findings when subjects in the first four experimental conditions (the proximity series) were studied. Many of these findings "washed out" when further experimental conditions were added in, for reasons that were somewhat mysterious to me. (It is true, of course, that the meaning of obedience and disobedience changes from one condition to the next.) My over-all reaction was to wonder at how few correlates there were of obedience and disobedience and how weakly they are related to the observed behavior. 1 am certain that there is a complex personality basis to obedience and disobedience. But I know we have not found it.

In any event it would be a mistake to believe that any single temperamental quality is associated with disobedience, or to make the simpleminded statement that kindly and good persons disobey while those who are cruel do not. There are simply too many points in the processes at hand at which various components of the personality can play complicated roles to allow any oversimplified generalizations. Moreover, the disposition a person brings to the experiment is probably less important a cause of his behavior than most readers assume. For the social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

[admin]

Notes

1. 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.

[admin]

References

Abse, D. The Dogs of Pavlov. London: Valentine, Mitchell & Co., Ltd., in press.

Adorno, T.; Frenkel-Brunswik, Else; Levinson, D. J., and Sanford, R. N. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row, 1950.

Arendt, H, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

Asch, J. E. "Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgement." In H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, Leadership, and Men. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press, 1951.

Ashby, W. R. An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1956.

Baumrind, D. "Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience.''' American Psychologist, Vol. 19 (1964), pp. 421-23.

Berkowitz, L. Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962.

Bettelheim, B. The Informed Heart. New York: The Free Press, 1960.

Bierstedt, R. "The Problem of Authority." Chapter 3 in Freedom and Control in Modern Society. New York: Van Nostrand, 1954, pp. 67-81.

Block, J. and J. "An Interpersonal Experiment on Reactions to Authority." Human Relations, Vol. 5 (1952), pp. 91-98.

Buss, A. H. The Psychology of Aggression. New York: John Wiley, 1961.

Cannon, W. B. The Wisdom of the Body. New York: W. W. Norton, 1932.

Cartwright, D. (ed.). Studies in Social Power. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959.

Comfort, A. Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State: A Criminological Approach to the Problem of Poeer. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1950.

Crawford, T. "In Defense of Obedience Research: An Extension of the Kelman Ethic." In A. G. Miller (ed.), The Social Psychology of Psychological Research. New York The Free Press, 1972, pp. 179-86.

Dicks, H. V. Licensed Mass Murder: A Social Psychological Study of Some S.S. Killers. New York Basic Books, 1972.

Elms, A. C. "Acts of Submission." Chapter 4 of Social Psychology and Social Relevance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

English, H. B. Dynamics of Child Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Erikson, M. "The Inhumanity of Ordinary People." International Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 6 (1968), pp. 278-79.

Etzioni, A. "A Model of Significant Research." International Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 6 (1968), pp. 279-80.

Feinberg, I. "Sex Differences in Resistance to Group Pressure." Unpublished master's thesis, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa.

Festinger, L. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. New York: Harper & Row. 1957.

Frank, J. D. "Experimental Studies of Personal Pressure and Resistance." Journal of Genetic Psychology, Vol. 30 (1944), pp. 23-64.

French, J. R. P. "A Formal Theory of Social Power: Psychological Review, Vol. 63 (1956), pp. 181-94.

___, Morrison, H. W., and Levinger, G. "Coercive Power and Forces Affecting Conformity." Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 61 (1960), pp. 93-101.

___, and Raven, B. H. "The Bases of Social Power." In D. Cartwright (ed.), Studies in Social Power. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959, pp. 150-67.

Freud, S. Totem and Taboo. Translated by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1950.

___, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death." In J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14. London, The Hogarth Press, 1957, pp. 273-302.

___, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1922; New York: Bantam Books, 1960. (German original, 1921.)

Fromm, E. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941.

Garfinkel, H. "Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities." Social Problems, Vol. 11 (Winter 1964), pp. 225-50.

Glasser, R. J. 365 Days. New York: George Braziller, 1971.

Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.

___, "Embarrassment and Social Organization." the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62 (November 1956), pp. 264-71.

Halberstam, David. Making of a Quagmire. New York: Random House, 1965.

Hall, E. T. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Doubleday, 1966.

Hillberg, R. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961.

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909, Reproduction of 1651 edition.

Hofling, C. K.; Brotzman, E.; Dalrymple, S.; Graves, N., and Pierce, C. "An Experimental Study of Nurse-Physician Relations." The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Vol. 143, No. 2 (1966), pp. 171-80.

Homans. G. C. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961.

Katz, J. Experimentation with Human Beings: The Authority of the In vestigator, Subject, Professions, and State in the Human Experimentation Process. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972.

Kelman, H. "Human Use of Human Subjects: The Problem of Deception in Social Psychological Experiments." Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 67 (1967), pp. 1-11.

___, and Lawrence, L. "Assignment of Responsibility in the Case of Lt. Calley: Preliminary Report on a National Survey." Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1972).

Kierkegaard, S. Fear and Trembling. English edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941.

Kilham, W., and Mann, L. "Level of Destructive Obedience as a Function of Transmittor and Executant Roles in the Milgram Obedience Paradigm." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in press.

Koestler, Arthur. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Kohlberg, L. "Development of Moral Character and Moral Ideology." In Hoffman, M. L., and Hoffman, L. W. (eds.), Review of Child Development Research, Vol. 1. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1964, pp. 383-431.

___, "Relationships Between the Development of Moral Judgment and Moral Conduct." Paper presented at Symposium on Behavioral and Cognitive Concepts in the Study of Internationalization at the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 26, 1956.

Laski, H. J. '''The Dangers of Obedience." Harper's Monthly Magazine, Vol. 159 (1919), pp. 1-10.

Lazarus, R. "A Laboratory Approach to the Dynamics of Psychological Stress." American Psychologist, Vol. 19 (1964), pp. 400-411.

Leavitt, S. "The Andersonville Trial." In Bennett Cerf (ed.), Four Contemporary American Plays. New York: Random House. 1961.

Lerner, M. J. "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.

Lewin, K. Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper & Row, 1951.

Lippett, R. "Field Theory and Experiment in Social Psychology: Autocratic and Democratic Group Atmosphere." American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 45, pp. 25-49.

Lorenz, K. On Aggression. Translated by M. K. Wilson. New York: Bantam Books, 1963.

Mantell, D. M. "The Potential for Violence in Germany." Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1971), pp. 101-12.

Marler, P., Mechanisms of Animal Behavior. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967.

Milgram, S. "Behavioral Study of Obedience." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 67 (1963), pp. 371-78.

___, "Dynamics of Obedience: Experiments in Social Psychology." Mimeographed report, National Science Foundation, Jan. 25, 1961.

___, "Group Pressure and Action Against a Person." Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, Vol. 69 (1964), pp. 137-43.

___, "Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind." American Psychologist, Vol. 19 (1964), pp. 848-52.

___, "Liberating Effects of Group Pressure." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 1 (1965), pp. 127-34.

___, Obedience (a filmed experiment). Distributed by the New York University Film Library. Copyright 1965.

___, "Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority." Human Relations, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1965), pp. 57-76.

___, "Interpreting Obedience: Error and Evidence; A Reply to Orne and Holland." In A. G. Miller (ed.), The Social Psychology of Psychological Research. New York: The Free Press, 1972.

Miller, A. (ed.). The Social Psychology of Psychological Research. New York: The Free Press, 1972.

Miller, N. "Experimental Studies of Conflict." In M. J. Hunt (ed.), Personality and Behavior Disorders. New York: Ronald Press, 1944, pp. 431-65.

Modigliani, A. "Embarrassment and Embarrassability." Sociometry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 1968). pp. 313-26.

___, "Embarrassment, Facework, and Eye Contact: Testing a Theory of Embarrassment." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1971), pp.15-24.

Orne, M. T., and Holland, C. C. "On the Ecological Validity of Laboratory Deceptions." International Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1968), pp. 282-93.

Orwell, G. Selected Essays. London: Penguin Books, 1957.

Raven, B. H. "Social Influence and Power." In I.D. Steiner and M. Fishbein (eds.), Current Studies in Social Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.

___, and French, J. R. P. "Group Support, Legitimate Power, and Social Influence." Journal of Personality, Vol. 26 (1958), pp. 400-409.

Rescher, N. The Logic of Commands. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.

Rosenhan, D. "Some Origins of Concerns for Others." In P. H. Mussen, J. Langer, and M. Covington (eds.), Trends and Issues in Developmental Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, pp. 134-53.

___, Obedience and Rebellion: Observations on the Milgram Three-Party Paradigm. In preparation.

Rosenthal, R., and Rosnow, R. L. "Volunteer Subjects and the Results of Opinion Change Studies." Psychological Reports, Vol. 19 (1966), p. 1183.

Scott, J. P. Aggression. Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Sheridan, C.L., and King, R. G. "Obedience to Authority with an Authentic Victim." Proceedings, Eightieth Annual Convention, American Psychological Association. 1972, pp. 165-66.

Sherif, M. The Psychology of Social Norms. New York: Harper & Row, 1936.

Shirer, W. L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.

Sidis, B., The Psychology of Suggestion. New York: Appleton, 1898.

Simon, H. A. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations. New York: The Free Press, 1965.

Snow, C. P. "Either-Or" Progressive, February 1961, p. 24.

Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by J. J. Chapman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930.

Stogdill, R. M. "The Measurement of Attitudes Toward Parental Control and the Social Adjustment of Children." Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 20 (1936), 259-67.

Taylor, T. Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Tinbergen, N. Social Behavior in Animals. London: Butler and Tanner, Ltd., 1953.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Edited by Sherman Paul. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Tolstoy, L. Tolstoy's Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-violence. New York: New American Library, 1968.

Weber, M. Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Wouk, H. The Caine Mutiny. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1952.

Other Works Consulted

Adams, J. Stacy, and Romney, A. Kimball "A Functional Analysis of Authority." Pychological Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (July 1959), pp. 234-51.

Aronfreed, Justin. Conduct and Conscience: The Socialization of Internalized Control over Behavior. New York: Academic Press, 1968.

Berkowitz, Leonard, and Lundy, R. "Personality Characteristics Related to Susceptibility to Influence by Peers or Authority Figures." Journal of Personality, Vol. 25 (1957), pp. 306-16.

Binet, A. La Suggestibilite. Paris: Schleicher, 1900.

Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

DeGrazia, Sebastian. "What Authority Is Not." The American Political Science Review, Vol. 3 (June 1959).

Eatherly, Claude. Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot Told in His Letters to Gunther Anders. New York: Monthy Review Press, 1961.

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Friedlander, Saul. Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

Friedrich, C. J. Authority. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Gamson, William, Power and Discontent. Homewood, Ill: The Dorsey Press, 1968.

Gaylin, W. In the Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison. New York: The Viking Press, 1970.

Goldhammer, R., and Shils, E. "Types of Power and Status." American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45 (1939), pp. 171-78.

Gurr, Ted Robert. Why Men Rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Hallie, Philip P. The Paradox of Cruelty. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.

Hammer, Richard. The Court Martial of Lt. Calley. New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1971.

Heydecker, J. J., and Leeb, J. The Nuremberg Trial. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1962.

Howton, F. William. Functionaries. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Lasswell, H. D., and Kaplan, A. Power and Society. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950.

Lauman, Edward O.; Siegel, Paul M., and Hodge, Robert W. (eds.). The Logic of Social Hierarchies. Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1970.

Neuman, Franz. The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory. Edited by Herbert Marcuse. New York: The Free Press, 1957.

Parsons, T. The Social System. New York: The Free Press, 1951.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946.

Ring, K., Wallston, K., and Corey, M. "Mode of Debriefing as a Factor Affecting Subjective Reaction to a Milgram-Type Obedience Experiment: An Ethical Inquiry." Representative Research in Social Psychology, Vol. 1 (970), pp. 67-88.

Rokeach, M. "Authority, Authoritarianism, and Conformity." In I. A. Berg and B. M. Bass (eds.), Conformity and Deviation. New York: Harper & Row, 1961, pp. 230-57.

Russell, Bertrand. Authority and the Individual. Boston: Beacon Press, 1949.

Sack, John. Lt. Calley: His Own Story. New York: The Viking Press, 1970.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Tilker, H. A. "Socially Responsible Behavior as a Function of Observer Responsibility and Victim Feedback," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 2 (February 1970), pp. 95-100.

Von Mises, Ludwig. Bureaucracy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944.

Whyte, L. L., Wilson, A. C., and Wilson, D. (eds.), Hierarchical Structures. New York: American Elsevier Publishing, 1969.

Wolfe, D. M. "Power and Authority in the Family," In D. Cartwright (ed.), Studies in Social Power. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959, pp. 99-117.

[admin]

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