If you ever took first year psychology – or read any popular psychology – then you’re probably familiar with the obedience studies conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the early 1960s. Inspired in part by the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram wanted to assess whether some nationalities are more willing than others to obey authority figures. He designed an experiment in which participants were told by a lab-coated authority figure to administer a memory test to a learner – and to give progressively-severe electric shocks if the learner made a mistake. The learner was not only in a separate room from the “teacher” (who was actually the experimental subject) but was actually only acting to be shocked.
The way I, and I think most people, remember the experiment is that it showed that ordinary people were willing to inflict severe and even lethal levels of electric shock when ordered to do so by an authority figure. It was a chilling reflection of the Holocaust: under the right conditions, any of us could be cold-hearted killers. But a review of the experiment and of Milgram’s broader body of research in this month’s Scientific American Mind suggests that this capsule summary may be misleading.1
To begin with, authors Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam, point out that even in the original experiment, not everyone followed orders: in fact, 35% of subjects quit or refused to continue. (Personally I don’t remember that from Psych 101 – I assumed everyone complied.) Footage of the experiment showed that many of the participants visibly agonized over what to do. As Reicher and Haslam describe it, “They argue with the experimenter. They reflect the learner’s concerns back to him. They search for reassurance and justification.” Many felt trapped between their duties to the experimenter and the experiment – which had been described to them as a worthy attempt to advance science – and the pleas of the “learner.”
Although this is the study most of us remember, in actual fact Milgram conducted a number of subsequent studies in which he looked at the influence of various factors. He found that when the subjects sat in the same room as the learner and saw the effects of the “shocks” the percentage who complied fell to 40%. It fell even further if the person had to press the learner’s hand onto an electric plate to deliver the shock. It also plummeted (to less than 20%) when two other “participants” (who were also actors) refused to participate. Finally, no-one went up to the “lethal dose” if the learner asked for the shocks, when the “authority figure” was the person being shocked, or when two authority figures gave conflicting instructions.
Looking at the research, Reicher and Haslam conclude that the issue is not that followers lose their moral compasses so much as they choose particular authorities to guide them through the dilemmas of making difficult decisions. Which authority figures do we chose? Some research suggests our choices are guided by the extent to which we identify with that person and his or her goals. So we need to be careful who we choose as our “moral authority.” But even so, it doesn’t mean we necessarily turn off our own moral compass – or our responsibility.
Take-away message/bottom line
Re-assessment of Milgram’s original study in 1961 suggests that the common interpretation that people are blindly obedience to authority may not be correct; the situation may be much more complex.
1 Reicher S, Haslam SA. Culture of shock. Scientific American Brain 2011 22(5): 57-61