Obedience to Authority

In July of 1961, three months after the beginning of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram started the first of a series of experiments studying the nature of obedience. At the time, it was generally supposed that Germans had a special propensity for obedience, and initially Milgram wanted to use Americans as a control group before conducting the experiment on Germans. The unexpected results stopped him from experimenting on German subjects.

The experiment goes like this: participants (called “teachers” in the experiment), were called in to participate in a “study of memory”, for which they would be paid $4.00. These participants would enter a room with the experimenter and would be told that in the other room is a “learner” who will be taking a test (the learner is an actor). When the learner gets a question wrong, the participant will shock them. The shocks become progressively higher in voltage, and the learner’s reaction goes from small grunts to screams of agony. When the participant refuses to administer a shock, the experimenter gives them a prod. There were four prods for ongoing insistence on stopping:

1. Please continue.

2. The experiment requires that you continue.

3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.

4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the participant continues to refuse after the fourth prod, the experiment is stopped.

In the first set of experiments, 65% of participants (26 of 40) continued to administer the shocks until the final 450 volt shock, and 100% administered shocks of 300 volts or above. The participants showed varying signs of stress, including shaking, biting their nails, groaning, etc. All the participants paused to question the experiment. Replications of the experiment by other psychologists produced similar results. In 2007, Jerry Burger conducted a replication of the experiment and got almost the same results, with 65% of participants continuing to administer shocks until the end (Burger, 2007).

In his book on the experiments, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Milgram describes the nature of obedience as, most simplistically, a variety of factors that go into producing and maintaining the agentic state that the participant enters when they enter the role of the teacher. The interaction between these factors is shown in figure 1. The agentic state is when, in Milgram’s words, “a person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and…no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions.” Once a person shifts into the agentic state, Milgram says, “all of the essential features of obedience follow.” (Milgram, 1974).

Both the antecedent conditions and the binding factors are intrinsically connected to the material conditions of the participant. The antecedent conditions are the perception of the authority of the experiment, the institution (in Milgram’s case, Yale University), and the experimenter. All these perceptions are influenced fundamentally by the nature of hierarchy in the society at large, as well as within the nature of the situation (in this case, a scientific experiment) and the field of study (in this case, psychology). The binding factors are what keep the participant in the agentic state, and are influenced by many of the same societal realities as the antecedent conditions are, just manifested in different ways, including anxiety around defying authority, etiquette and situational obligations, and the sequential nature of the exercise (this means that in order for the participant to cut off the experiment, they must admit to themselves that what they have done is bad, which may hurt their self-image as well as implicate the participant in the destructive behavior).

Thus, the strength of the agentic state (the degree of obedience) is strongly influenced by the material conditions surrounding the participant. Participants tested in Nazi Germany would likely display different results, because hierarchy under Nazi rule was stricter and more pronounced. In addition, Nazi Germany would likely display more brutality if the race or gender of the learner were taken into account, because of demographic societal hierarchies (in terms of perceived position in society, which in both places is, again, influenced by material conditions). The United States would undeniably display distinct differences in the treatments by and of different races and genders, but in Nazi Germany the phenomenon would be more pronounced.

The Milgram experiment and analysis are a clear explanation of the effects of hierarchy. The degree and strictness of hierarchy in a society is correlated to the degree of obedience. This obedience is dangerous; time and time again it is manipulated by those at the top in order to further subjugate those at the bottom, often through the unspeakable acts of horror that are made possible by the agentic state. Because of this, hierarchy must be avoided at all costs, insofar as it can be.

Obedience to authority is not, however, the case for all members of society. In times of unrest, this obedience is rejected, at least partially, by a segment of the population, often those who are most disenfranchised by the hierarchy. Movements such as the anti-fascist, anti-racist, and feminist movements, which have made a resurgence in the United States in recent years, encourage the liberation from obedience on a personal level. For many, even the most vehement of government detractors, the obedience that has been instilled in them since birth remains. One of the many roles of these movements is to personally weed out and destroy these vestiges of obedience and liberate themselves from them.

Additionally, Milgram’s theory of obedience explains many of the dilemmas in our society today. It shows that people don’t tend to realize that an authority with the appearance of benevolence is really malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence to the latter. In the anti-racist protests of this year, this concept is made abundantly clear. Despite obvious government overreach of power and contempt for human rights, most of the country still blames the protests for the destruction of businesses, extrajudicial killings, and filling their neighborhoods with gas, even when these events are the direct result of unnecessary police action. Despite most people believing the system is corrupt and democracy compromised, they still call for the participation in electoralism with no qualifications and no other solutions. Additionally, ordinary people will tend to trust more what the government tells them, as well as express undue sympathy for police officers attacked (whether injured or not, whether the attack was in self-defense or not), whereas they will be callous toward protesters harmed by police. Many people will feel alienated from the protester, seeing them as mad or violent even if they insist otherwise. Even if video evidence shows that the protester acted purely in self-defense, or did nothing aggressive at all, the response will often be to ask for context. This is also shown in the Milgram experiment. In one of the permutations, the experimenter takes the test and receives the shocks, while another “participant” (actually a confederate) plays the role of the experimenter. Every single participant broke off at the first protest from the experimenter (now the learner). The participants justified their response on humane grounds, and “vehemently denied that they would continue beyond the point where the victim protests.”

The police themselves are also in the agentic state in a more obvious way. They carry out the brutal work of counterinsurgency and “peacekeeping” for the government. When confronted by protesters on what they think of the role of police in modern society, response is nearly invariably one of three: 1. Ignoring the question. 2. The cliché: “I’m just doing my job”, also known as “I’m just following orders”. 3. “Well maybe if you stopped committing crimes, we could all go home.” The first is an expression of arrogance and disrespect. It is communicating to the protester that the officer is above them. They have the authority of legitimacy behind them and need not justify themselves to criminals. The second is putting the responsibility for their actions on their superiors, as was analyzed above in relation to the sequential nature of the punishment. The third is putting the responsibility for their actions on the victim. In one of the permutations, Experiment 4, the participant is told to hold the learner’s hand to the shock plate, thus forcing the participant to come into physical contact with the learner in order to follow the orders of the experimenter. Mr. Batta is one of the participants who went through to the end in Experiment 4. Throughout the experiment, he remains brutally impassive, completely indifferent to the learner, as if he hardly considers them a human being. After the experiment, the experimenter asks him the routine question of whether the experiment has any other purpose that he can think of. He responds, “Well, we have more or less a stubborn person (the learner). If he understood, he would’a went along without getting the punishment.” From his perspective, the learner brought the punishment upon himself.

In the epilogue to Obedience to Authority, Milgram responds to a criticism of the results and conclusion of his experiments:

“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.

“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.”

It is rapidly becoming clear to many that despite America’s appearance as a democracy, it is in reality something quite different than what they have been taught. Yet the general populace, and even many who believe in the widespread corruption and brutality of the United States, still fundamentally retain their belief in the legitimacy of the state’s authority, and submit to it before all else. Obedience to authority profoundly affects our society, and before we can move beyond it, we can never achieve a system that is free of brutality and oppression.

Sources:

Burger, J. M. (2007). Replicating Milgram. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-64-1-1.pdf

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. London: Travistock Publications.