43-2 What did Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us about the power of social influence?

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963, 1974), a high school classmate of Philip Zimbardo and then a student of Solomon Asch, knew that people often give in to social pressures. But how would they respond to outright commands? To find out, he undertook what became social psychology’s most famous and controversial experiments (Benjamin & Simpson, 2009).

Imagine yourself as one of the nearly 1000 people who took part in Milgram’s 20 experiments. You respond to an advertisement for participants in a Yale University psychology study of the effect of punishment on learning. Professor Milgram’s assistant asks you and another person to draw slips from a hat to see who will be the “teacher” and who will be the “learner.” Because (unknown to you) both slips say “teacher,” you draw a “teacher” slip and are asked to sit down in front of a machine, which has a series of labeled switches. The supposed learner, a mild and submissive-seeming man, is led to an adjoining room and strapped into a chair. From the chair, wires run through the wall to “your” machine. You are given your task: Teach and then test the learner on a list of word pairs. If the learner gives a wrong answer, you are to flip a switch to deliver a brief electric shock. For the first wrong answer, you will flip the switch labeled “15 Volts—Slight Shock.” With each succeeding error, you will move to the next higher voltage. With each flip of a switch, lights flash and electronic switches buzz.

The experiment begins, and you deliver the shocks after the first and second wrong answers. If you continue, you hear the learner grunt when you flick the third, fourth, and fifth switches. After you activate the eighth switch (“120 Volts—Moderate Shock”), the learner cries out that the shocks are painful. After the tenth switch (“150 Volts—Strong Shock”), he begins shouting. “Get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment anymore! I refuse to go on!” You draw back, but the stern experimenter prods you: “Please continue—the experiment requires that you continue.” You resist, but the experimenter insists, “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” or “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

If you obey, you hear the learner shriek in apparent agony as you continue to raise the shock level after each new error. After the 330-volt level, the learner refuses to answer and falls silent. Still, the experimenter pushes you toward the final, 450-volt switch. Ask the question, he says, and if no correct answer is given, administer the next shock level.

Would you follow the experimenter’s commands to shock someone? At what level would you refuse to obey? Before undertaking the experiments, Milgram asked people what they would do. Most people were sure they would stop soon after the learner first indicated pain, certainly before he shrieked in agony. Forty psychiatrists agreed with that prediction when Milgram asked them. Were the predictions accurate? Not even close. When Milgram conducted the experiment with other men aged 20 to 50, he was astonished. More than 60 percent complied fully—right up to the last switch. When he ran a new study, with 40 new “teachers” and a learner who complained of a “slight heart condition,” the results were similar. A full 65 percent of the new teachers obeyed the experimenter right up to 450 volts (FIGURE 43.3). In 10 later studies, women obeyed at rates similar to men’s (Blass, 1999).

Cultures change over time. Researchers wondered if Milgram’s results could be explained by the 1960s American mind-set. To find out, Jerry Burger (2009) replicated Milgram’s basic experiment. Seventy percent of the participants obeyed up to the 150-volt point, only a slight reduction from Milgram’s result. And in a recent French reality TV show replication, 81 percent of people, egged on by a cheering audience, obeyed and tortured a screaming victim (Beauvois et al., 2012).

529

Did Milgram’s teachers figure out the hoax—that no real shock was being delivered and the learner was in fact a confederate who was pretending to feel pain? Did they realize the experiment was really testing their willingness to comply with commands to inflict punishment? No. The teachers typically displayed genuine distress: They perspired, trembled, laughed nervously, and bit their lips.

Milgram’s use of deception and stress triggered a debate over his research ethics. In his own defense, Milgram pointed out that, after the participants learned of the deception and actual research purposes, virtually none regretted taking part (though perhaps by then the participants had reduced their cognitive dissonance—the discomfort they felt when their actions conflicted with their attitudes). When 40 of the teachers who had agonized most were later interviewed by a psychiatrist, none appeared to be suffering emotional aftereffects. All in all, said Milgram, the experiments provoked less enduring stress than university students experience when facing and failing big exams (Blass, 1996). Other scholars, however, after delving into Milgram’s archives, report that his debriefing was less extensive and his participants’ distress greater than what he had suggested (Nicholson, 2011; Perry, 2013).

In later experiments, Milgram discovered some conditions that influence people’s behavior. When he varied the situation, the percentage of participants who obeyed fully ranged from 0 to 93 percent. Obedience was highest when

The power of legitimate, close-at-hand authorities was apparent among those who followed orders to carry out Holocaust atrocities. While obedience alone does not explain the Holocaust, in which anti-Semitic ideology also played a role, it was a significant factor. In the summer of 1942, nearly 500 middle-aged German reserve police officers were dispatched to German-occupied Jozefow, Poland. On July 13, the group’s visibly upset commander informed his recruits, mostly family men, of their orders. They were to round up the village’s Jews, who were said to be aiding the enemy. Able-bodied men would be sent to work camps, and the rest would be shot on the spot.

The commander gave the recruits a chance to refuse to participate in the executions. Only about a dozen immediately refused. Within 17 hours, the remaining 485 officers killed 1500 helpless women, children, and elderly, shooting them in the back of the head as they lay face down. Hearing the victims’ pleas, and seeing the gruesome results, some 20 percent of the officers did eventually dissent, managing either to miss their victims or to wander away and hide until the slaughter was over (Browning, 1992). In real life, as in Milgram’s experiments, those who resisted did so early, and they were the minority.

A different story played out in the French village of Le Chambon. There, villagers openly defied orders to cooperate with the “New Order” by sheltering French Jews, who were destined for deportation to Germany. The villagers’ Protestant ancestors had themselves been persecuted, and their pastors taught them to “resist whenever our adversaries will demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel” (Rochat, 1993). Ordered by police to give a list of sheltered Jews, the head pastor modeled defiance: “I don’t know of Jews, I only know of human beings.” Without realizing how long and terrible the war would be, or how much punishment and poverty they would suffer, the resisters made an initial commitment to resist. Supported by their beliefs, their role models, their interactions with one another, and their own initial acts, they remained defiant to the war’s end.

Lest we presume that obedience is always evil and resistance is always good, consider the obedience of British soldiers who, in 1852, were traveling with civilians aboard the steamship Birkenhead. As they neared their South African port, the Birkenhead became impaled on a rock. To calm the passengers and permit an orderly exit of civilians on the three available lifeboats, soldiers who were not assisting the passengers or working the pumps lined up at parade rest. “Steady, men!” said their officer as the lifeboats pulled away. Heroically, no one frantically rushed to claim a lifeboat seat. As the boat sank, all were plunged into the sea, most to be drowned or devoured by sharks. For almost a century, noted James Michener (1978), “the Birkenhead drill remained the measure by which heroic behavior at sea was measured.”

531

What do the Milgram experiments teach us about ourselves? How does flicking a shock switch relate to everyday social behavior? Psychological experiments aim not to re-create the literal behaviors of everyday life but to capture and explore the underlying processes that shape those behaviors. Participants in Milgram’s experiments confronted a dilemma we all face frequently: Do I adhere to my own standards, or do I respond to others?

In Milgram’s experiments and their modern replications, participants were torn. Should they respond to the pleas of the victim or the orders of the experimenter? Their moral sense warned them not to harm another, yet it also prompted them to obey the experimenter and to be a good research participant. With kindness and obedience on a collision course, obedience usually won.

These experiments demonstrated that strong social influences can make people conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty. Milgram saw this as the fundamental lesson of this work: “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” (1974, p. 6).

Focusing on the end point—450 volts, or someone’s real-life violence—we can hardly comprehend the inhumanity. But we ignore how they get there, in tiny increments. Milgram did not entrap his teachers by asking them first to zap learners with enough electricity to make their hair stand on end. Rather, he exploited the foot-in-the-door effect, beginning with a little tickle of electricity and escalating step by step. In the minds of those throwing the switches, the small action became justified, making the next act tolerable. In Jozefow and Le Chambon, as in Milgram’s experiments, those who resisted usually did so early. After the first acts of compliance or resistance, attitudes began to follow and justify behavior.

So it happens when people succumb, gradually, to evil. In any society, great evils often grow out of people’s compliance with lesser evils. The Nazi leaders suspected that most German civil servants would resist shooting or gassing Jews directly, but they found them surprisingly willing to handle the paperwork of the Holocaust (Silver & Geller, 1978). Milgram found a similar reaction in his experiments. When he asked 40 men to administer the learning test while someone else did the shocking, 93 percent complied. Cruelty does not require devilish villains. All it takes is ordinary people corrupted by an evil situation. Ordinary students may follow orders to haze initiates into their group. Ordinary employees may follow orders to produce and market harmful products. Ordinary soldiers may follow orders to punish and then torture prisoners (Lankford, 2009).