This is a paper I wrote for a psychology course at Kean University 5 years ago. Give it a read and let me know what you think. A link to the PowerPoint on Google Docs is at the bottom.

Obedience to Authority

David S. Pekerosky Jr.

5/13/2015

Resistance to authority stems from an individual’s locus of control center: personal autonomy through deep moral and/or religious convictions.  Without these convictions, the likelihood of following what is perceived as a legitimate authority’s commands becomes apparent, and ultimately inevitable, even when the individual is in direct opposition with the commands given.  Research on obedience and conformity in the years following World War II, along with several, more similar and current studies sought not only to interpret the results of these studies, but to also answer some key questions and difficulties presently facing our world.  Would people resist today?  Or would obedience take precedence over any type of resistance or defiance?  Just how far will someone go to resist authority?  Where does this sense of unquestioning obedience stem from?

These questions needed to be answered.  How could an entire nation of people be seduced into compliance with orders to savagely execute other human beings in such grotesque manners?  What is in their character to make them so submissive to orders such as these?  What are the underlying issues integrated into society just out of reach from the naked eye which facilitate this type of behavior?  What is the exact legitimacy of this authority?  And how does the perception of said authority to the obedient factor into the equation?  Many psychologists and experts in the field of human behavior have answered these questions over the years.

According to a French psychologist, Theodule Ribot (1891), early research on obedience in relation to psychology had favorable outcomes and suggested obedience as positive with benefits to human nature.  He suggested it was matter of sheer will, and “[that] one man gains an irresistible influence over others”.  A student of renowned pioneer in the field psychology, William James, Boris Sidis (1898) suggested obedience was the result of hypnosis and claimed this obedience to be automatic.  Echoing the theories of Ribot, another Frenchman and sociologist, Gustave LeBon (1908), called this theory “mob psychology.”  (Benjamin, Simpson 2009)

Recent evidence has suggested hidden deep in the conscience, human nature has within its scope, the ability to be deviant, to hurt other individuals at the request of who the individual perceives to be a legitimate authority.  It is only during the right circumstances this capacity to harm another individual will be brought to fruition, as was the case 1930’s and 40’s in Nazi Germany.  When faced with the opportunity to disobey authority because of a moral code of conduct learned in early childhood and following the commands of these authority figures unquestioningly, obedience wins out and atrocities, such as the ones discovered by American, English and French troops during World War II, will take place.  Hitler’s own perceived legitimacy of his authority and the people’s commitment to him and his projected authority are what drove him to commit some of the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever seen.

All too often Nazi soldiers and Germans citizens alike justified their behavior and inaction to speak up or resist with excuses of national pride, loyalty to country, and opinions such as, the orders were given to them by their superior officers so they should automatically be followed and trusted as what is best for the greater good of Germany.  Hitler began with simple commands which developed trust and admiration from his people.  Eventually the orders increased in severity and lead to the extermination of hundreds of thousands.  This evidence proved what philosophers have been saying for centuries about the imminent dangers of blind obedience and what Percy Bysshe Shelley was quoted as saying in reference to this obedience; it is the “bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, [and] truth, [and that it] makes slaves of men.”  (Benjamin, Simpson 2009)

Children are taught from the beginning to obey their elders, primarily their parents and secondly teachers and police officers.  Most of what children carry with them into adulthood is learned in the first six years of life, when they are most vulnerable to the authority of others.  As a child is discovering its path in life, obedience becomes a system of rewards for compliance and punishments for disobedience.  When a child misbehaves there is often a negative repercussion.  These repercussions become deeply rooted in the brain so even when one reaches adulthood and there is no actual punishment for disobedience most adults will blindly obey because it is what they have been trained to do.  Many adults obey not only what they have been taught to believe is just and moral, but to also obey what appears to be in line with their personal self-interests.

To research this theory, looking into the Bible is a good start.  It claims in the Ten Commandments adhering to your parents will result in having a prolonged life.  Concerns among leading psychologists and professionals in the business of giving advice to parents when raising children warned of problematic situations in raising these children to blindly obey their parents.  Their suggestions were geared for those in these professions to help parents understand the importance of making sure children “want to obey rather than be forced to obey.”  Agreement among these very psychologists and “child-rearing experts” of the inherence of obedience to be nil, also resulted in this conclusion: obedience is learned in the beginning developmental stages of a child’s life.  However, a student of Sigmund Freud’s, Sando Ferenczi agreed in part, but also added “it occurred as a part of normal human development.”  (Benjamin, Simpson 2009)     

 Throughout history obedience to authority has proved detrimental, to say the least, to the safety, health and well being of targeted and persecuted groups of individuals, namely, and in relatively more recent history, the Jews of Europe.  Crimes against humanity (e.g. Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question) have been perpetuated and carried out in the name of this obedience, primarily the blind obedience to a perceived legitimate authority figure(s).  The responses of the Nazi officers to questions during the Nuremburg War Trials following World War II were most often, in one form or another, how they were “just following orders” from their superior officers.  (McLeod, 2007) 

Seeking to better understand this unquestioning obedience to authority, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a series of experiments to determine why people would ignore their conscience and follow orders which are in direct conflict with their morals, belief and values.  His research on obedience to authority, controversial as it was, would go on to shape the way similar experiments are conducted with regard to the ethical treatment of the subjects.  For decades these experiments have been the primary model for “the use of experimental realism in the service of a question of deep social and moral significance.”  (Blass, 2009)

Stanley Milgram, born of Jewish parents in a Bronx hospital in August of 1933, would eventually become the creator of the highly controversial Obedience Experiments.  Milgram, although born in the U.S., felt a special kind of identification with the Jews of Central Europe.  This connection played a role in his interest with the disciplines of social science, more specifically, social psychology.  What began as a degree in political science at Queens College quickly turned to pursuit of a degree in social psychology at Harvard University.  He discovered his lack of interest in political science due to its foundation in philosophy.  There, at Harvard, he would meet the most influential men in his academic and professional career. (Blass, 2009)

According to Thomas Blass, Ph.D. and author of the book “The Man Who Shocked the World”,  “...one can identify three factors or events that led Milgram to study obedience to authority.” (Blass, 2009)  The first can be connected to his introduction to and close work with Solomon Asch and his research on conformity.  Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority are a variation of the techniques employed by Asch in his research.  He served as a teaching assistant to Asch while studying at Harvard and was privy to these techniques.  However, referring to Asch’s paradigm, Milgram sought research in an area “more consequential than the original experiments.”  (Blass, 2009)

The second factor which led Milgram to his research on obedience, and equally as important to him, was his concernment with the Holocaust and his “lifelong identification with the Jewish people.”  (Blass, 2009)  His divine kinship with European Jewry dates back to his childhood.  And, the third and final element which drove his quest to understand obedience to authority was a level of motivation stemming from his love for social psychology sparked during his first year at Harvard University.  To truly have an impact, Milgram understood his successes in academia could only be born from original and powerful research in the field of psychology.  (Blass, 2009)

Although “humans have a powerful propensity to obey authority”, Stanley Milgram was determined to show us just how powerful this propensity to be.  Humans would abandon all moral code to harm another individual, as long as their perception of the orders given came from what they believed to be a legitimate authority figure, in this case a gentleman in a white lab coat who spoke authoritatively.

Before the experiment, Milgram consulted forty renowned psychologists who all predicted less than one percent of participants would administer high level shocks.  Milgram’s findings were astounding.  Twenty-six out of 40 willing participants in his experiments ignored their moral code and conscience, which goes back to early childhood and the lessons we are taught about harming others, and continued to administer “shocks” although the “experimenter” had no true authority.  (Blass, 2009)

The Experiment

Milgram was given a grant for $30,348 and immediately began to piece his project together.  He began his experiments on August 7, 1961 with the project lasting the duration of two years.  He concluded them at the end of May, 1962 having conducted more than 20 versions of his initial model.  (Blass, 2009)

Milgram hired two actors to play the part of the “experimenter” and the “learner”.  He then recruited participants through ads in the New Haven Register and through mailing applications.  The participants, ranging in ages between 20 and 50, were recruited under the guise of participating in a “learning experiment” and were given $4.50 for their participation in the experiment.  (Blass, 2009)  (McLeod, 2007)

The participants drew straws to see who would play the role the “teacher” and whose role would be the “learner”.  The role of the “learner”, of course, was staged to be so in every instance, in this case 40 times.  The unwitting participants, also known in the experiments as the “teacher”, were instructed to shock the “learner” (a confederate of Milgram’s) in a memory exercise whenever the “learner” repeated a wrong answer.  The “teacher” would be in one room while the “learner” was in a separate room connected to electrodes which were connected to a shock machine.  (McLeod, 2007) 

The shock machine, a fake, and ranging in voltage from 15 to 450, was connected to the “learner”.  It was designed so the “teacher” believed he/she was increasing each shock in 15 volt increments with every wrong answer given by Milgram’s accomplice.  After the first handful of wrong answers, intentionally done so, the “learner”, instructed by Milgram of course, was to shout in pain and instruct the “teacher” to stop.  The experimenter would prod the “teacher” to continue.  After some more “wrong” answers and voltage increase in shocks, the “learner” was also instructed to begin yelling about his heart condition and eventually to stop responding.  All of this taking place with the “experimenter”, another confederate of Milgram’s instructing the “teacher” with commands of “the experiment requires you to continue, it is absolutely essential that you continue, and you have no choice but to continue”.  (McLeod, 2007)

Time and time again the test subjects shocked the “learner” with each wrong answer.  Not one single participant disobeyed the commands of the “experimenter” before reaching the 300 volt mark.  65 percent of the participants continued to administer shocks to the “learner” right up to the final mark of 450 volts.  Throughout this entire experiment was the idea of leading the subject to believe the shocks were painful but harmless by giving them a sample shock.  This, ironically, was the only real shock given.  (Blass, 2004)

Milgram wanted to highlight the magnitude of his conclusions by offering details of his experiments to his colleagues, psychiatrists and the middle class alike.  They were asked to predict the outcome.  They were all wrong by quite a large margin.  

The experiments were designed to determine just how far a person would go to harm another individual given the command to do so regardless of the pain the other person was experiencing.  As Thomas Blass, Ph.D. states in his book about Milgram, The Man Who Shocked the World, “The obedience experiments presented a disturbing view of human behavior.  He goes on to say these “experiments did provide enlightening answers to particular questions.”  There wasn’t one single theory in which to cover all the aspects of this highly influential project, however, his colleagues along with the public when the results were released to them, and even Milgram himself, were shocked, for lack of a better term, at the results.  When asked why the “teachers” obeyed the instructor, some of the ways in which the behavior was justified included; the learner was unseen, the work was done at a prestigious university, the instructor appeared to be legitimate, pressure from being the only one in the room with the instructor, and “just doing as I was told”.  (Blass, 2004)

Although highly controversial at the time, these experiments have brought new insight to some of the most important dilemmas facing society today.  They have also given a course of direction to counter the obedience seen in circumstances and events such as the Holocaust.  Understanding the root cause will assist researchers and psychologists in laying the groundwork for change.  Exposure of these major dilemmas in society has proved useful to the field of psychology.  Milgram’s research was extremely valuable in providing useful benefits to counteract these dilemmas. (Benjamin, Simpson 2009)

The question now arises, would the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiment be the same today?  In a 2009 study “Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?” American psychologist Jerry M. Burger replicates the Milgram paradigm with minor adjustments to account for ethics in the protection of the participants.  Burger’s findings again shocked the scientific community.  The experiment concluded obedience rates were only marginally lower than those previously deduced by the Milgram experiment conducted almost forty five years earlier.  “The primary factors in disobeying the orders from the instructor in this experiment were empathic concern and the individual’s desire for control”.  (Burger, 2009)

Obedience to authority is the theme of Christopher R. Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.  Although the actions of the Nazis were repulsive to say the least, Browning makes a strong case for this almost innate inclination to follow orders which echo the conclusions Stanley Milgram had drawn from his experiments decades earlier.  Often obedience is viewed as a virtue.  A soldier, a “good soldier”, is honored for following orders regardless of moral and ethical confliction.  Loyalty to God and country seem to come before morality and decency.  Simply following orders was the constant explanation for crimes against humanity committed in Nazi Germany.  Although Nazi culture was vehemently opposed to any form of dissent, and severe punishment was practically a foregone conclusion for disobedience in most cases, members of the Nazi regime, including soldiers in the military often found themselves with absolutely no choice when faced with the option to disobey an order even with no “dire” consequences for their disobedience present.  Browning claims, “A variation on the explanation of inescapable orders is ‘putative duress.’”  This means, should the punishment for their crimes not been so severe for those who continued to follow orders they had no way of knowing.  This is what Browning means when he says “They sincerely had had no choice when faced with orders to kill.”

In an article published in the Journal of Personality and Psychology, Linda Skitka reviews the research done regarding the limits to authority as they relate to the religious and moral restrictions on obedience to authority.  She discusses the perception an individual has of a legitimate authority’s decision (the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling PAS, or physician assisted suicide) prior to and following, acceptance and fairness of said decision based on their moral convictions.  She also talks about the independent results of outcome fairness prediction and acceptance of this decision based on religious conviction.  However, the results of this independent study did not include the perceived legitimacy of this authority of the court’s ruling.  Skitka argues justification to obey authority with no consent given or advantage to be taken is necessary as long as this authority is perceived as having legitimacy. As in Milgram’s experiment the instructor was given validity because the teacher perceived him to be so and unquestioningly obeyed.  She goes on to add it is regarded “to create a duty and obligation to obey as an imperative that replaces even personal moral standards as a guide or primary motivation.”    

Davide Morselli’s research in “Avoiding crimes of obedience: A comparative study of the biographies of M.K. Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr. provides some answers as to why certain people are able to display prosocial disobedient behaviors, overcome unjust situations, and withstand persecution. All of this concludes there is extreme importance in parental value orientation and the parental ability to allow a child to choose rather than require obedience of them.  The choice given during childhood in whether or not to obey plays a crucial role in structuring prosocial disobedience as an adult thus allowing the child to develop his or her own sense of social and moral responsibility.

    Works Cited

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Benjamin, L. T., Jr., & Simpson, J. A. (2009). The power of the situation: The impact of Milgram's obedience studies on personality and social psychology. American Psychologist, 64(1), 12-19. doi: 10.1037/a0014077

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Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1-11. doi: 10.1037/a0010932

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Morselli, D., & Passini, S. (2010). Avoiding crimes of obedience: A comparative study of the autobiographies of M. K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 16(3), 295-319. doi: 10.1080/10781911003773530

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Browning, C. R. (1992, 1998). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final           Solution in Poland. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Blass, T. (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World. New York, NY: Basic Books.

McLeod, S. A. (2007). The Milgram Experiment. Retrieved from    http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html