Image: Steve McAlister/Getty Images (hand turning switch); Scientific American Mind (bolts)
In Brief
- Fifty years ago Stanley Milgram conducted groundbreaking experiments, discovering that ordinary people were willing to inflict lethal shocks on a stranger when asked to do so by an experimenter.
- Initially seen as evidence of humans’ blind obedience to authority, more recent analyses cast doubt on that interpretation.
- Innovative experimental approaches are allowing psychologists to address ethical concerns about Milgram’s original experiments and tackle pressing questions about conformity and power.
In 1961 Stanley Milgram embarked on a research program that would change psychology forever. Fueled by a desire to understand how ordinary Germans had managed to participate in the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram decided to investigate when and why people obey authority. To do so, he developed an ingenious experimental paradigm that revealed the surprising degree to which ordinary individuals are willing to inflict pain on others.
Half a century later Milgram’s obedience studies still resonate. They showed that it does not take a disturbed personality to harm others. Healthy, well-adjusted people are willing to administer lethal electric shocks to another person when told to do so by an authority figure. Milgram’s findings convulsed the world of psychology and horrified the world at large. His work also left pressing questions about the nature of conformity unanswered. Ethical concerns have prompted psychologists to spend decades struggling to design equally powerful experiments without inflicting distress on the participants.
This article was originally published with the title Culture of Shock.
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9 Comments
Add CommentI am glad to see that psychologists are reexamining what happened in these tests. I continue to be highly skeptical of the conclusions of these types of experiments, mainly because it is assumed that the subjects are completely taken in by the experimenters' acting, even though the performers usually do not have any special training in acting. Given how often even Hollywood films, which have the largest pool of actors in the world to draw from, have rather unbelievable performances, it seems very likely that the performances by people in psychological experiments are also often not believed by the test subjects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we look at the real world, the times we see people willing to commit atrocities on others is when they have been conditioned to think of those others as not being human, as "beasts" or "animals". Keeping a distance between the perpetrator and victim also seems to be an enabler. On the other hand, when there does exist a feeling of connection you get the sort of thing that happened in Tienanmen Square: where the person in control of a column of tanks was unwilling to run over a fellow Chinese even though he had probably been through months or even years of training to follow the orders of superiors without question or hesitation.
I think we still have a lot to learn about when people are obedient to authority or not.
"Initially seen [i.e. :portrayed in media?] as evidence of humans’ blind obedience to authority, more recent analyses cast doubt on that interpretation"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought Milgram basically told us that peer pressure > pretty much anything.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, this hasn't filtered through to society and how it treats mental illness, crime, war etc.
Killing of people in the nazi gas chambers in WW II was a monstruous crime, however, probaby germans just were aware that the people that were victims of this serial killings were taken away from their places, ordinary germans were not aware of the imprisoned's destiny. The reasons why the NSADP managed to obtain 35% of support remains unknown to me. A person that may have some link with the spanish communist party told me that gas chambers were implemented because not enough food was available for the people in concentration champs, and a decision not to let them slowly starve was made; even today, decades after this tragedy, sensibilities about it differ, you find totally unexpected and hard to handle oppinions on this crimes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe frequently look at the Nazis as engaging in some kind of aberrant behavior. Was it really? How about the tens of millions killed by the "Communists" under Stalin and Mao? Bosnia-Serbia? Rwanda? Cambodia? Somalia? How many instances of genocide do we need before we call it "normal" human behavior? What would it take to convince you to kill a person or a lot of people. Saying "I could never do that" is too easy. I don't think we know what we are capable of until the actual situation arises. We just hope that it never does and then pass judgement on others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHerd mentality is common all over the world.Blind obedient is part of herd mentality.Why majority of people are obeying to authority? There is no responsibility in obeying, no guilt feeling no burden on consciousness.That is why those German people taken part in Holocaust were surprised to called them guilty they protested that we only obey the order of authority.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne must wonder about the type of participants in the study. How likely is it that those that chose to participate were mentally defective. I don't care if the "test subject" agreed to be shocked, I'm not gonna zap anybody at all in such a setting. If a group is rioting I'll have no trouble using a tazer on them but some person sitting in a chair isn't worthy of getting a shock. There is also the possibility of economic duress. If they really needed the money they may have been more tolerant of the shocks they had to administer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Germans had more than a decade of indoctrination that increased in intensity as time went on. They also saw that those that disagreed tended to disappear or die. The Stalinists and Maoists had propaganda and worse, mass starvation on top of years of war to prepare them for such atrocities as well as the disappearance of objectors.
Stanley Milgram's experiments are still accurate. The Nazies tried to pull the old blind obedience trick during the Nüremberg to defend their cowardly acts on other humans. The same blind obedience behaviour is still going on today in corporations where corporatist psychopaths and sociopaths usher out orders to their obedient underlings to restructure, rationalize the work place and export North American jobs into the third world for personnal profit and gain. Stanley Milgram's conclusion still apply today in the modern business world and in many other authoritarian organisations that have become more raunchy and pathological in time and where blind obedience is conditional on holding down a job and getting paid. Like the Nazies who would want to admit to being part of a process of psychological or physical cruelty towards another human being while obeying orders. Of course, our new business needs world would like Stanley Milgram's conclusions about blind obedience to go away or reframed as necessary modern business practises to control their workers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI disagree vehemently with the authors' opinion that "obedient people are not mindless zombies after all" and also with the conclusion, "followers don't so much lose their moral compass as choose moral authorities to guide them through the ethical dilemmas of everyday life". What if that 'moral authority' happens to be Hitler and that 'everyday life' happens to be you doing your job loading heartbreakingly distressed 'passengers' into railway cars? Also, the authors look at only half the equation. They look only at the obey-er and not at the order-er. Order and Obey are part of the same obsessive need to exert control over the situation. Commander and Comandee, any different, really?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm glad Milgram's conscience bothered him and that he was willing to share his qualms. At least the Milgram subjects of the experiment were adults. The article doesn't state if any prospective subjects of the experiment declined to participate once they knew what the experiment entailed. I have seen videos of subjects of experiments who are infants. The infant is separated from his mother by a simulated (visually-real but not actually real) chasm. The infant crawls to his mother, from whom he has been separated for a long enough time to ensure separation anxiety, and, seeing the 'chasm', stops in his tracks, wailing because he can see his mother a few feet away but he can't get to her. The mother, obeying the 'authority' of the experimenter, does not go pick up and soothe her distressed infant. The experimenter has learned that infants are afraid of falling down chasms. The subject of the experiment, the infant, has learned his mother can't be trusted.