Obedience to Authority
Stanley Milgram
Harper Perennial, 2019
Originally published 1974
xix + 282 pages
I was just following orders, so I am not responsible. Such a defence, often used by those who have committed some horrible war crime, has a long history. So popular was the defence amongst National Socialist leaders that it has become known as the “Nuremberg Defence.” Readers may be thinking, “surely, I would never inflict harm on another person just because someone told me to.” Perhaps not. But what if that person was someone you, the reader, recognised as an authority figure? What if it was a man in a grey lab coat who you thought was a scientist conducting an experiment in learning?
The late psychologist, Stanley Milgram, decided to find out what people would do when asked to inflict physical pain indirectly on another person when told to do so. The results surprised him and his colleagues. This is the subject of Obedience to Authority, which is a fascinating, and depressing, insight into human behaviour. The book itself is short, clear and concisely written. It is jargon-free, and the style would make George Orwell or Earnest Hemmingway happy. Less is more! It is not a history book so there is no thesis to prove. Instead, Milgram simply tells us what the experiment is (really experiments as several permutations were conducted) and what the results were.
The experiment was simple. Some New Haven residents answered an advertisement in a local newspaper promising $4 and cab fare if they took part in a study of “memory and learning.” (p. 17) Subjects included all the strata of New Haven society: postal clerks, university professors, labourers, engineers, nurses, etc. Several experiments took place in a handsome building on the Yale University campus; others were conducted off-site. There were three people in the experiment, two of whom were actors. Those who answered the ad were naïve dupes who were, in fact, the subjects. Ultimately, one of the actors was strapped into an electric chair. The other actor played the role of experimenter; he set the stage about the importance of the experiment and established himself as an authority. The fake experiment was supposedly going to explore the effects of punishment on learning. The naïve subject would read word pairs to the “victim” in the electric chair. Each time he got a wrong answer, he would receive a shock on the wrist from the experimenter. The voltage would increase with every wrong answer.
Shocks were never induced. It was play-acting. However, as the unreal shock levels increased, the “victim” responded with ever increasing signs of distress. He eventually began to scream and beg for the experiment to stop. Understandably, some the naïve subjects wished to stop reading the word pairs during the experiment. In such situations, the experimenter used four prods, always in sequence:
- Please continue, or, Please go on.
- The experiment requires that you continue.
- It is absolutely essential that you continue.
- You have no other choice; you must go on. (p. 24)
What did the experiments reveal? When confronted with a recognised authority, many naïve subjects continued to the very end of the experiment. At this point, the “victim” was supposedly receiving 450-volt shocks and was unresponsive; this was after much screaming and begging to stop. During Experiment 1, when the “victim” was in another room, twenty-six out of forty naïve subjects carried on to the very end of the experiment. Follow-up interviews with the naïve subjects revealed that many had completely surrendered their human agency to authority. They willingly took orders even though they thought they were indirectly hurting another human being. In one case, a subject thought he had killed the “victim” as he was unresponsive in another room:
Well, I faithfully believed the man was dead until we opened the door. When I saw him, I said, ‘Great, this is great.’ But it didn’t bother me even to find that he was dead. I did a job. (p. 109)
Why did many naïve subjects carry on to the bitter end and most others obey up to a certain point? Milgram believes it is a part of the human condition. We are born into a system of authority: the family. Commands from mother and father are by their nature commands for obedience, “Don’t hit smaller children.” What is the next stage of conditioning? School of course, where the child becomes a cog in an “institutional system of authority.” (p.166) Ultimately then:
The first twenty years of the young person’s life are spent functioning as a subordinate element in an authority system, and upon leaving school, the male usually moves into either a civilian job or military service. On the job, he learns that although some discreetly expressed dissent is allowable, an underlying posture of submission is required for harmonious functioning with superiors. (p.166)
Does Milgram see a way out of this bleak state of the human condition? No. He sees it as an inherent part of human psychology and a very dangerous one at that. The experiment revealed, “the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into large institutional structures.” (p.227)
Students of totalitarian states will find this book particularly useful in understanding why the masses in Germany, Italy, Russia and China acted the way they did. It will also help understand blind obedience amongst hoi polloi in the present.
I will finish with stating I do not share Milgram’s pessimism. After all, some naïve subjects did disobey the experimenter. Indeed, one subject refused to carry on with the experiment when the “victim” demanded the experiment stop at 150 volts. When later told the true nature of the experiment, the naïve dupe was asked what he thought was the most effective way to strengthen resistance to inhumane authority. He replied, “If one had as one’s ultimate authority God, then it trivialises human authority.” (p. 58)
