by Paul Seager
Key idea: Obedience
An individual will perform an action, or set of actions, in response to a direct order from a perceived authority figure.
Whilst Stanley Milgram is the name most commonly linked to obedience research in the 1960s and 1970s, there were certainly earlier studies in the area. For example, Landis in 1924 reported the results of a study where 71 per cent of participants obeyed an instruction to decapitate a live rat. They were handed a sharp knife and a live rat, and instructed by a man dressed in a white lab coat to cut off the rat’s head: 15 out of 21 people did just this simply because they were told to do so by a supposed authority figure (i.e. the experimenter dressed in a white coat). There have certainly been other studies that have shown that people will obey a request more often if the person making the demand is dressed in a uniform of some kind.
STUDYING OBEDIENCE
However, it was Milgram who conducted possibly the most celebrated and infamous study in the field of obedience, and perhaps in all of social psychology. Milgram was interested in addressing the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis to explain why some of the worst war crimes of the twentieth century were committed. German soldiers at the Nüremberg trials explained away their terrible actions by arguing that they were only following orders. Milgram was interested to test whether this could be true: was it something about the German people which accounted for these atrocities, or, given the same set of circumstances, would any ordinary person have done what they did.
‘Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living …’
(Stanley Milgram, 1963, p. 371
To try to answer this question, Milgram set up his basic experiment at Yale University. Under the guise of testing whether punishment affected learning, Milgram recruited participants (40 males between the ages of 20 and 50 from the surrounding area) and investigated whether they would deliver potentially lethal electric shocks to another person simply because they were told to do so by a man dressed in a white coat carrying a clipboard (a stereotypical authority figure).
Case study: Milgram’s methodology
Participants were greeted by the experimenter (a man dressed in a white coat) and another man who was introduced as a fellow participant in the study (actually a confederate).
The experimenter explained that the study required one of them to be the ‘learner’ and one the ‘teacher’. The teacher would read out lists of paired words to the learner; the learner would then be given a key word and required to say out loud which word (from a list of four) was previously paired with it. Every time they gave an incorrect answer, an electric shock punishment would be administered by the teacher to see if it would help the learner to remember more or less effectively.
The assignment of who was the learner, and who the teacher, was supposedly a random process, but, through the use of trickery, it was always the confederate who became the learner. The confederate was seated in an experimental chamber and hooked up to a series of electrodes. The teacher was taken to a separate room which housed an electric shock generator linked to the electrodes – an imposing looking machine containing a series of 30 switches in 15 volt increments (from 15 volts to 450 volts). Each set of four switches was given a descriptive label, from ‘Slight Shock’ (15–60v), through ‘Moderate Shock’ (75–120v) to ‘Danger: Severe Shock’ (375–420v). The last two switches (435–450v) were simply labelled ‘XXX’. The teacher was told to press the next switch in the sequence (starting with the 15v switch) each time an incorrect answer was given. To demonstrate that the machine was genuine, the teacher was given a 45v shock – actually the only real shock administered in the entire experiment.
The experiment then commenced, the word lists read out, and the punishment administered appropriately. If the teacher ever threatened to stop the experiment, or queried whether they should continue, the experimenter would deliver a series of four ‘prods’, such as: ‘Please continue’; ‘The experiment requires that you continue’. Only after the final prod was delivered and the teacher still expressed a desire to stop, or the maximum punishment (450v) delivered, was the experiment actually terminated. At this point, the maximum shock delivered was recorded and the participant was thoroughly debriefed. The participant was considered to be fully obedient if they had delivered all of the 30 shocks.
The results of Milgram’s initial study were startling at the time and are still disturbing today. Despite asking a number of senior students and colleagues, before the experiment took place, to predict how many participants would deliver the top shock and thus be considered fully obedient (the mean estimate was that only 1.2 per cent would), no one was quite prepared for the outcome. Milgram found that 26 out of the 40 participants (65 per cent) delivered the 450v shock, despite obviously being very distressed at what they were doing. This was taken as evidence that perhaps the Germans weren’t quite so different after all.
UNDERSTANDING MILGRAM’S INITIAL FINDINGS
Without a doubt, Milgram’s findings courted controversy. Critics argued that the study was unethical, that the results were a one-off, that there were mitigating circumstances to explain the results, and that the findings were simply a product of their time.
To his credit, Milgram attempted to address the outcries of his detractors. For example, he showed how he systematically debriefed all of his participants (and in fact Milgram was one of the first researchers to do this), and contacted them at a later date to ensure they were suffering no ill effects (many of the participants actually thanked him for their experience). It was during these debriefings that he began to realize what was happening to his participants – namely they believed they were acting simply as an extension of the experimenter and not under their own volition; in effect, they were surrendering their autonomy. Thus Milgram developed the idea of an ‘agentic shift’ to explain why people obeyed an authority figure.
‘The critical shift in functioning is reflected in an alteration of attitude. Specifically, the person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person … I shall term this the agentic state.’
(The Agentic Shift: Milgram, 1974, p. 133)
FURTHER EXPLANATIONS FOR OBEDIENT BEHAVIOUR
Milgram conducted an additional set of 18 ‘variations’ based on his initial experiment to try to understand his findings further and to show that the results were certainly not an anomaly (and as we saw in Chapter 1, replication is essential to having confidence in our research findings). For example, some argued that it was only the prestigious surroundings of Yale University that caused people to obey the experimenter (referred to as ‘situational effects’); to counter this, Milgram carried out a replication of his study in a suite of offices in a nearby city (Bridgeport) in order to dissociate the study from Yale. Whilst the levels of obedience did fall, it was still found that almost half of the participants (47.5 per cent) were still totally obedient.
Similarly when the experiment comprised female participants, obedience levels were identical (65 per cent), and when the personnel of the experiment were changed (i.e. the learner and the experimenter) to ensure that it wasn’t their characteristics which caused the levels of obedience, lower but similar levels (50 per cent) were also found. Interestingly, there was a variation where the ‘teachers’ were allowed to set their own level of shock to administer to the learner (rather than deliver them in the set sequence). This variation was important to determine whether, if left to their own devices, participants would actually deliver the top shock, or whether it was the command of the experimenter that made them do it. Findings from this condition show that the mean level of shock was between the 45v and 60v level, which seems quite reasonable; however, one participant still decided that it was perfectly reasonable to administer the 450v shock!
With regard to the questio
n of whether Milgram’s findings were simply a product of their time, or whether some form of ‘enlightenment effect’ would moderate our behaviour in the present day, there have been a number of studies over the years that have replicated and added to his findings. Whilst ethical considerations make it quite tricky to investigate obedience in exactly the same way as Milgram, there have certainly been some ingenious attempts.
For example, an Australian study in the 1970s found that 13–14-year-old boys engaged in a behaviour that was likely to cause self-harm (as opposed to harming others as Milgram found) simply because an experimenter asked them to: 90 per cent turned a dial on a machine to a setting that was labelled as having a 20 per cent chance of permanently impairing their hearing. However, there are potentially confounding variables that might account for the findings of this study.
More recent studies in America have used a limited version of Milgram’s paradigm (asking participants to deliver shocks up to 150v) to show that obedience levels are comparable to those found by Milgram over 35 years earlier. An even more inventive study, using a virtual environment, also found a worryingly high level of total obedience (32 per cent).
One pair of Dutch researchers argued that Milgram’s paradigm lacked mundane realism (after all, when was the last time someone asked you to deliver an electric shock to another person?). Consequently, they developed an alternate methodology which they called ‘administrative obedience’. Instead of an electric shock, participants were asked by an experimenter to deliver ‘stress remarks’ to a candidate (a confederate) taking a job application test; they were told that if the candidate failed the test they would not be offered the job. Despite this knowledge, almost 92 per cent of participants obeyed the experimenter and delivered 15 stress remarks which caused the candidate to fail.
As can be seen, obedience research is still being conducted, and is still delivering findings that are of some concern. It seems that ordinary people will carry out a number of dubious activities, simply because they are told to do so by a person who they perceive to have some kind of authority over them.
Summary
Whilst it is generally accepted that social influence is a necessity of day-to-day life, research has helped to understand why people are influenced by others. For example, we may conform to the behaviour of others because we are unsure of the correct way to act or simply because we want to be liked by them. Moreover, such conformity might be affected by a number of personal and situational factors. Occasionally, it might also be possible for the minority to influence the majority, but certain conditions need to be met. Similarly, research has helped us to understand some of the factors that might affect why people obey the request of an authority figure, even when the request may be to the detriment of others (or even ourselves). Worryingly, it seems that we might not yet have learned some important lessons from research conducted over forty years ago.
Food for thought
Imagine you are serving on a jury for a murder case. When the jury retires to consider their verdict, it quickly becomes clear to you that ten people believe the defendant is guilty, one person is unsure and only you believe the defendant is innocent. In light of the content of this chapter, list what forces you think would be at play in the jury room, and consider your strategy for convincing the other members of the jury that the defendant was innocent.
Dig deeper
Blass, T. (2007). The Man who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. Basic Books.
Burger, J. M. (2009). ‘Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?’ American Psychologist, 64(1), 1–11.
Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2012). ‘Contesting the ‘‘Nature’’ Of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show’. PLoS Biology, 10(11)
Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority. Tavistock.
Zimbardo, P. (2008). The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil. Rider.
Fact-check
1 What percentage of participants in Milgram’s original study were totally obedient?
a 50%
b 55%
c 65%
d 70%
2 John goes to a restaurant with his friends. When it comes to ordering dessert, he is urged to have one because everyone else is having one. He initially says ‘no’ because he is not hungry, but because his friends start complaining that he is being unsociable, he changes his mind and orders a bowl of ice cream. This is an example of:
a Compliance
b Obedience
c Normative influence
d Informational influence
3 In his ‘line judgement paradigm’, Asch found that what percentage of his participants never gave a wrong answer despite the pressure of majority influence?
a 13%
b 25%
c 37%
d 49%
4 In the same experiment as question 3, what percentage of participants conformed to the majority decision at least once despite knowing that the answer they were giving was wrong?
a 13%
b 25%
c 37%
d 49%
5 The ‘autokinetic effect’ was used by which researcher to show that we sometimes change our decision in light of what other people say simply because we are unsure of how to act in an ambiguous situation?
a Solomon Asch
b John Darley
c Stanley Milgram
d Muzafer Sherif
6 Peter decides he wants to improve his chess-playing, so he joins an established chess club in his area. On the first night he goes along at 6:30pm, starts chatting to some people in the room and begins a game with one of them. Everything is going well. However, at 7pm, everyone suddenly stops playing, bows their heads and starts to recite over and over again: ‘Chess is good, Chess is power …’. After a few seconds, bizarrely Peter does the same. This is an example of:
a Informational influence
b Obedience
c Normative influence
d Compliance
7 Which of the following factors have been linked to increased conformity?
a An authoritarian personality
b A lower IQ
c High levels of anxiety
d All of the above
e None of the above
8 Which of the following is not a good strategy for a minority to adopt in order to influence a majority?
a Be consistent in their message
b Generally keep a low profile
c Walk a fine line between rigidity of position and flexibility of position
d Ensure that all members of the minority agree with each other at all times
9 In one of his variations, how did Milgram show that sometimes situational elements might affect obedience levels?
a He recruited female participants instead of using solely males
b He allowed the ‘teacher’ to choose their own level of punishment to administer
c He changed the clothes that the experimenter was wearing, from a white coat to a black coat
d He moved the experiment from Yale University to the nearby city of Bridgeport
10 Which of the following is not a valid criticism of Milgram’s experiments in general?
a They really tell us nothing useful about the mechanisms involved in obedient behaviour
b They violate the ethical principle of ‘informed consent’
c They lack mundane realism
d All of the above are valid criticisms
e None of the above are valid criticisms
7
Attitudes and persuasion
What do you think about the leader of your country? Should smoking be banned in all public places? Is global warming something you are concerned about? How do you feel about cricket or football? Would you buy a burger from a popular chain of fast-food outlets? Your answers to all of these questions reflect your attitudes.
Attitudes are important because they play a key role in how an individual views the world; therefore
it is important to understand what an attitude is and how they are formed. To answer these questions, it is first necessary to measure them, and this is not always as easy as it might seem. Once we know what a person’s attitudes are, the problem is then whether or not we can change them in terms of an individual’s behaviour, either permanently (persuasion) or temporarily (compliance). This chapter aims to address these questions.
What is an attitude?
A number of definitions abound with regards to what an attitude is and isn’t (see Spotlight below), but most contain a reference to some form of evaluative judgement, that is, do we favour something or not. In essence an attitude is how much we like or dislike something, and the ‘something’ (generally referred to as the attitudinal object) can be an object, a person or an idea. Attitudes are learned by an individual as opposed to them being innate.
Spotlight: Defining attitudes
Two definitions that seem to capture the essence of what an attitude is come from Eagly and Chaiken (1993):
‘a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor… psychological tendency refers to a state that is internal to the person, and evaluating refers to all classes of evaluative responding, whether overt or covert, cognitive, affective or behavioral’ (p. 1)
and from Maio and Haddock (2010) who put it slightly more succinctly:
‘an overall evaluation of an object that is based on cognitive, affective and behavioral information’ (p. 4).
Differing aspects of an attitude
There are three aspects of attitudes in which social psychologists have taken an interest: content, structure and function.