Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  What is the neurobiology of obedience to authority, when you’re being ordered to do something wrong? A similar mixture as with conformity, with the vmPFC and the dlPFC mud-wrestling, with indices of anxiety and glucocorticoid stress hormones showing up to bias you toward subordination. Which leads us to consider classic studies of “just following orders.”

  Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo

  The neurobiology of conformity and obedience won’t soon be revealing much about the core question in this field: if the circumstances are right, is every human capable of doing something appalling simply because they’ve been ordered to, because everyone else is doing it?

  It is virtually required by law to discuss three of the most influential, daring, disturbing, and controversial studies in the history of psychology, namely the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch, the shock/obedience studies of Stanley Milgram, and the Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo.

  The grandparent of the trio was Asch, working in the early 1950s at Swarthmore College.62 The format of his studies was simple. A volunteer, thinking that this was a study of perception, would be given a pair of cards. One card would have a line on it, the other a trio of different-length lines, one of which matched the length of the singleton line. Which line of the trio is the same length as the singleton? Easy; volunteers sitting alone in a room had about a 1 percent error rate over a series of cases.

  Meanwhile, the volunteers in the experimental group take the test in a room with seven others, each saying his choice out loud. Unbeknownst to the volunteer, the other seven worked on the project. The volunteer would “just happen” to go last, and the first seven would unanimously pick a glaringly wrong answer. Stunningly, volunteers would now agree with that incorrect answer about a third of the time, something replicated frequently in the cottage industry of research spawned by Asch. Whether due to the person’s actually changing their mind or their merely deciding to go along, this was a startling demonstration of conformity.

  —

  On to the Milgram obedience experiment, whose first incarnations appeared in the early 1960s at Yale.63 A pair of volunteers would show up for a psychology “study of memory”; one would arbitrarily be designated the “teacher,” the other the “learner.” Learner and teacher would be in separate rooms, hearing but not seeing each other. In the room with the teacher would be the lab-coated scientist supervising the study.

  The teacher would recite pairs of words (from a list given by the scientist); the learner was supposed to remember their pairing. After a series of these, the teacher would test the learner’s memory of the pairings. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was supposed to shock them; with each mistake, shock intensity increased, up to a life-threatening 450 volts, ending the session.

  Teachers thought the shocks were real—at the start they’d been given a real shock, supposedly of the intensity of the first punitive one. It hurt. In reality no punitive shocks were given—the “learner” worked on the project. As the intensity of the supposed shocks increased, the teacher would hear the learner responding in pain, crying out, begging for the teacher to stop.* (In one variant the “volunteer” who became the learner mentioned in passing that he had a heart condition. As shock intensity increased, this learner would scream about chest pains and then go silent, seemingly having passed out.)

  Amid the screams of pain, teachers would typically become hesitant, at which point they’d be urged on by the scientist with commands of increasing intensity: “Please continue.” “The experiment requires that you continue.” “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” “You have no other choice. You must go on.” And, the scientist assured them, they weren’t responsible; the learner had been informed of the risks.

  And the famed result was that most volunteers complied, shocking the learner repeatedly. Teachers would typically try to stop, argue with the scientist, would even weep in distress—but would obey. In the original study, horrifically, 65 percent of them administered the maximum shock of 450 volts.

  —

  And then there’s the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), carried out by Zimbardo in 1971.64 Twenty-four young male volunteers, mostly college students, were randomly split into a group of twelve “prisoners” and twelve “guards.” The prisoners were to spend seven to fourteen days jailed in a pseudoprison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department. The guards were to keep order.

  Tremendous effort went into making the SPE realistic. The future prisoners thought they were scheduled to show up at the building at a particular time to start the study. Instead, Palo Alto police helped Zimbardo by showing up earlier at each prisoner’s home, arresting him, and taking him to the police station for booking—fingerprinting, mug shots, the works. Prisoners were then deposited in the “prison,” strip-searched, given prison garb, along with stocking hats to simulate their heads being shaved, and dumped as trios in cells.

  The guards, in surplus military khakis, batons, and reflective sunglasses, ruled. They had been informed that while there was no violence allowed, they could make the prisoners feel bored, afraid, helpless, humiliated, and without a sense of privacy or individuality.

  And the result was just as famously horrific as that of the Milgram experiment. The guards put prisoners through pointless, humiliating rituals of obedience, forced painful exercise, deprived them of sleep and food, forced them to relieve themselves in unemptied buckets in the cells (rather than escorting them to the bathroom), put people in solitary, set prisoners against each other, addressed them by number, rather than by name. The prisoners, meanwhile, had a range of responses. One cell revolted on the second day, refusing to obey the guards and barricading the entrance to their cell; guards subdued them with fire extinguishers. Other prisoners resisted more individualistically; most eventually sank into passivity and despair.

  The experiment ended famously. Six days into it, as the brutality and degradation worsened, Zimbardo was persuaded to halt the study by a graduate student, Christina Maslach. They later married.

  Situational Forces and What Lurks in All of Us

  These studies are famed, have inspired movies and novels, have entered the common culture (with predictably horrendous misrepresentations).*65 They brought renown and notoriety to Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo.* And they were vastly influential in scientific circles—according to Google Scholar, Asch’s work is cited more than 4,000 times in the literature, Milgram’s more than 27,000 times, the SPE more than 58,000.*66 The number of times your average science paper is cited can be counted on one hand, with most of the citations by the scientist’s mother. The trio is a cornerstone of social psychology. In the words of Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, “The primary simple lesson the SPE [and, by extension, Asch and Milgram] teaches is that situations matter” (her emphasis).

  What did they show? Thanks to Asch, that average people will go along with absurdly incorrect assertions in the name of conformity. And thanks to the other two studies, that average people will do stunningly bad things in the name of obedience and conformity.

  The larger implications of this are enormous. Asch and Milgram (the former a Jewish Eastern European immigrant, the latter the son of Jewish Eastern European immigrants) worked in the era of the intellectual challenge of making sense of Germans “just following orders.” Milgram’s study was prompted by the start, a few months earlier, of the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man who famously epitomized the “banality of evil” because of his seeming normalcy. Zimbardo’s work burst forth during the Vietnam War era with the likes of the My Lai Massacre, and the SPE became bitingly relevant thirty years later with the abuse and torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib Prison by perfectly normal American soldiers.*67

  Zimbardo took a particularly extreme stance as to what these findings mean, namely his “bad barrel” theory—the issue isn’t how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it’s how a bad barrel
can turn any apple bad. In another apt metaphor, rather than concentrating on one evil person at a time, what Zimbardo calls a “medical” approach, one must understand how some environments cause epidemics of evil, a “public health” approach. As he states: “Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do—given the same situational forces.” Anyone could potentially be an abusive Milgram teacher, Zimbardo guard, or goose-stepping Nazi. In a similar vein, Milgram stated, “If a system of death camps were set up in the US of the sorts we had seen in Nazi Germany one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.” And as stated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, in a quote perpetually cited in this literature, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”68

  Some Different Takes

  Big surprise—the studies and their conclusions, especially those of Milgram and Zimbardo, have been controversial. Those two attracted firestorms of controversy because of the unethical nature of the work; some teachers and guards were psychological wrecks afterward, seeing what they had proven capable of;* it changed the course of a number of their lives.* No human-subjects committee would approve the Milgram study these days; in contemporary versions subjects are ordered to, for example, say increasingly insulting things to the learner or administer virtual shocks, evoking virtual pain, in avatars (stay tuned).69

  The controversies about the science itself in the Milgram and Zimbardo studies are more pertinent. The Milgram edifice has been questioned in three ways, most piercingly by the psychologist Gina Perry:

  Milgram seems to have fudged some of his work. Perry has analyzed Milgram’s unpublished papers and recordings of sessions, finding that teachers refused to shock much more frequently than reported. However, despite the seemingly inflated results, the finding of roughly 60 percent compliance rates has been replicated.70

  Few of the replicating studies were traditional academic ones published in peer-reviewed journals. Instead most have been re-creations for films and television programs.

  Perhaps most important, as analyzed by Perry, far more teachers than Milgram indicated realized that the learner was an actor and that there were no actual shocks. This problem probably extends to the replications as well.

  The SPE has arguably attracted the most controversy.

  The biggest lightning rod was the role of Zimbardo himself. Rather than being a detached observer, he served as the prison’s “superintendent.” He set the ground rules (e.g., telling guards that they could make the prisoners feel afraid and helpless) and met regularly with the guards throughout. He was clearly excited as hell to see what was happening in the study. Zimbardo is a larger-than-life force of nature, someone whom you’d very much wish to please. Thus guards were subject to pressure not only to conform with their cohort but also to obey and please Zimbardo; his role, consciously or otherwise, almost certainly prompted the guards to more extreme behavior. Zimbardo, a humane, decent man who is a friend and colleague, has written at length about this distortive impact that he had on the study.

  At the beginning of the study, volunteers were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners, and the resulting two groups did not differ on various personality measures. While that’s great, what was not appreciated was the possibility that the volunteers as a whole were distinctive. This was tested in a 2007 study in which volunteers were recruited through one of two newspaper ads. The first described “a psychological study of prison life”—the words used in the advertisement for the SPE—while in the other the word “prison” was omitted. The two groups of volunteers then underwent personality testing. Importantly, volunteers for the “prison” study scored higher than the others on measures of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, and social dominance and lower for empathy and altruism. Insofar as both guards and prisoners in the SPE might have had this makeup, it’s not clear why that would have biased toward the famously brutal outcome.71

  Finally, there’s science’s gold standard, independent replication. If you redid the SPE, down to matching the brand of the guards’ socks, would you get the same result? Any study this big, idiosyncratic, and expensive would be difficult to match perfectly in the replication attempt. Moreover, Zimbardo actually published remarkably little of the data about the SPE in professional journals; instead he mostly wrote for the lay public (hard to resist, given the attention the study garnered). Thus there’s only really been one attempted replication.

  The 2001 “BBC Prison Study” was run by two respected British psychologists, Stephen Reicher of the University of St Andrews and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter.72 As the name implies, it was carried out (i.e., among other things, paid for) by the BBC, which filmed it for a documentary. Its design replicated the broad features of the SPE.

  As is so often the case, there was a completely different outcome. To summarize a book’s worth of complex events:

  Prisoners organized to resist any abuse by the guards.

  Prisoner morale soared while guards became demoralized and divided.

  This led to a collapse of the guard/prisoner power differential and ushered in a cooperative, power-sharing commune.

  Which lasted only briefly before three ex-prisoners and one ex-guard overthrew the utopians and instituted a draconian regime; fascinatingly, those four had scored highest on scales of authoritarianism before the study began. As the new regime settled into repressive power, the study was terminated.

  Thus, rather than a replication of the SPE, this wound up being more like a replication of the FRE and the RRE (i.e., the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution): a hierarchical regime is overthrown by wet-nosed idealists who know all the songs from Les Mis, who are then devoured by Bolsheviks or Reign of Terror–ists. Importantly, the ruling junta at the end having entered the study with the strongest predispositions toward authoritarianism certainly suggests bad apples rather than bad barrels.

  Even bigger surprise—stop the presses—Zimbardo criticized the study, arguing that its structure invalidated it as a chance to replicate the SPE; that guard/prisoner assignments could not have really been random; and that filming made this a TV spectacle rather than science; and asking, how can this be a model for anything when the prisoners take over the prison?73

  Naturally, Reicher and Haslam disagreed with his disagreement, pointing out that prisoners have de facto taken over some prisons, such as the Maze in Northern Ireland, which the Brits filled with IRA political prisoners, and the Robben Island prison, in which Nelson Mandela spent his endless years.

  Zimbardo called Reicher and Haslam “scientifically irresponsible” and “fraudulent.” They pulled out all the stops by quoting Foucault: “Where there is [coercive] power there is resistance.”

  Let’s calm down. Amid the controversies over Milgram and the SPE, two deeply vital things are indisputable:

  When pressured to conform and obey, a far higher percentage of perfectly normal people than most would predict succumb and do awful things. Contemporary work using a variant on the Milgram paradigm shows “just following orders” in action, where the pattern of neurobiological activation differs when the same act is carried out volitionally versus obediently.74

  Nonetheless, there are always those who resist.

  This second finding is no surprise, given Hutus who died shielding Tutsi neighbors from Hutu death squads, Germans with every opportunity to look the other way who risked everything to save people from the Nazis, the informant who exposed Abu Ghraib. Some apples, even in the worst of barrels, do not go bad.*

  Thus what becomes vital is to understand the circumstances that push us toward actions we thought we were far better than or that reveal strength we never suspected we had.

  Modulators of the Pressures to Conform and Obey

  The end of the previous chapter exa
mined factors that lessen Us/Them dichotomizing. These included becoming aware of implicit, automatic biases; becoming aware of our sensitivity to disgust, resentment, and envy; recognizing the multiplicity of Us/Them dichotomies that we harbor and emphasizing ones in which a Them becomes an Us; contact with a Them under the right circumstances; resisting essentialism; perspective taking; and, most of all, individuating Thems.

  Similar factors decrease the likelihood of people doing appalling things in the name of conformity or obedience. These include:

  THE NATURE OF THE AUTHORITY OR GROUP PRESSING FOR CONFORMITY

  Does the authority(s) evoke veneration, identification, pants-wetting terror? Is the authority in close proximity? Milgram follow-ups showed that when the authority (i.e., the scientist) was in a different room, compliance decreased. Does the authority come cloaked in prestige? When the experiment was conducted in some nondescript warehouse in New Haven, instead of on the Yale campus, compliance declined. And, as emphasized by Tajfel in his writing, is the authority perceived as legitimate and stable? I’d more likely comply with, say, lifestyle advice issued by the Dalai Lama than by the head of Boko Haram.

  Similar issues of prestige, proximity, legitimacy, and stability influence whether people conform to a group. Obviously, groups of Us-es evoke more conformity than do groups of Thems. Consider the invoking of Us in Konrad Lorenz’s attempt to justify becoming a Nazi: “Practically all my friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man.”75