Obedience to Authority

by Stanley Milgram

  Dedication

  To

  MY MOTHER

  AND

  THE MEMORY OF

  MY FATHER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Experiments

  Foreword to the Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1. The Dilemma of Obedience

  2. Method of Inquiry

  3. Expected Behavior

  4. Closeness of the Victim

  5. Individuals Confront Authority

  6. Further Variations and Controls

  7. Individuals Confront Authority II

  8. Role Permutations

  9. Group Effects

  10. Why Obedience?—An Analysis

  11. The Process of Obedience: Applying the Analysis to the Experiment

  12. Strain and Disobedience

  13. An Alternative Theory: Is Aggression the Key?

  14. Problems of Method

  15. Epilogue

  Appendixes Appendix I: Problems of Ethics in Research

  Appendix II: Patterns Among Individuals

  References

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Experiments

  1.REMOTE - VICTIM

  2.VOICE - FEEDBACK

  3.PROXIMITY

  4.TOUCH - PROXIMITY

  5.A NEW BASE - LINE CONDITION

  6.CHANGE OF PERSONNEL

  7.CLOSENESS OF AUTHORITY

  8.WOMEN AS SUBJECTS

  9.THE VICTIM’S LIMITED CONTRACT

  10.INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT

  11.SUBJECT FREE TO CHOOSE SHOCK LEVEL

  12.LEARNER DEMANDS TO BE SHOCKED

  13.AN ORDINARY MAN GIVES ORDERS

  13a.THE SUBJECT AS BYSTANDER

  14.AUTHORITY AS VICTIM: AN ORDINARY MAN COMMANDING

  15.TWO AUTHORITIES: CONTRADICTORY COMMANDS

  16.TWO AUTHORITIES: ONE AS VICTIM

  17.TWO PEERS REBEL

  18.A PEER ADMINISTERS SHOCKS

  Foreword to the Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition

  What is common about two of the most profound narratives in Western culture—Lucifer’s descent into Hell and Adam and Eve’s loss of Paradise—is the lesson of the dreadful consequences of one’s failure to obey authority. Lucifer—God’s favorite angel, “the Light,” who is also referred to as “the Morning Star” in scripture—challenges God’s demand that all angels honor Adam, his newly designed perfect human creature. Lucifer and a band of like-minded angels argue that they existed prior to Adam’s creation and, further, that they are angels while he is a mere mortal. Instantly, God finds them guilty of the twin sins of Pride and Disobedience to his authority. Without any attempt at conflict resolution, God summons the Archangel Michael to organize a band of obedient angels to forcefully challenge these renegades. Of course, Michael wins (with God in his corner), and Lucifer is transformed into Satan, the Devil, and cast down to God’s newly designed Hell, along with the rest of the fallen angels. However, Satan returns to prove that it was appropriate not to honor Adam because he is not only imperfect but, worse, easily corruptible by a serpent.

  Recall that God gave Adam and Eve free reign in the perfect paradise of Eden, with one little exception and admonition: Do not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. When Satan, in serpent’s skin, persuades Eve to take one bite, she in turn urges her mate to follow suit. With one bite of the forbidden fruit, they are instantly condemned, banished from Eden forever. They must toil on earth, experience much suffering, and witness the conflicts between their children, Cain and Abel. They lose their innocence as well. To make matters worse, this tale of the horrific consequences of disobedience to authority results in their sin becoming transgenerational and eternal. Every Catholic child in the world is born bearing the curse of original sin for the misdeeds of Adam and Eve.

  Obviously, these narratives are myths created by men, by authorities, most likely by priests, rabbis, and ministers, because they exist in cosmic history before humans could have observed and recorded them. But they are designed, as all parables are, to send a powerful message to all those who hear and read them: Obey authority at all costs! The consequences of disobedience to authority are formidable and damnable. Once created, these myths and parables get passed along by subsequent authorities, now parents, teachers, bosses, politicians, and dictators, among others, who want their word to be followed without dissent or challenge.

  Thus, as school children, in virtually all traditional educational settings, the rules of law that we learned and lived were: Stay in your seat until permission is granted by the teacher to stand and leave it; do not talk unless given permission by the teacher to do so after having raised your hand to seek that recognition, and do not challenge the word of the teacher or complain. So deeply ingrained are these rules of conduct that even as we age and mature they generalize across many settings as permanent placards of our respect for authority. However, not all authority is just, fair, moral, and legal, and we are never given any explicit training in recognizing that critical difference between just and unjust authority. The just one deserves respect and some obedience, maybe even without much questioning, while the unjust variety should arouse suspicion and distress, ultimately triggering acts of challenge, defiance, and revolution.

  Stanley Milgram’s series of experiments on obedience to authority, so clearly and fully presented in this new edition of his work, represents some of the most significant investigations in all the social sciences of the central dynamics of this aspect of human nature. His work was the first to bring into the controlled setting of an experimental laboratory an investigation into the nature of obedience to authority. In a sense, he is following in the tradition of Kurt Lewin, although he is not generally considered to be in the Lewinian tradition, as Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, Lee Ross, and Richard Nisbett are, for example. Yet to study phenomena that have significance in their real world existence within the constraints and controls of a laboratory setting is at the essence of one of Lewin’s dictums of the way social psychology should proceed.

  This exploration of obedience was initially motivated by Milgram’s reflections on the ease with which the German people obeyed Nazi authority in discriminating against Jews and, eventually, in allowing Hitler’s Final Solution to be enacted during the Holocaust. As a young Jewish man, he wondered if the Holocaust could be recreated in his own country, despite the many differences in those cultures and historical epochs. Though many said it could never happen in the United States, Milgram doubted whether we should be so sure. Believing in the goodness of people does not diminish the fact that ordinary, even once good people, just following orders, have committed much evil in the world. British author C. P. Snow reminds us that more crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of obedience than disobedience. Milgram’s mentor, Solomon Asch, had earlier demonstrated the power of groups to sway the judgments of intelligent college students regarding false conceptions of visual reality. But that influence was indirect, creating a discrepancy between the group norm and the individual’s perception of the same stimulus event. Conformity to the group’s false norm was the resolution to that discrepancy, with participants behaving in ways that would lead to group acceptance rather than rejection. Milgram wanted to discover the direct and immediate impact of one powerful individual’s commands to another person to behave in ways that challenged his or her conscience and morality. He designed his research paradigm to pit our general beliefs about what people would do in such a situation against
what they actually did when immersed in that crucible of human nature.

  Unfortunately, many psychologists, students, and lay people who believe that they know the “Milgram Shock” study, know only one version of it, most likely from seeing his influential movie Obedience or reading a textbook summary. He has been challenged for using only male participants, which was true initially, but later he replicated his findings with females. He has been challenged for relying only on Yale students, because the first studies were conducted at Yale University. However, the Milgram obedience research covers nineteen separate experimental versions, involving about a thousand participants, ages twenty to fifty, of whom none are college or high school students! His research has been heavily criticized for being unethical by creating a situation that generated much distress for the person playing the role of the teacher believing his shocks were causing suffering to the person in the role of the learner. I believe that it was seeing his movie, in which he includes scenes of distress and indecision among his participants, that fostered the initial impetus for concern about the ethics of his research. Reading his research articles or his book does not convey as vividly the stress of participants who conintued to obey authority despite the apparent suffering they were causing their innocent victims. I raise this issue not to argue for or against the ethicality of this research, but rather to raise the issue that it is still critical to read the original presentations of his ideas, methods, results, and discussions to understand fully what he did. That is another virtue of this collection of Milgram’s obedience research.

  A few words about how I view this body of research. First, it is the most representative and generalizable research in social psychology or social sciences due to his large sample size, systematic variations, use of a diverse body of ordinary people from two small towns—New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut—and detailed presentation of methodological features. Further, its replications across many cultures and time periods reveal its robust effectiveness.

  As the most significant demonstration of the power of social situations to influence human behavior, Milgram’s experiements are at the core of the situationist view of behavioral determinants. It is a study of the failure of most people to resist unjust authority when commands no longer make sense given the seemingly reasonable stated intentions of the just authority who began the study. It makes sense that psychological researchers would care about the judicious use of punishment as a means to improve learning and memory. However, it makes no sense to continue to administer increasingly painful shocks to one’s learner after he insists on quitting, complains of a heart condition, and then, after 330 volts, stops responding at all. How could you be helping improve his memory when he was unconscious or worse? The most minimal exercise of critical thinking at that stage in the series should have resulted in virtually everyone refusing to go on, disobeying this now heartlessly unjust authority. To the contrary, most who had gone that far were trapped in what Milgram calls the “agentic state.”

  These ordinary adults were reduced to mindless obedient school children who do not know how to exit from a most unpleasant situation until teacher gives them permission to do so. At that critical juncture when their shocks might have caused a serious medical problem, did any of them simply get out of their chairs and go into the next room to check on the victim? Before answering, consider the next question, which I posed directly to Stanley Milgram: “After the final 450 volt switch was thrown, how many of the participant-teachers spontaneously got out of their seats and went to inquire about the condition of their learner?” Milgram’s answer: “Not one, not ever!” So there is a continuity into adulthood of that grade-school mentality of obedience to primitive rules of doing nothing until the teacher-authority allows it, permits it, and orders it.

  My research on situational power (the Stanford Prison Experiment) complements that of Milgram in several ways. They are the bookends of situationism: his representing direct power of authority on individuals, mine representing institutional indirect power over all those within its power domain. Mine has come to represent the power of systems to create and maintain situations of dominance and control over individual behavior. In addition, both are dramatic demonstrations of powerful external influences on human action, with lessons that are readily apparent to the reader, and to the viewer. (I too have a movie, Quiet Rage, that has proven to be quite impactful on audiences around the world.) Both raise basic issues about the ethics of any research that engenders some degree of suffering and guilt from participants. I discuss at considerable length my views on the ethics of such research in my recent book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding Why Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2008). When I first presented a brief overview of the Stanford Prison Experiment at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in 1971, Milgram greeted me joyfully, saying that now I would take some of the ethics heat off his shoulders by doing an even more unethical study!

  Finally, it may be of some passing interest to readers of this book to note that Stanley Milgram and I were classmates at James Monroe High School in the Bronx (class of 1950), where we enjoyed a good time together. He was the smartest kid in the class, getting all the academic awards at graduation, while I was the most popular kid, being elected by senior class vote to be “Jimmie Monroe.” Little Stanley later told me, when we met ten years later at Yale University, that he wished he had been the most popular, and I confided that I wished I had been the smartest. We each did what we could with the cards dealt us. I had many interesting discussions with Stanley over the decades that followed, and we almost wrote a social psychology text together. Sadly, in 1984 he died prematurely from a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. He left us with a vital legacy of brilliant ideas that began with those centered on obedience to authority and extended into many new realms—urban psychology, the small-world problem, six degrees of separation, and the Cyrano effect, among others—always using a creative mix of methods. Stanley Milgram was a keen observer of the human landscape, with an eye ever open for a new paradigm that might expose old truths or raise new awareness of hidden operating principles. I often wonder what new phenomena Stanley would be studying now were he still alive.

  Philip Zimbardo

  January 2009

  Preface

  Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily over-looked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action that is spontaneous.

  The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.

  The dilemma inherent in obedience to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham. What the present study does is to give the dilemma contemporary form by treating it as subject matter for experimental inquiry, and with the aim of understanding rather than judging it from a moral standpoint.

  The important task, from the standpoint of a psychological study of obedience, is to be able to take conceptions of authority and translate them into personal experience. It is one thing to talk in abstract terms about the respective rights of the individual and of authority; it is quite another to examine a moral choice in a real situation. We all know about the philosophic problems of freedom and authority. But in every case where the problem is not merely academic there is a real person who must obey or disobey authority, a concrete instance when the act of defiance occurs. All musing prior to this moment is mere speculation, and all acts of disobedience are characterized by such a moment of decisive action. The experiments are built around this notion.

  When we move to the laboratory, the problem narrows: if an experimenter tells a subject to a
ct with increasing severity against another person, under what conditions will the subject comply, and under what conditions will he disobey? The laboratory problem is vivid, intense, and real. It is not something apart from life, but carries to an extreme and very logical conclusion certain trends inherent in the ordinary functioning of the social world.

  The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch. The differences in the two situations are, of course, enormous, yet the difference in scale, numbers, and political context may turn out to be relatively unimportant as long as certain essential features are retained. The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow. The adjustment of thought, the freedom to engage in cruel behavior, and the types of justification experienced by the person are essentially similar whether they occur in a psychological laboratory or the control room of an ICBM site. The question of generality, therefore, is not resolved by enumerating all the manifest differences between the psychological laboratory and other situations but by carefully constructing a situation that captures the essence of obedience—that is, a situation in which a person gives himself over to authority and no longer views himself as the efficient cause of his own actions.

  To the degree that an attitude of willingness and the absence of compulsion is present, obedience is colored by a cooperative mood; to the degree that the threat of force or punishment against the person is intimated, obedience is compelled by fear. Our studies deal only with obedience that is willingly assumed in the absence of threat of any sort, obedience that is maintained through the simple assertion by authority that it has the right to exercise control over the person. Whatever force authority exercises in this study is based on powers that the subject in some manner ascribes to it and not on any objective threat or availability of physical means of controlling the subject.