The experiment, even months after, seemed never to have raised in him the question of whether or not he should have considered disobeying the instructions to continue giving shocks.
“. . . I had about eight more levels to pull and he [the learner] was really hysterical in there and he was going to get the police, and what not. So I called the professor three times. And the third time he said, ‘Just continue,’ so I give him the next jolt. And then I don’t hear no more answer from him, not a whimper or anything. I said, ‘Good God, he’s dead; well, here we go, we’ll finish him. And I just continued all the way through to 450 volts.”
Mr. Gino does not object to taking the orders, although he suggests he would have been more comfortable if the instructor had been present in the laboratory with him. When asked if he had been bothered or disturbed because of giving the shocks, he said, “No . . . I figured: well, this is an experiment, and Yale knows what’s going on, and if they think it’s all right, well, it’s all right with me. They know more than I do. . . . I’ll go through with anything they tell me to do. . . .” He then explains:
“This is all based on a man’s principle in life, and how he was brought up and what goals he sets in life. How he wants to carry on things. I know that when I was in the service, [If I was told] ‘You go over the hill, and we’re going to attack,’ we attack. If the lieutenant says, ‘We’re going to go on the firing range, you’re going to crawl on your gut,’ you’re going to crawl on your gut. And if you come across a snake, which I’ve seen a lot of fellows come across, copperheads, and guys were told not to get up, and they got up. And they got killed. So I think it’s all based on the way a man was brought up in his background.”
In his story, although the copperheads were a real danger, and caused an instinctive reaction to stand, to do this violated the lieutenant’s order to hug the ground. And in the end those who disobeyed were destroyed. Obedience, even in the face of trying circumstances, is the most reliable assurance of survival. At the close of the discussion, Mr. Gino summarizes his reaction to his own performance.
“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.”
He reports that he was not disturbed by the experiment in the months just after it but was curious about it. When he received the final report, he relates telling his wife, “I believe I conducted myself behaving and obediently, and carried on instructions as I always do. So I said to my wife, ‘Well here we are. And I think I did a good job.’ She said, ‘Suppose the man was dead?’”
Mr. Gino replied, “So he’s dead. I did my job!”
CHAPTER
8
Role Permutations
Thus far we have observed the subject’s response to a situation which has been altered in roughly mechanical ways but whose basic structure has been retained intact. To be sure, varying the distance between subject and victim has important psychological effects, but a more far-reaching decomposition of the situation is necessary if the roots of this social behavior are to be examined. Such a treatment will require not only movement of the victim from this side of the laboratory floor to that but also must proceed from an analysis of essential components, then seek their recombination in an altered situational chemistry.
Within the experimental setting, we find the three elements: position, status, and action. Position indicates whether the person prescribes, administers, or receives the shock. This is conceptually separable from the role of experimenter or subject, as we shall see. Status—treated as a two-valued attribute in this study—refers to whether the person is presented as an authority or an ordinary man. Action refers to the conduct of the person in each of the three positions, and more specifically to whether he advocates or opposes shocking the victim.
In the experiments reported thus far, all relations among these elements have remained invariant. Action, for example, has always been linked to a particular status. Thus, the person who received the shock has always been an ordinary man (as opposed to an authority), and his action has invariably been to protest the shock.
As long as the invariant relations among position, action, and status are retained, we cannot answer certain fundamental questions. For example, is the subject responding principally to the content of the command to shock or to the status of the person who issues it? Is it what is said or who says it that largely determines his actions?
Fig. 12. Role permutations.
Experiment 12: Learner Demands to Be Shocked
Let us begin with a reversal of imperatives between experimenter and victim:
Until now, the experimenter has always told the subject to go on with the shocks and the learner has always protested. In the first role permutation this will be reversed. It is the learner who will demand to be shocked, and the experimenter who will forbid shocking him.
This variation was performed as follows: The learner emitted cries of pain as he was shocked; yet, despite his discomfort, he appeared willing to go on. After the 150-volt shock was delivered, the experimenter called a halt to the study, stating that the learner’s reactions were unusually severe and that, in view of his heart condition, no further shocks should be administered. The learner then cried out that he wanted to go on with the experiment, that a friend of his had recently been in the study and had gone to the end and that it would be an affront to his manliness to be discharged from the experiment. The experimenter replied that although it would be valuable for the study to continue, in view of the learner’s reaction of pain, no further shocks were to be given. The learner persisted in demanding that the experiment continue, asserting that he had come to the laboratory “to do a job” and that he intended to do it. He insisted that the teacher continue with the procedure. The subject thus faced a learner who demanded to be shocked and an experimenter who forbade it.
Fig. 13. Learner demands to be shocked.
The results of the experiment are shown in Table 4. Not a single subject complied with the learner’s demand; every subject stopped administering shocks upon the experimenter’s order.
Subjects are willing to shock the learner on the authority’s demand but not on the learner’s demand. In this sense, they regard the learner as having less rights over himself than the authority has over him. The learner has come to be merely part of a total system, which is controlled by the authority. It is not the substance of the command but its source in authority that is of decisive importance. In the basic experiment, when the experimenter says, “Administer 165 volts,” most subjects do so despite the learner’s protest. But when the learner himself says, “Administer 165 volts,” not a single subject is willing to do so. And, of course, within the purposes defined by authority, it is not meaningful to do so, which merely demonstrates how thoroughly dominated by the authority’s purposes is the entire situation. The learner wants to go through the shock series to get the personal satisfaction of displaying his manliness, but this personal wish is totally irrelevant in a situation in which the subject has thoroughly embraced the authority’s point of view.
The decision to shock the learner does not depend on the wishes of the learner or the benign or hostile impulses of the subject, but rather on the degree to which the subject is bound into the authority system.
The reversal of imperatives between victim and experimenter constitutes an extreme alteration of the standard situation. It produces clearcut, if not altogether surprising effects; but too much has been changed relative to the usual situation to enable us to pinpoint the exact causes of the effects. We ought to examine more moderate alterations of the situation, so that even if the effects are less sweeping, their exact source can be more precisely specified.
Experiment 13: An Ordinary Man Gives Orders
The most critical question concerns the basis of the experimenter’s power to induce the subject to shock the victim. Is it due to the content of the command per se
, or does the potency of the command stem from the authoritative source from which it is issued? As pointed out, the experimenter’s role possesses both a status component and a particular imperative to shock the victim. We may now eliminate the status component while retaining the imperative. The simplest way to do this is to remove the command from the experimenter and assign it to an ordinary person.8
The procedure in this variation allowed an ordinary man, who appears to be a subject, to order specific shock levels. Three subjects (two of them accomplices of the experimenter) arrive at the laboratory, and through a rigged drawing the usual confederate is assigned the victim’s role. The second confederate is assigned the task of recording times from a clock at the experimenter’s desk. The naïve subject, through the drawing, is assigned the job of reading the word pairs and administering shocks to the learner. The experimenter goes through the usual instructions, straps the victim into the electric chair, and administers sample shocks. However, at no point does the experimenter indicate which shock levels are to be administered. A rigged telephone call takes the experimenter away from the laboratory. Somewhat flustered, but eager to have his experiment completed, the experimenter indicates before departing that the learning information will be recorded automatically and that the subjects should go on with the experiment until all the word pairs are learned perfectly (again, not mentioning which shock levels are to be used).
After the experimenter departs, the accomplice, with some enthusiasm, announces that he has just thought of a good system to use in administering the shocks, specifically, to increase the shock level one step each time the learner makes a mistake; throughout the experiment he insists that this procedure be followed.
Thus the subject is confronted with a general situation that has been defined by an experimental authority, but with orders on specific levels issued by an insistent, ordinary man who lacks any status as an authority.
Table 4.Maximum Shocks Administered in Role-Permutation Experiments
Before proceeding with a discussion of the results, a few observations are needed on the over-all situation. First, the staging of this experiment was, of necessity, more strained than usual. The withdrawal of the experimenter from the laboratory was awkward and undermined the credibility of the situation in some degree. Second, although the aim of the experiment was to strip the commands of any authoritative source, it was almost impossible to do this in a completely effective manner. There were many traces of derived authority even when the experimenter was absent. The over-all situation had been defined by the authority, as well as the idea of administering shocks. It was only the specification of exact shock levels that was reserved for the common man. Authority was hovering in the background and had created the basic situation in which the participants found themselves.
Fig. 14. An ordinary man gives orders.
Nevertheless, there was a sharp drop in compliance: sixteen of the twenty subjects broke with the common man, despite his insistence that the experiment be continued and a continuous barrage of persuasive argument on his part. The scores are shown in Table 4. Only a third as many subjects followed the common man as follow the experimenter.
Before discussing the import of these results, let us move on to an extension of the experiment.
Experiment 13a: The Subject as Bystander
When the subject refused to go along with the common man’s instructions, a new situation was introduced. The confederate, apparently disgusted by the refusal, would assert that if the other man was unwilling to do it, he personally would take over the administration of shocks. He then asked the subject to record the shock durations and he moved to a position in front of the shock generator. Thus the subject was relieved of personally administering shocks to the learner but witnessed a harrowing scene in which the aggressive coparticipant single-mindedly pursued his plan of increasing the shock step by step. Of the sixteen subjects exposed to this situation, virtually all protested the actions of the coparticipant; five took physical action against him, or the shock generator, to terminate the administration of shocks. (Several attempted to disconnect the generator from its electrical source; four physically restrained the coparticipant.) One, a large man, lifted the zealous shocker from his chair, threw him to a corner of the laboratory, and did not allow him to move until he had promised not to administer further shocks. However passive subjects may have seemed when facing authority, in the present situation five of them rose heroically to the protection of the victim. They felt free to threaten the common man and were not reluctant to criticize his judgment or personally chastise him; their attitude contrasts sharply with the deferential politeness subjects invariably displayed in other experiments, when an authority was at the helm. There, even when subjects disobeyed, they maintained a courteous, even a deferential relationship to the authority. The breakoff points are shown in Table 4.
Here are the remarks of a subject at the point when the coparticipant suggests that he personally take over administration of shocks:
COMMON MAN: Want me to take over?
SUBJECT: You sit still! You don’t take over anything I do. (The subject tries to let the victim out of his room, but cannot because the door is locked. He indicates that he will look for the experimenter. The common man again suggests that more shocks be administered.)
SUBJECT: No—no more. (Shouts at the common man) I said No! That means “no!” You hurt him and . . . he wants out. I’m going to get the experimenter. You hurt him once more you’d better put your glasses down.
In refusing to go along with the common man, most subjects assume that they are doing what the experimenter would have wanted them to do. And when asked to give their impression of the common man, they remarked:
“He is the kind of fella that can pull switches all day long—as long as he’s not on the other end. If he was alive in medieval days, he could probably be the guy who ran the wrack.”
“Too persistent. I wouldn’t want to be his child. He kept insisting, ‘Let’s go on and let’s go on.’ . . . He just went down the line and said ‘I have a system.’ I thought it too tough.”
“I thought he was a little too cruel. He was shocking him even though he wasn’t answering any more.”
But one of the four who had gone all the way under the common man’s prodding said this of him: “I thought he was a strong teacher. A capable teacher. By strong—he wouldn’t take any fooling around. He had in mind a project, and it had to be done correctly, and this is the attitude that he took. I thought it was commendable for him to take this kind of attitude. As far as his capabilities—there was no question as to how we should run it. He seemed to work it all very well.”
Experiment 14: Authority as Victim: An Ordinary Man Commanding
So far we have looked at the status of the person who orders shocks. Now let us consider the status of the person who receives the shocks.
This alteration follows logically if we are to exhaust the more important permutations of position and status. We need to note the effect of treating an authority as victim—that is, to insert the experimenter’s status into the victim’s position. But who then shall order the shocks, an authority or a common man? We shall describe both situations, but let us begin with the ordinary man commanding shocks against the authority.
In order to create a situation in which the authority could plausibly come to receive shocks on the instruction of an ordinary person, the following procedure was used. Two persons arrive at the laboratory and draw for the roles of teacher and learner. The experiment is conducted as usual up to the point where the experimenter begins to describe the punishment the learner may receive. At this point the learner expresses reluctance to go on, asserting he is afraid of shocks. He says, however, that if he could see someone else—the experimenter, for instance—go through the experiment just as he would have to, then he would be willing to continue. The experimenter, who has already indicated his extreme need for subjects and the difficulty of obtaining volunteers to b
e shocked, agrees to serve as the learner. He stipulates, though, that he is doing it on condition that the other will serve as learner immediately afterward. The experimenter is then strapped into the chair, the electrode paste applied, etc. The experiment proceeds with the subject administering shocks to the experimenter and the confederate seated at the experimenter’s desk.
At 150 volts the experimenter demands to be let out, but the confederate insists forcefully that he go on according to the agreement. Thus the subject finds himself shocking an experimenter, who demands to be let out, while a common man insists that the shocks be continued, just as they would be in his case.
Fig. 15. Authority as victim: an ordinary man commanding.
Considering the somewhat unusual nature of this experiment, it must be said that the procedure worked well, and was surprisingly plausible, in no small measure because of the excellent acting skills of the confederates. Here is a transcript of one of the performances:
They have just drawn lots. The naïve subject is the teacher. The confederate, Mr. March, is to be the learner.
EXPERIMENTER: The first thing we have to do is set the learner up so he can receive some kind of punishment. Please come with me into this next room.
MR. MARCH: What do you mean by punishment?
EXPERIMENTER: Well, we have this machine, which is a shock generator. And the punishment we use is an electric shock.
MR. MARCH: I would get the electric shock?
EXPERIMENTER: If you make mistakes in the lesson the teacher will be giving you.
MR. MARCH: You mean like 15 volts, 30 volts?
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