8.The assertion that the content of the command may itself be largely responsible for the effects is not gratuitous. Numerous studies in social psychology demonstrate the effects that peers, lacking any particular authority, may exercise on an individual (Asch, 1951; Milgram, 1964).
9.Conformity is, as de Tocqueville shrewdly observed, the logical regulatory mechanism of democratized relations among men. It is “democratic” in the sense that the pressure it places on the target is not to make him better or worse than those exerting the pressure but merely to make him the same.
Obedience arises out of and perpetuates inequalities in human relationships and thus, in its ultimate expression, is the ideal regulatory mechanism of fascism. It is only logical that a philosophy of government that has human inequality as its touchstone will also elevate obedience as an absolute virtue. Obedient behavior is initiated in the context of a hierarchical social structure and has as its outcome the differentiation of behavior between superior and subordinate. It is no accident that the hallmark of the Third Reich was its emphasis both on the concept of superior and inferior groups and on quick, impressive, and prideful obedience, with clicking boots and the ready execution of command.
10.I have oversimplified. While it is true that nature is rich in hierarchical organizations, it is not the case that men need function within them at all times. An isolated brain cell cannot survive apart from its larger organ system. But an individual’s relative self-sufficiency frees him from total dependence on larger social systems. He has the capacity both to merge into such svstems, through the assumption of roles, or to separate himself from them. This capacity for dual functioning confers on the species maximum adaptive advantages. It assures the power, security, and efficiency that derives from organization, along with the innovative potential and flexible response of the individual. From the standpoint of species survival it is the best of both worlds.
11.Students of child development have long recognized that “the first social relationship is one of recognizing and complying with the suggestions of authority” (English, 1961, page 24). The initial conditions of total dependency give the child little choice in the matter. And authority generally presents itself to the infant in a benign and helpful form. Nonetheless, it has been commonly observed that at the age of two or three, the infant enters a period of unrestrained negativism in which he challenges authority at virtually every turn, rejecting even its most benign demands. Stogdill (1936) reports that of all behavior problems of social adjustment, parents rank disobedience as the most serious. Frequently, there is intense conflict between child and parent at this point, and maturational processes, abetted by parental insistence, ordinarily bring the child to a more compliant disposition. The child’s interminable disobedience, however much it constitutes a rejection of authority and assertion of self, differs from adult disobedience in that it takes place without any conception of individual responsibility on the child’s part. Unlike the forms of disobedience we may come to value in the adult, it is an indiscriminate, purely expressive form of defiance that is not grounded in moral concerns.
12.The technical problem of how authority communicates its legitimacy is worth serious thought. Consider that when a young man receives a letter that claims to be from his draft board, what evidence is there that the entire operation is not simply an extended prank? And if we are to carry this further, what is the evidence that when the boy appears at a camp designated by the board, the men in khaki really have the right to take charge of his life? Perhaps it is all a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a contingent of unemployed actors. Genuine authority, because it recognizes the ease with which the appearance of authority may be fabricated, must be extremely vigilant of counterfeit authority, and the penalties for falsely claiming authority are severe.
13.Imagine an experimenter traveling from one house to the next in a private residential district and, with permission, setting up his experiments in the living rooms of those homes. His aura of authority would be weaker without the laboratory setting that ordinarily buttresses his position.
14.For the concept of “zone of indifference,” see Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations. New York: The Free Press, 1965.
15.The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk (1952), illustrates this situation well. It is all right for an authority to be stupid. Many persons of authority function exceedingly well even if they are incompetent. The problem arises only when an authority, taking advantage of his position, forces his more competent subordinates to follow a wrong course of action. Stupid authorities can sometimes be very effective and even beloved by their subordinates, as long as they assign responsibility to the talented subordinates. The Caine Mutiny illustrates two additional points. First, how difficult it is to defy authority even when authority is incompetent. Only after great inner stress and turmoil did Willie and Keith take over the Caine, though it was on its way to being sunk because of Queeg’s incompetence. Second, despite what appeared to be virtually absolute requirement that the mutiny occur, the attachment to principles of authority was so profound, that the author, through the voice of Greenwald, in a dramatic turn of events, called into question the moral basis of the mutiny.
16.In Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud pointed out that a person suppresses his own superego functions, allowing the leader full right to decide what is good or bad.
17.Koestler notes in his brilliant analysis of social hierarchies: “I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much lesser historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society—he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity.” Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), Part III, “Disorder,” p. 246.
18.An interpretation consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. See L. Festinger, 1957.
19.See Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization,” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 62 (November 1956), pp. 264–71. See also Andre Modigliani, “Embarrassment and Embarrassability,” Sociometry, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 1968), pp. 313–26; and “Embarrassment, Facework, and Eye Contact: Testing a Theory of Embarrassment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1971), pp. 15–24.
20.If embarrassment and shame are important forces holding the subject to his obedient role, we ought to find a sharp drop in obedience when the preconditions for the experience of these emotions are eliminated. This is precisely what occurred in Experiment 7, when the experimenter departed from the laboratory and gave his orders by telephone. Much of the obedience shown by our subjects was rooted in the face-to-face nature of the social occasion. Some types of obedience—say, that of a soldier sent on a solitary mission behind enemy lines—require extended exposure to the authority in question and a congruence between the values of the subordinate and his authority.
Both the studies of Garfinkel and the present experiment indicated that the assumptive structure of social life needed to be disrupted if disobedience was to occur. The same awkwardness, embarrassment, and difficulty in being disobedient occurs as in Garfinkel’s (1964) demonstrations, in which people are asked to violate suppositions of everyday life.
21.It is the failure to grasp the transformation into a state of agency and an inadequate understanding of the forces that bind the person into it that account for the almost total inability to predict the behavior in question. Those judging the situation think it is the ordinary person, with his full moral capacities operating, when they predict his breakoff from the experiment. They do not take into account in the least the fundamental reorganization of a person’s mental life that occurs by vi
rtue of entry into an authority system.
The quickest way to correct the erroneous prediction of persons who do not know the outcome of the experiment is to say to them, “The content of the action is not half so important as you think; the relationship among the actors is twice as important. Base your prediction not on what the participants say or do, but on how they relate to each other in terms of a social structure.”
There is a further reason why people do not correctly predict the behavior. Society promotes the ideology that an individual’s actions stem from his character. This ideology has the pragmatic effect of stimulating people to act as if they alone controlled their behavior. This is, however, a seriously distorted view of the determinants of human action, and does not allow for accurate prediction.
22.Konrad Lorenz describes the disturbance in inhibitory mechanisms brought about by the interposition of tools and weapons: “The same principle applies, to even a greater degree, to the use of modern remote-control weapons. The man who presses the releasing button is so completely screened against seeing, hearing, or otherwise emotionally realizing the consequences of his action that he can commit it with impunity–even if he is burdened with the power of imagination.” Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), p. 234.
23.See N. J. Lerner, “Observer’s Evaluation of a Victim: Justice, Guilt, and Veridical Perception,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1971), pp. 127–35.
24.In Princeton: D. Rosenhan, Obedience and Rebellion: Observations on the Milgram Three-Party Paradigm. In preparation.
In Munich: D. M. Mantell, “The Potential for Violence in Germany.” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1971), pp. 101–12.
In Rome: Leonardo Ancona and Rosetta Pareyson, “Contributo allo studie della aggressione: La Dinamica della obbedienza distruttiva,” Archiva di psicologia neurologia e psichiatria, Anna XXIX (1968), fasc. IV.
In Australia: W. Kilham and L. Mann, “Level of Destructive Obedience as a Function of Transmittor and Executant Roles in the Milgram Obedience Paradigm.” In press (1973) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
25.See M. I. Orne and C. C. Holland, for example, and my response to them in: A. G. Miller (ed.) The Social Psychology of Psychological Research. New York: The Free Press, 1972.
26.But we must not be naïve on this point. We have all seen how government, with its control of the propaganda apparatus, invariably portrays its goals in morally favorable terms; how, in our own country, the destruction of men, women, and children in Vietnam was justified by reference to saving the Free World, etc. We see, also, how easily the pronouncements are accepted as legitimizing goals. Dictatorships attempt to persuade the masses by justifying their programs in terms of established values. Even Hitler did not say that he would destroy the Jews because of hatred but because of his wish to purify the Aryan race and create a higher civilization free of enfeebling vermin.
27.Bierstedt points out quite correctly that the phenomenon of authority is more fundamental even than that of government: “. . . The problem of authority rests at the very bottom of an adequate theory of the social structure . . . even government, in a sense, is not merely a political phenomenon but primarily and fundamentally a social phenomenon, and . . . the matrix from which government springs itself possesses an order and a structure. If anarchy is the contrary of government, so anomy is the contrary of society. Authority, in other words, is by no means a purely political phenomenon in the narrow sense of the word. For it is not only in the political organization of society, but in all of its organization, that authority appears. Each association in society, no matter how small or how temporary it might be, has its own structure of authority.” Bierstedt, pp. 68–69.
28.But the plea of “superior orders” was made by Lieutenant William Calley, who commanded the platoon that carried out the action.
The military prosecutor challenged Calley’s plea of superior orders. Instructively, the prosecutor did not contest the principle that a soldier must obey orders, but charged that Calley acted without orders, and therefore, was responsible for the massacre. Calley was adjudged guilty.
The reaction of the American public to the Calley trial was studied by Kelman and Lawrence (1972), and their findings are not reassuring. Fifty-one percent of the sample indicated that they would follow orders if commanded to shoot all inhabitants of a Vietnamese village. Kelman concludes:
“Clearly, not everyone finds the demands of apparently legitimate authorities equally compelling. Not all of Milgram’s subjects shocked their victims with the highest voltage. Nor did every soldier under Calley’s command follow his orders to kill unarmed civilians. Those who resist in such circumstances have apparently managed to retain the framework of personal causation and responsibility that we ordinarily use in daily life.
“Yet, our data suggest that many Americans feel they have no right to resist authoritative demands. They regard Calley’s actions at My Lai as normal, even desirable, because (they think) he performed them in obedience to legitimate authority.”
We need to ask why Kelman’s respondents see themselves as complying with military authority at My Lai (when few—if any—would have predicted submission to the experimenter’s authority).
First, the interview response, secured while the country was at war in Vietnam, reflected attitudes toward the war itself and indicated general support for the government’s policies. If the questions had been asked in peacetime, a larger proportion would have predicted disobedience. The response also expressed solidarity with an American soldier who most Americans felt should not have been brought to trial. Second, raising the question of obedience in a military context places it in the setting that is most familiar to the average person: he knows that a soldier is supposed to obey orders, and his interview response springs from folk wisdom, hearsay, and knowledge of the military context. Yet, this does not presume any understanding of general principles of obedience, which can only be demonstrated by their correct application to a novel context. People understand that soldiers massacre, but they fail to see that an action such as this, routinely carried out, is the logical outcome of processes that are at work in less visible form throughout organized society. Finally, the response indicates the degree to which the American people had embraced the viewpoint of authority in evaluating the Vietnam War. They had been thoroughly indoctrinated by government propaganda (which, at the societal level, is the means whereby an official definition of the situation is promulgated). In this sense, the respondents to Kelman’s question did not reside completely outside the authority system they were asked to comment upon but had already been influenced by it.
29.Henry Wirz, Trial of Henry Wirz (Commandant at Andersonville), House of Representatives, 40th Congress, 2d Session, Ed. Doc. No. 23. (Letter from the Secretary of War Ad Interim, in answer to a resolution of the House of April 16, 1866, transmitting a summary of the trial of Henry Wirz. Dec. 17, 1867 (ordered to be printed).
30.It would seem that the anarchist argument for universal dismantling of political institutions is a powerful solution to the problem of authority. But the problems of anarchism are equally insoluble. First, while the existence of authority sometimes leads to the commission of ruthless and immoral acts, the absence of authority renders one a victim to such acts on the part of others who are better organized. Were the United States to abandon all forms of political authority, the outcome would be entirely clear. We would soon become the victims of our own disorganization, because better organized societies would immediately perceive and act on the opportunities that weakness creates.
Moreover, it would be an oversimplification to present the picture of the noble individual in a continuous struggle against malevolent authority. The obvious truth is that much of his nobility, the very values he brings to bear against malevolent authority, are themselves derived from authority. And for every individual who carries out harsh action because of authority, there is anoth
er individual who is restrained from doing so.
31.See Jay Katz, Experimentation with Human Beings: The Authority of the Investigator, Subject, Professions, and State in the Human Experimentation Process, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972). This source book of 1159 pages contains commentaries on the present experiments by Baumrind, Elms, Kelman, Ring, and Milgram. It also includes the statement of Dr. Paul Errera, who interviewed a number of participants in the experiment (page 400). Thoughtful discussions of the ethical issues of this research can be found in A. Miller, The Social Psychology of Psychological Research, and in A. Elms, Social Psychology and Social Relevance.
Index
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Abse, Dannie, 198
Action, in obedience experiment, 89, 90, 149
Administrative Behavior (Simon), 208
Adorno, T., 204
Agentic state, 132–134, 135, 138, 140, 142, 143–148, 155; binding factors in, 7, 148–152; and commands, 147–148; and “definition of situation,” 145; responsibility lost in, 145–147; self-image in, 147; and tuning process, 144; see also Authority; Disobedience; Hierarchy; Obedience; Obedience experiment
Aggression, 165–168
Allport, Cordon W., 178
American Journal of Sociology, 209
American Psychologist, 193
Anarchism, 212
Ancona, Leonardo, 210
Antigone (Sophocles), 2
Anxiety, and disobedience, 152
Arendt, Hannah, 5, 6
Asch, S. E., 114, 115, 207
Ashby, W. R., 125; quoted, 127
Attica Penitentiary, 113
Authoritarian state, 179
Authority, 144, 155, 175, 179, 208, 211; closeness of, 61; coordination of command with function of, 141–142; double, see Two Authorities; entry into system of, 140–141; perception of, 138–140; see also Agentic state; Disobedience; Hierarchy; Obedience; Obedience experiment
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