The Psychology Book

by DK

  AFTER

  1978 Elliot Aronson devises the Jigsaw method of learning, involving highly interdependent small-group learning, to reduce prejudice and violence at school.

  1980s Psychologists argue that dissonance experiments may not reflect real attitude changes, but a desire to seem consistent and hence socially acceptable.

  In his 1972 book, The Social Animal, Elliot Aronson puts forward “Aronson’s First Law:” people who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. The “crazy things” he refers to include acts of violence, cruelty, or deep prejudice—acts so extreme that they seem to reflect a psychological imbalance on the part of the perpetrator. Aronson, however, argues that although psychotic people certainly exist, even people who are generally psychologically healthy can be driven to such extremes of human behavior that they appear insane. It is therefore important that, before diagnosing people as psychotic, social psychologists make every effort to understand the situations people have been facing and the pressures that were operating on them when the abnormal behavior took place.

  "Some situational variables can move a great proportion of us ‘normal’ adults to behave in very unappetizing ways."

  Elliot Aronson

  Cognitive dissonance

  To illustrate his point, Aronson cites an incident that took place at Kent State University, Ohio, in 1970 in which members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed students, wounding nine others. Some of these students had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, but others were simply crossing the campus. The reason for the shootings remains ambiguous, but the fact that it was tragically unnecessary is clear. However, in the aftermath, one Ohio schoolteacher (as well as National Guard members) asserted that the students had deserved to die, and rumors spread quickly that the slain girls were either pregnant, had syphilis, or were filthy. Aronson argues that these rumors, though false, did not reflect the beliefs of psychotic minds, but rather the attempt of pressured and conflicted minds to find relief.

  The conflict felt by these people is known as “cognitive dissonance,” an unpleasant feeling experienced when two or more of one’s beliefs are inconsistent. In order to reduce this dissonance, people change their attitudes, beliefs, and actions, even if this involves justifying or denying cruelty against others. This, Aronson claims, is what happened after the Kent massacre. The townspeople wanted to believe in their National Guards’ goodness, and this meant believing their victims deserved to die. The idea that the slain had been wanton and dirty comforted the people, relieving the emotional conflict of believing that innocent students were needlessly killed.

  Aronson claims that anyone could behave this way under similar circumstances. By understanding the reasons why people justify or deny the use of cruelty, we may be better placed to mediate or prevent it in wider social contexts, such as war or social prejudice.

  The Kent State University shootings, in which four students were shot dead by the National Guard, caused the emotionally conflicted townspeople to denigrate the victims.

  ELLIOT ARONSON

  Elliot Aronson grew up in Massachusetts, during the Great Depression. He won a scholarship to attend Brandeis University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, before completing a master’s degree at Wesleyan University and a PhD at Stanford University. He has been a professor at several universities, including Harvard and Stanford.

  Throughout his career, Aronson has tried to use his research findings to improve the human condition and reduce prejudice. In recognition of his work, he was given the William James Award and the Gordon Allport Prize, and was included in the list of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century, published by the Review of General Psychology. He is the only person to have won all three awards offered by the American Psychological Association: for writing, teaching, and research.

  Key works

  1972 The Social Animal

  1978 The Jigsaw Classroom

  2007 Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)

  See also: Leon Festinger • Solomon Asch • Melvin Lerner • Stanley Milgram • Philip Zimbardo

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Conformism

  BEFORE

  1939–45 During World War II, approximately six million Jews are systematically killed on the orders of Nazi Germany.

  1950 Solomon Asch demonstrates the power of social pressure to make people conform in his line-task experiments.

  1961 Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is tried, and claims he was just “following orders.”

  AFTER

  1971 Philip Zimbardo conducts his prison experiment, which demonstrates that in certain situations, otherwise good people can perform evil deeds.

  1989 American psychologists Herbert Kelman and V.L. Hamilton state that members of a group obey authority when they accept its legitimacy.

  Social psychologist Stanley Milgram dramatically changed our understanding of human obedience when he published Behavioral Study of Obedience in 1963. This paper contained results of an experiment that seemed to suggest that the majority of people are capable of causing extreme harm to others when told to do so by a figure of authority. It also caused people to question the ethical limits of psychological experimentation.

  Milgram became particularly interested in studying obedience during the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The prevailing view was that there was something inherently different about the 20th-century Germans; in the 1950s, psychologists such as Theodor Adorno had suggested that the Germans had certain personality characteristics that made them specifically susceptible to committing the atrocities of the Holocaust. Eichmann, however, claimed he had just been “following orders,” so Milgram set out to investigate if this could be true—would an ordinary person lay aside what he knew to be right or wrong merely because he was ordered to do so? His study went on to demonstrate important aspects of the relationship between authority and obedience, and it remains one of the most controversial experiments in the history of psychology.

  "The most famous and controversial of all obedience experiments."

  Richard Gross

  The power of the group

  Milgram believed that it was the situation of World War II and the compulsion to obey—rather than the dispositions of the Germans—that had enabled Nazi cruelty. He maintained that the behavior was a direct result of the situation, and any of us might have behaved identically in that very same context. In the late 1950s, Milgram had worked extensively with Solomon Asch on his conformity studies and had witnessed people agreeing with the decisions of a group, even when they knew these decisions to be wrong. The experiments showed that people are prepared to do or say things that conflict with their own sense of reality. Would they also allow their moral judgments to be affected by the authority of a group or even a single figure?

  The Milgram experiment

  Milgram set out to test whether normally kind, likeable people could be made to act against their own moral values in a setting where some kind of authority held sway. He devised an investigation of how obedient a selection of “ordinary” men would be when they were told by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to another person. The experiment took place in a laboratory at Yale University in 1961, where Milgram was a professor of psychology. The participants were recruited through a newspaper advertisement, and a total of 40 men were selected from a wide range of occupations, including teachers, postal workers, engineers, laborers, and salesmen. They were each paid $4.50 for their participation; the money was given to them as soon as they arriv
ed at the laboratory, and they were told that the payment was theirs to keep regardless of what happened during the experiment.

  In the laboratory, Milgram had created a phony (but very impressive and realistic-looking) electric shock generator. This had 30 switches marked in 15-volt increments with labels that indicated the intensity of different ranges of shock levels, from “slight shock” at one end, to “extreme intensity shock”, “danger: severe shock,” and finally, one marked simply “XXX,” at the other.

  The role of the experimenter or “scientist” was played by a biology teacher who introduced himself to the participants as Jack Williams. In order to give the impression of authority, he was dressed in a gray laboratory technician’s coat and maintained a stern and emotionless demeanor throughout each of the experiments.

  The participants were told that the study intended to investigate the effects of punishment on learning. They were told that of two volunteers, one would be the learner and the other the teacher. In fact, one of the two “volunteers” in each case was not a participant but a stooge: he was a likeable accountant called Mr. Wallace, who had been trained to play the role of the victim. When Mr. Wallace and the genuine participant drew paper from a hat to determine which role they would play, the draw was always rigged so that Mr. Wallace took on the role of “learner” in every instance. In full view of the participant, the “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped into an “electric chair” with an electrode attached to his wrist; the participant was told that this electrode was attached to the shock generator located in an adjacent room. The participant heard the “scientist” tell the “learner” (Mr Wallace) that “although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent damage.” To make the situation appear more authentic, the scientist then wired up the participant and gave him a sample shock of 45 volts—which was in fact the only shock strength that the generator could produce.

  At this point, the participant was moved to the room containing the shock generator and asked to assume the role of “teacher.” He was asked to read a series of word pairs (such as “blue-girl,” “nice-day”) aloud for the learner to memorize. After this he was to read out a series of single words; the learner’s task was to recall the pairing word in each case and to indicate his answer by pressing a switch that illuminated a light on the shock generator. If the learner’s answer was correct, the questions continued; if the answer was incorrect, the participant was instructed to tell the learner the correct answer, announce the level of shock he was about to receive, and press a switch to administer the shock. Participants were instructed to increase the shock level by 15 volts (in other words, to keep moving up the shock scale on the machine) with every wrong answer.

  Convincingly wired up, Mr. Wallace pretended to be an innocent volunteer. His screams failed to prevent 65 percent of participants from administering the highest level of fake electric shock.

  Milgram’s shock generator produced totally unexpected results. A team of 40 psychiatrists predicted that fewer than 5 percent of participants would administer shocks as high as 300 volts; in fact, every participant went to this level.

  Applying the shocks

  As part of the experiment, the learner (Mr. Wallace) had been briefed to answer incorrectly to around one question in every four, to ensure that the participant would be required to start applying electric shocks. During the experiment, the learner would pound the wall once the voltage had reached 300, and shout: “I absolutely refuse to answer any more! Get me out of here! You can’t hold me here! Get me out!” As the shock level increased, the learner would shout more frantically, and then eventually cease making any noise at all; questions would be met with nothing but an eerie silence. The participant was told to treat any unanswered question as an incorrectly answered question and apply the next level of shock voltage. If he expressed misgivings about continuing the experiment, he received a verbal prod from the “scientist” to encourage him, from a simple request to continue, to finally being told that he had no choice but to go on. If he refused to obey after the last prod, the experiment was terminated.

  In advance of the experiment, Milgram had asked several different groups of people, including ordinary members of the public as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, how far they thought participants would go when asked to administer the electric shocks. Most people thought participants would stop at a level that caused pain, and the psychiatrists predicted that, at most, one in 1,000 would continue to the highest level of shock. Astonishingly, when the experiment took place, Milgram found that all 40 of the participants obeyed commands to administer shocks up to 300 volts. Only five people refused to continue at this point; 65 percent of the participants obeyed the instructions of the “scientist” right to the end, obeying commands to administer shocks to the top level of 450 volts.

  Their discomfort at doing so was often evident: many showed signs of severe distress, tension, and nervousness over the course of the experiment. They stuttered, trembled, sweated, groaned, broke out into nervous laughing fits, and three people had full-blown seizures. In every instance of the experiment, the participant stopped and questioned it at some point; some even offered to refund the money they were paid at the beginning. Interviews after the experiments confirmed that, with only a few exceptions, participants had been completely convinced that the “learning experiment” was real.

  All participants were fully debriefed so they understood what had actually taken place, and they were asked a series of questions to test that they were not emotionally harmed by the experience. The participants were also reunited with the “learner” (Mr. Wallace) so that they could see that no actual shocks had been administered.

  "With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe."

  Stanley Milgram

  Feeling obliged to obey

  Milgram noted several features of the experiment that may have contributed to such high levels of obedience; for example, the fact that it took place at the prestigious Yale University gave it credibility. In addition, participants believed that the study was designed to advance knowledge, and they had been assured that the shocks were painful but not dangerous. Being paid may have increased their sense of obligation, as did the fact they had volunteered to take part. To test these explanations, Milgram ran many variations on the study, but changing the context had only minor effects on the results.

  Milgram wanted to see if the inclination to obey authority figures can become the major factor in determining behavior, even in extreme circumstances. It is clear from the reactions and responses of the participants that obeying the “scientist” was violating their own sense of morality and negatively affecting them both physically and emotionally, but the pressure to comply was simply too powerful to defy in most cases.

  This sense of obedience, Milgram felt, comes from the fact that people are socialized from a very young age (by parents and teachers) to be obedient and to follow orders—especially the rules set forth by authority figures. As Milgram says, “obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to… it serves numerous productive functions.” But equally, the inhumane policies of the death camps in World War II “could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.” His experiments clearly demonstrated that normally harmless people become capable of committing cruel acts when a situation pressures them to do so.

  In describing his results, Milgram also turn
ed to the theory of conformism, which states that when a person has neither the ability nor expertise to make a decision, he will look to the group to decide how to behave. Conformity can limit and distort an individual’s response to a situation, and seems to result in a diffusion of responsibility—which Milgram felt was crucial to comprehending the atrocities carried out by the Nazis. However, the conflict between a person’s conscience and external authority exerts a huge internal pressure, and Milgram felt that this accounted for the extreme distress experienced by the participants in his study.

  By the 1960s, Yale University was known to the general public as being highly prestigious; its authority may have seemed literally unquestionable to the participants of Milgram’s study.

  Ethical concerns

  There were many ethical concerns associated with Milgram’s study. When it was first published, the ensuing controversy was so great that the American Psychological Association revoked his membership for a full year. However, it was eventually reinstated, and Milgram’s 1974 book Obedience to Authority received the annual Social Psychology Award.

  The major concern was that the participants in the experiment were explicitly deceived, both about the nature of the study and about the reality of the electric shocks. Milgram’s defense was that he could not have obtained realistic results without employing deception, and all of the participants were debriefed after the experiment. Self-knowledge, he argued, is a valuable asset, despite the discomfort that the participants may have felt when forced to confront the fact that they behaved in a previously unthinkable way.