Are You Prone To Obey Authority?

Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority are among the best known social science experiments ever done and we've looked at them before, primarily on the context of what kind of a person will agree to torture another human being-- and what kind of a person will refuse. Stanley Milgram began these experiments in 1961 just after the high-profile trial of German war criminal Adolf Eichmann dominated international headlines.

In their new book, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford look at Milgram's work as well. I couldn't wait to get confirmation of what I knew in my heart-- that the kind of stooge who would obey orders to torture someone is a brainwashed Fox News/Hate Talk Radio listener who votes for Republicans. And that people who would refuse to torture a fellow human being is… well, someone like me, an anti-fascist, a progressive.

Stanley Milgram is famous for teaching us that getting people to do really, really bad things to other people does not require a seriously evil demagogue with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. All you need is five dollars and a lab coat. No Gestapo loomed over the good citizens of New Haven, Connecticut, who were recruited by Milgram’s lab in the late 1950s. These folks were given a token participation fee and then were asked (politely) by a mild-mannered social scientist to inflict potentially devastating harm on innocents. They were alarmingly quick to comply.

It was all, thank goodness, a sham. Milgram was interested in who would obey authority figures and under what conditions, a pretty big question for social scientists at a time when one world war had been triggered by authoritarian fascists and another threatened by totalitarian communists. Maybe there was something about culture that led people to obey authority figures? Would Americans chuck their morals and act atrociously toward other people just because some authority figure told them to? Milgram was interested in answers to such questions so he set up an experiment that led his participants to believe they were being asked to send increasingly strong electric shocks into another experimental subject as punishment for failing a word-pairing exercise. In truth, the individual ostensibly trying to remember the word pairs was an experimental confederate who was not being shocked at all.

Milgram’s experiments are among the most famous in all of social science and their most famously disturbing finding is that even when people thought they were being asked to shoot more than 400 volts of electricity into a fellow participant who had done them no harm, they often complied. Milgram’s results led to much handwringing about the human condition. If homo sapiens are this willing to obey authority figures, it is no surprise that otherwise decent human beings follow the edicts of evil authority figures. The depressing, even frightening, implication was that given the right circumstances we would all become complicit in the perverted policies of a Himmler or an Eichmann.

…Milgram’s ersatz shock machine was calibrated in 15 volt increments, beginning with 15 and going to 450, and his primary interest was the number of participants who would go the full Monty. He found that the likelihood of participants cooperating all the way to the 450 volt switch was increased by a number of environmental factors. Milgram altered the experiment’s features, and these manipulations had a considerable effect on participant behavior. Notably, he varied whether the subject controlling the shock box could hear or see what was being done to the shock-ee. When the poor schlub getting jolted was neither seen nor heard by the individual in control of the levers of power, 65 percent of the participants were willing to go to 450 volts; when the recipients’ discomfort was heard but not seen, obedience dropped to 62.5 percent; when it was both heard and seen, full obedience plummeted to 40 percent. When the protesting subject’s hand had to be forced onto a contact plate to get jolted, only 30 percent of the participants went all the way. Averaging across Milgram’s four core experimental manipulations a bit more than half-- 81 of 160-- of the participants refused to go all the way to 450 volts.

It is hardly surprising that people are less willing to inflict pain on someone they can hear, see and feel, so the variation across these experimental manipulations was not seen a serious caveat on the central conclusion that humans are inclined to obey authority figures (this was noted and discussed at the time). Typically passed over-- certainly by Milgram himself-- is a far more intriguing finding; namely, the remarkable variation in the behavior of his participants within the same situation. Even when the recipient was only an abstraction-- neither seen nor heard-- more than a third of the experimental participants refused to go to 450 volts. Some refused as early as 105 volts, when the experiment was just getting started. When the authority figure-- the official, scientifically-attired Yale scientist-- said “the experiment requires you to go on,” one in three people essentially said, “forget it, I’m not going to hurt that guy.” Conversely, even when the subject’s hand was used to complete the circuit, nearly one out of three was still willing to do go all the way. Makes you wonder under exactly what circumstances these particular individuals would NOT obey authority figures.

Our point is this: Milgram’s research is typically invoked as evidence that all humans are capable of atrocities but its real message is that some of us are and some of us are not. If his sample is representative of the rest of the population, Milgram’s results suggest that roughly one-third of all people are strongly inclined to obey authority no matter the painful implications for innocent others; another third are obedient in some circumstances and resistant in others; and the final third are commendably resistant to authority figures when the fate of innocents is at stake. Milgram’s results indicate the existence of a great deal of individual-level variation in obedience/resistance and this conclusion squares with outside the lab reality. Not everyone fell in line behind Hitler and Mussolini; not all young Americans defied authority in the 1960s; and not all Chinese were at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, let alone standing calmly in front of a row of tanks. Each of us has raised multiple offspring and that experience tells us that children-- even children raised in very similar environments-- vary wildly in their tendency to obey authority figures such as parents.

This marked variation in the degree to which individuals defer to authority, like the marked variation in virtually all behavioral traits may not be surprising yet social science research often undersells, or even ignores, individual-variation in behavioral predispositions in favor of variations from situation to situation.

And… and… and? Teabaggers? Who's more likely to torture someone, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Matt Bevin or Miss McConnell? In your heart, you know.