What is it about ourselves that makes us accept the wrong things from the wrong people? What makes us bend under the yoke of authority? Have you ever asked yourself how is it possible that millennia and millennia passed, and most of us still obey the most corrupt, dishonest, amoral individuals, only because they appear to be higher than us on the social ladder? While I for a long time used to struggle to understand the saying “history repeats itself”, it has never made more sense to me since I’ve started interesting myself in the fascinating topic of human nature, and more specifically, human behavior. Indeed, although some of us struggle with authority, whether confronted by it on the short or long term, most of us are pretty much law-abiding citizens. We pay our taxes, we believe what the media tells us to believe, we adopt and apply the government’s guidelines in our daily lives, etc. Although a lot of it relies on conformity and group dynamics, a great part has to do with obedience. So what is it that makes us so prone to bow-down before an authority figure, or somebody with a greater social status than ourselves? How close to animals are we when it comes to developing and abiding by an almost natural hierarchy? Let’s try and understand this phenomenon and above all, let’s attempt to understand ourselves a bit more.
A few months ago, I watched “The Stanford Prison Experiment”. I found it fascinating. Scary even, to a certain level – given that the entire story is based on real events. The movie, released in 2015, is in fact based on the 1971 eponymous study conducted at Stanford University and supervised by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, whereby students played the role of either prisoner or prison guard. Within the framework of this experiment, Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department and assigned each participant to either play the role of prisoners, or that of guard, with Zimbardo himself acting as the prison warden. While the study aimed at running for two weeks, it ended up having to be discontinued after only six days – the reason behind this being that the study participants had become so involved within their roles (especially the guards and the abuse they made of their authority) that some participants reached the point of serious mental breakdown. In fact, we can learn that in a few cases, the guards even subjected the prisoners to psychological abuse, harassment, and physical torture. This, however being a very much contained and moderated experiment, gives food for thought as to the effect power has over us, and the consequences it may bring in real-life scenarios: how easily power corrupts and how effortlessly it bends the people beneath it.
However, Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment wasn’t the first of its kind. As a matter of fact, the latter was preceded by a similar study conducted during the 1950s by psychologist Stanley Milgram, who himself was inspired and intrigued by the results of previous experiments (the Ash conformity experiment) performed by Solomon Asch, Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. Asch’s experiments consisted in having actual study participants alongside pretend-participants. The latter would then behave in a certain way to see if the actual participants would feel influenced by them, or if they would stand firm on their own position. For each experiment, student participant would be placed in a room with several other people participating in the experiment. The subjects were then told that they were taking an ‘eye test’. In total, 50 students took part in this study. Out of 18 trials, the real participants gave incorrect responses in 12 of them. This part of the story is what Asch referred to as the ‘critical trials’ – the purpose being to see if the participants would change their answer in order to conform to how the others in the group responded. During the first part, the participants actually answered correctly. It’s only after seeing their counterparts’ answer that the latter decided to change their answers to match with that of the others. All in all, nearly 75% of the participants in the experiments went along with the rest of the group at least one time. This experiments and the results it produces revealed some thought-provoking information about us as people and how much we hold power to influence each other, whether as a sole individual or as members of a group.
Stanley Milgram, American social psychologist, was particularly intrigued at the results of Asch’s study, to the point that he decided to push things a little further, and see how far people were willing to go when it comes to conformity. Another event which had aroused Milgram’s interest in regards to the notion of obedience was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers behind the mass deportation of Jews during World War II. Indeed, during the trial, Eichmann expressed no remorse regarding his responsibility in the Holocaust, and explained that from his point of view, he was simply following orders and doing what his superiors requested. What Milgram wanted to explore was the question “Are Germans different?” He will soon discover via his research that most people are surprisingly obedient to authority. This gave birth to one of the most famous and controversial studies around authority and obedience: the Milgram Experiment. This involved placing the study participants in a room and directing them to deliver electrical shocks to a ‘learner’ located in another room. What the participants didn’t know however, was that the person supposedly receiving the shocks on the other room was actually in the experiment and was only acting out responses to imaginary shocks. As for the results of this experiment, it turned out that 65% of participants were in fact willing to deliver the maximum level of shocks on the orders of the experimenter – an interesting result to understand what we people are willing to do when under the yoke of an authority figure. As a matter of fact, Milgram was soon followed by others in the exploration of this topic, with similar experiments being conducted all over the world (Thomas Blass, 1999), and obedience rates ranging from a high of 90% in Spain and the Netherlands (Wim H. Meeus & Quinten A. Raaijmakers, 1986) to a low of 16% among Australian women (Wesley Kilham & Leon Mann, 1974) for instance.
Likewise, the experiment conducted by Ash, Milgram and Zimbardo helped distinguish and understand the difference between conformity and obedience. Kendra Cherry, author and educational consultant in fact explains that those two notions differ from each other in three key ways:
→ “Obedience involves an order; conformity involves a request.
→ Obedience is obeying someone with a higher status; conformity is going along with people of equal status.
→ Obedience relies on social power; conformity relies on the need to be socially accepted.”
Indeed, although both notions share some sort of similarities, they differ on various levels – the first having to do with authority and social status. The aforementioned studies can therefore be distinguished as follows: Asch’s experiments were focused on conformity, while Milgram and Zimbardo’s were orientated towards obedience.
Likewise, the same way Asch asked himself “Are Germans different?”, one could ask themselves what impact culture has on obedience and overall conformism to societal norms since all three experiments were conducted in the United States. Well, it turns out that, as mentioned earlier, similar studies have been conducted outside of the US, with for example obedience rates over 80% in Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Holland, as outlined by Wayne Weiten in his 2010 “Psychology: Themes and Variations”.
We could also ask ourselves whether obedience is situational, i.e. depending on the context or the setting the individual finds themselves. In this regard, another interesting application of the Milgram experiment was with the nurse-physician relationship, applied by various studies, like the 1996 Hofling hospital experiment conducted by Charles Hofling, whereby nurses were ordered by unknown doctors to administer to patients what could have been a dangerous dose of a (fictional) drug. Despite official guidelines forbidding the administration of such dosages, Hofling found that 21 out of the 22 nurses would have given the patient an overdose of medicine. Milgram’s findings have also been replicated in other contexts. For example, high-school students were found to be even more willing to obey orders.
So have things changed since the last century, and what does this look like in our everyday life? A 2015 study from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Wrocław, Poland, helps us understand where we’re at today(-ish) when it comes to obedience. With a self-explanatory title, “Would You Deliver an Electric Shock in 2015? Obedience in the Experimental Paradigm Developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 Years Following the Original Studies”, Dariusz Doliński, Tomasz Grzyb, Michał Folwarczny, and other colleagues gave the Milgram experiment a try, but this time with 21st-century people. It turns out that this replication of Milgram’s work generated levels of obedience higher than the original one. Another recent study is detailed by John Greenwood in his 2018 article “How Would People Behave in Milgram’s Experiment Today?” for the journal Behavioral Scientist: “More intriguing was the 2009 replication by Jerry Burger, who found an ingenious way of navigating the ethical concerns about Milgram’s original experiment. Burger noted that in the original experiment 79 percent of subjects who continued after the 150 volts—after the learner’s first screams—continued all the way to the end of the scale, at 450 volts. Assuming that the same would be true of subjects today, Burger determined how many were willing to deliver shocks beyond the 150-volt level, at which point the experiment was discontinued.” In this study, seventy adults participated in a replication of Milgram’s Experiment up to the point at which they first heard the learner’s verbal protest (150 volts). Since 79% of Milgram’s participants who went past this point continued to the end of the shock generator’s range, it was assumed that such results could not be attained with present participants. It turned out that the obedience rates in this 2006 replication were only slightly lower than those Milgram found half a century ago. “Contrary to expectation, participants who saw a confederate refuse the experimenter’s instructions obeyed as often as those who saw no model. Men and women did not differ in their rates of obedience, but there was some evidence that individual differences in empathic concern and desire for control affected participants’ responses” (Jerry Burger, 2009). It’s also worth mentioning that when given social support, most subjects in fact refused to continue to administer shocks. John Greenwood explains that this suggests that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority.
Now as to everyday-life scenarios, the past two years have given us more than enough examples to pick from, between the reign of Covid-terror and the surge of social protests. Indeed, during the pandemic, while most of us were denied visiting our family, traveling, attending funerals, sometimes even just going for walks, a great percentage of the population was adamantly applying all governmental guidelines, listening to whatever narrative the media would broadcast and overall partaking in spurring terror amongst us all. Whoever would have the audacity to go against the rules would be called selfish, irresponsible, or hostile even. Obedience to the government and conformity with the masses was our mantra for two years, and still continues to be in certain ways. Scared to be outcasts, most of us complied, however without really understanding the actual stakes of the situation. It turns out that as per May 2022 data from the United States, 98.6% of infections resulted in recovery, with an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of 1.4%. Likewise, while a lot of unvaccinated people were called egoistic and self-centered, for “not caring about others”, it also turns out that a lot of vaccinated people have been infected and therefore contributed to spreading the virus. These two years therefore gave us an interesting panorama of human nature, and to what length people go when obeying orders, as well as the length to which others go to fit the mold and avoid being left out. Similarly, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, countless people took to the streets in the name of George Floyd – a lot of them without really understanding the whole situation and even less the history of America. A lot of non-Black individuals, by fear of being finger-pointed for their lack of participation, and therefore by pure conformism, attempted to punctually show interest in racial issues. The actions being based on the will to conform rather than a true will for change then easily resulted in the cause being dropped within a few months, as the ‘trend’ slowly died down.
All in all, regardless of time, location, culture, something in (most of) us always makes us fold under the pressure of authority. We fear punishment, we put ourselves first before our neighbor, ready to inflict pain on them for the sake of our survival. This, as raw and unappealing as it seems, is human nature. This is what makes history repeat itself. 17th-century people didn’t oppose slavery, as for them, it was the norm – or should I say, they had been convinced it was. 1933 Germany wasn’t much different. So how can we say we’ve evolved so much, when our world still operates on the same rules?
Sources
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-obedience-2795894
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-asch-conformity-experiments-2794996
https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/obedience-power-and-leadership/
https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-milgrams-experiment-today/
https://simplypsychology.org/hofling-obedience.html
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550617693060
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19209958/
Aude Calloch 