Obedience
Everyone
stand up
We are going outside grab
your coats
Definition
Obedience
• A type of social influence whereby someone
acts in response to direct order from a
perceived authority figure
Obedience
Why do you think we obey authority?
Can you give examples of situations where we are obedient?
Why were you obedient earlier?
EXTENSION: Why might it be argued that obedience is important and
some ways fundamental to our society?
Everyday Examples of
Obedience?
Student sitting still and quiet in class when
teacher is present.
Following the orders given to you by a
parent.
Doing what your boss tells you to do.
Why do you think we obey authority?
• Human nature – dispositional
• Experience teaches us authorities are generally trustworthy
• We do as we’re told
• Personality
• Upbringing
• We assume people have more knowledge or expertise
• We don’t see consequences of actions
• People dislike confrontation
• We may be scared of consequences
• We are taught to respect rules
What do all of these have in
common?
The use of authority that is based in power.
.
• Without power authority usually has little
influence, and therefore the authority figure is
of low standing
Give 2 examples of
when obedience
can have a negative
consequence?
Abuse of Authority?
Stanley Milgram (1963)
Experiment on Obedience
Yale University America
‘Germans are different’ hypothesis
Milgram's Questions ...
• Why do we obey authority?
• What conditions foster obedience?
• What conditions foster independent
behaviour?
BACKGROUND
• MILGRAM: JEWISH
• 1961 : 25 YEARS AFTER THE END OF WW2
• OBEDIENCE MAY BE DEEPLY INGRAINED
• ARE THE GERMANS DIFFERENT ?
Social Context
WW2 ended in 1945
• The behaviour of the German
people during the the holocaust
• The Nurenberg trials
The article by
Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in
Jerusalem : a
report on the
banality of evil
The Study
Aim was to test the ‘Germans are different
hypothesis’.
Use of lab setting to ‘scientifically’
understand the variables that create
obedience.
Stanley Milgram (1963) - Experiment on Obedience
Milgram’s participants
• He placed an advert seeking volunteers
for a memory and learning experiment
at Yale University
• It was a self selecting (volunteer) sample
• He recruited 40 men between 20 and
50
• They were paid $4.50 for one hour of their
time (just for turning up!)
You can see
that a wide
range of
occupations
were
sampled
The Experiment involved 3 people
a ‘learner’
a ‘teacher’
an ‘experimenter’
The ‘Learner’ and ‘experimenter’ were
confederates of Milgram
•The learner was strapped into chair with electrodes
• The Teacher (ppt) was given a sample ‘electric shock’ of 45 volts
• The Teacher is taken into an adjacent room – exp. about generator
• Switches: 15 – 450 volts
•The teacher believes the learner has had to learn a number of different
word pairs like ‘blue hat’ ‘nice day’ ‘sharp knife’
•The teacher then reads out a list of possible answers
•Blue
ball (1) hat (2) Sky (3) Dress (4)
The Teacher (ppt) was instructed to gives electric shocks to the
‘learner’ for every wrong answer
The Shock intensity increased each time
If teacher was unwilling they were urged to continue
The Prods used in Milgram’s experiment
The Learner was heard to be distressed
and in pain
When Ps no longer wanted to continue
they were verbally ‘prompted’
•
•
•
•
“Please continue (or please go on).”
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
“You have no other choice; you must go on.”
The Learner’s
protests in the
Milgram
experiment
At what stage would you refuse to continue shocking the observer?
What percentage of Milgram’s participants went all the way to the
end i.e. 450 volts?
PRIOR PREDICTIONS
• PSYCHIATRISTS
• 120 v
• MIDDLE CLASS
ADULTS
• 135 v
• STUDENTS
• 150 v
Estimate > 3% would go up to 450 volts
270 volts heard ‘Screaming’
65% gave the maximum shock
REACTION OF PARTICIPANTS
• SIGNS OF TENSION
• 14 NERVOUS LAUGHTER
• 3 HAD Hysterical SIEZURES
• SIGHS OF RELIEF, MOPPED THEIR BROW etc.
• SOME REMAINED CALM THROUGHOUT
Conclusions
• Ordinary people are astonishingly obedient to
authority when asked to behave in an inhumane way
• It is not necessarily evil people who commit evil
crimes but ordinary people who are just obeying
orders.
• Crimes against humanity may be the outcome of
situational rather than dispositional factors
• An individuals capacity for making independent
decisions is suspended under certain situational
constraints – namely, being given an order by an
authority figure
Was this experiment ethical?
• What do you think?
• If you were a member of an Ethics committee
would you allow Milgram to repeat this study?
Explanations of Milgram’s findings
The most fundamental lesson of our study is that ordinary
people simply doing their jobs and without any particular
hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible
destructive process.
Must look outside the individual. In this way , the emphasis is
shifted away from personal characteristics to the
characteristics of the social situation.
Sometimes an authority makes an unreasonable request and
people ought not to obey but they do … why?
‘in certain circumstances the
most ordinary decent person
can become a criminal’
(Arendt, 1963)
Lacked mundane realism – set
was artificial and controlled
Evaluation
Findings have low ecological validity as they
lack generalisability to real life settings
Extremely dubious ethics - pressuring, stressful,
deceitful no informed consent – right to withdraw
May have been demand
characteristics
Provided an enormously valuable
insight into o human behaviour
Dispositional factors
are still important –
not everyone obey to
the same degree
Milgram argues that he could
not have anticipated how
many people would obey
Only looked at
obedience in one
particular setting
Many participants glad to have taken
part in the study – they said they had
learned something important
Variations of Milgram’s original experiment
In order to gain greater insight into the conditions under which
people will obey authority.
Tasks
Decide whether the result would have been higher or lower than
the 65% found in the base-line condition. Try to explain your
decision. Estimate the total obedience rate (those who went all
the way to 450 volts).
1. Orders given by telephone rather than face to face.
2. The victim was not seen or heard.
3. The participant had to force the learner’s hand onto the shock
plate.
4. The experimenter was not a scientist, but a member of the
public.
5. Teacher paired with another (stooge) teacher who delivered
shocks on their behalf.
6. The victim was only 1m away from the participant.
7. Where another confederate refused to give shocks.
8. The experiment was conducted in a seedy office rather than a
prestigious university.
Milgram’s results
These variations give us greater insight into the
conditions under which people will obey unjust requests
Cross-cultural differences
NB key aspects of the procedure varied between
cultures – therefore difficult to interpret
Were the findings in these countries higher or lower
than Milgram's’ baseline experiment in the US?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Italy
Spain
Germany
Holland
Austria
Australia
All higher except for Australia
Influences on levels of obedience
1. Situational factors
2. Psychological factors
3. Dispositional factors
Factors that influence obedience to authority
• Proximity of victim – the closer the teacher to the learner e.g.
touch proximity study the lower the levels of obedience. Physical
presence and contact leads to greater empathy making the
suffering of the learner harder to ignore
• Proximity of authority – Giving instructions over the phone
resulted in 23% of participants administering the maximum level
of shock
• Presence of allies – It is difficult to confront an authority
alone. The presence of other rebels helps with resistance to
obedience. When two fellow teacher (confederates) refused to
shock the ‘real’ participant withdrew their co-operation (10%
proceeded to 450volts)
Psychological processes explaining
why people obey
• A socially obedient environment – our experience has taught us
that authorities are generally trustworthy and legitimate
• Gradual commitment – the order given by the experimenter
moved from the reasonable to the unreasonable, and so it was
hard for the participants to notice when they began to be asked
to behave in an unreasonable way
• The agentic state – participants were acting as an agent for
someone or becoming the instrument of an authority figure.
They then cease to act according to their consciences, with the
attitude ‘I am not responsible I act as I do because I was order
to do it’
• The role of buffers – a buffer is anything that prevents a
person seeing the consequences of their actions i.e. participants
could not see the victim
Dispositional explanations of obedience
• Personality: Some people have an authoritarian personality and
are most likely to be obedient and also prejudice. Characteristics
of such individuals include: Rigid beliefs in conventional values;
general hostility towards other groups; submissive attitudes
towards authority figures; intolerance of ambiguity
• Early experience: childhood experiences play a key role in the
development of authoritarian personality. Harsh treatment by
parents can create hostility in children. This may be repressed. In
later life the hostility may resurface and be displaced onto nonthreatening minority groups
• The F Scale: The Fascism Scale (Adorno et al. 1950) measures
attitudes of authoritarian personality. Higher scorers on the F
scale gave stronger shock in Milgram’s experiment
• "The world is a dangerous place, not because
of those who do evil, but because of those
who look on and do nothing." - Albert Einstein