I don't often dabble in social psychology. In fact, I'm often too critical of it, believing it to be a frail aspect of psychological discovery with little to no empirical value. However, there is one aspect of social psychology that I have studied (and have loved to study) for years - the concept of compliance (or obedience).
We, as humans, love obedience. It gives us a sense of dominance and control in a world where we so often lack such. We want our pets, children, co-workers, families, and - in reality - everyone we meet to abide by our rules, to subject to our power. And when people fail to do so, we often retaliate - children get spanked, employees get fired, family members get disowned. "It's my way or the highway." That is the motto we so often live by.
While most people see this system as "order," I find it dangerous. Dangerous because I can't help but wonder what the harm is in thinking. Philosopher Rene Descartes once said, "I think, therefore I am." The problem is people often don't think for themselves. Humans are notorious for complying with authority, and though many think of this as a positive thing (a product of the "good ol' days" when subordinates only ever did as they were told), the truth is simple: It's not always positive.
Using two blog posts to analyze two different studies in social psychology related to obedience, I will analyze exactly how compliance can be a hindrance not only to our individual character, but to human life as a whole.
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Adolf Hitler's Influence on Social Psychology
Adolf Hitler was the driving force behind much of the research conducted on social psychology in the 1960s. When Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi SS and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, stood trial in Jerusalem in 1961, psychologists were immediately fascinated. Hitler wasn't a dictator - not at first. He was subjected to his people's vote on a referendum in 1934. If the people voted "yes" the positions of president and chancellor would be merged, giving the presiding "Führer" supreme power. The referendum passed by a landslide - 88.1 percent of the vote. Psychologists questioned how a man not born of royal blood could possibly manage to bring an entire nation into his subjection. He took control of multiple European nations and nearly eradicated an entire race of people... and he did it with an army rallied around him.
Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, questioned how Hilter had managed to get people like Eichmann to comply with his disastrous genocide. Some psychologists believed human beings were simply that obedient, others disagreed, believing humans too good and too capable of their own thinking to even consider blindly following a mad dictator. Milgram decided to test the theory - experimenting to see if simple authority was capable of leading humans to do, arguably, the most ghastly thing one can do: Kill someone.
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Milgram Obedience Study
The study involved three groups of people - teachers, students and lab directors. Of those three groups, only one was comprised of actual participants (the teachers). The other two groups were made of confederates (actors who pretended to play the part).
Milgram recruited people from New Haven, Connecticut, offering them a monetary reward for just one hour of their time. When the participants (and confederates) arrived they were told to draw a slip of paper from a hat, labeling them as either "teachers" or "students." The drawing was rigged so that only confederates would play students and only actual participants would be teachers. Once categorized they were divided into groups of two - one teacher and one student paired with a lab director that worked at Yale University. They were introduced to one another, taken to adjacent rooms (with the teacher and lab director in one room and the student in another) and then the experiment was related to them.
The lab director explained (falsely) that this was a study on memory. Through an intercom system, the teacher would read off a list of words that the student was expected to remember and then recite back. If they failed to do so (either by repeating a wrong word or repeating the words in the wrong order), the teacher would be required to administer an electric shock to the student, and raise the voltage every time they did so.
Unbeknownst to the teachers, the confederate actors were not actually being shocked; rather, a tape recorder was integrated into the electroshock generator that played prerecorded sounds as a response to each shock level. At first, the shocks were minor, resulting only in brief yelps of irritation. But as the voltage was increased, the confederates began to express sincere pain to their teacher counterparts. They would bang on the wall that separated them, begging them to stop and complaining of torture. Many of the teachers expressed a desire to stop the experiment, not wanting to subject the students to any more pain. To this, the lab directors were given a set of verbal prods to read off from the corner of the room, including:
1.) Please continue.
2.) The experiment requires that you continue.
3.) It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4.) You have no other choice. You must go on.
If the subject wished to stop after all four verbal prods, then the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was up to the participant to refuse the lab director's authority and cease administering the shocks on their own.
If the participant did not stop they would eventually reach 450 volts, labeled on the shock box as "XXX" - a theoretically fatal voltage. This means, essentially, that the participant (teacher) was being asked, if the time came, to administer a life-threatening shock to the individual in the adjacent room.
Now, I know what you're thinking - no one would do that. Right? That's absurd. Who would administer a fatal shock to an individual simply because some lab director in a white coat tells them to?
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The Results
Milgram had conducted a poll prior to the start of the experiment asking fourteen senior-year psychology majors at Yale to predict the behavior of the "teacher" participants. Every respondent said less than 3 of the 100 (with an average of 1.2 out of 100) would be willing to inflict a fatal shock. Milgram also polled his colleagues and forty psychiatrists. All of them agreed very few, if any, of the participants would administer the maximum voltage.
His results shocked everyone.
Sixty-five percent of participants were willing to administer the fatal shock.
What does this mean? From a theoretical perspective, it tells us that the research is evidence supporting the idea that, as humans, we comply with authority to the extent that we are willing to obediently take someone else's life. It was not just one or two "bad" people in Milgram's experiment who crossed the finish line to administer a fatal blow - it was the majority. Sixty-five percent were willing to do what most of us swear we never could - kill someone.
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The Fallout
Milgram's experiment would be viewed as one of the most unethical research studies in psychological history. Not only were the participants deceived in the most severe sense possible, but, after debriefing, 65 percent of them walked away with the knowledge that they were of weak enough character to kill another human being merely because a man in a white lab coat told them to do so. This was a man they had never met who worked in a random lab at a university. How much further would someone go to comply with the orders of a parent, of a boss, of a governmental authority?
Despite criticism, Milgram's experiment remains a testament to the dangers of blind obedience, total compliance and the repression of individual thought.
Further Reading:
https://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/abn/67/4/371/
