Stanley Milgram, the man who uncovered some disturbing truths about human nature.

The Man Who Shocked The World 

Milgram's research; like Freud's, did lead to profound revisions in some of the fundamental assumptions about human nature. Indeed, by the fall of 1963, the results of Milgram's research were making headlines. He found that an average, presumably normal group of New Haven, Connecticut, residents would readily inflict very painful and perhaps even harmful electric shocks on innocent victims.

The subjects believed they were part of an experiment supposedly dealing with the relationship between punishment and learning. An experimenter—who used no coercive powers beyond a stern aura of mechanical and vacant-eyed efficiency—instructed participants to shock a learner by pressing a lever on a machine each time the learner made a mistake on a word-matching task. Each subsequent error led to an increase in the intensity of the shock in 15-volt increments, from 15 to 450 volts.

In actuality, the shock box was a well-crafted prop and the learner an actor who did not actually get shocked. The result: A majority of the subjects continued to obey to the end—believing they were delivering 450 volt shocks—simply because the experimenter commanded them to. Although subjects were told about the deception afterward, the experience was a very real and powerful one for them during the laboratory hour itself.

That year, the headline of an article in the October 26 issue of The New York Times blared, "Sixty-five Percent in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain." A week later the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also informed its readers about the experiments—in an editorial lambasting Milgram and Yale for the ordeal they put their subjects through. That article marked the beginning of an enduring ethical controversy stirred up by the experiments that sometimes overshadowed the substance of the findings.

Those groundbreaking and controversial experiments have had—and continue to have—long-lasting significance. They demonstrated with jarring clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced to act destructively even in the absence of physical coercion, and humans need not be innately evil or aberrant to act in ways that are reprehensible and inhumane. While we would like to believe that when confronted with a moral dilemma we will act as our conscience dictates, Milgram's obedience experiments teach us that in a concrete situation with powerful social constraints, our moral sense can easily be trampled.

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Milgram's warning—that when an individual "merges...into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of human inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority"—has much resonance. Professionals in fields as varied as nursing, marketing, accounting and management have inferred practical lessons from Milgram's obedience studies.

Legal scholarship has also drawn heavily on the obedience studies and their implications. For example, Steven Hartwell, a law professor at the University of San Diego, conducted an educational exercise for his students in which they were to individually advise litigants in a small-claims court. He told his students that he would be available in an adjacent office if they needed to consult with him. Hartwell writes:

The "clients" were, in fact, a single confederate who sought the same advice from each student: how she should present her side of a rent dispute. I told each student to advise the client to lie under oath that she had paid the rent. When students asked for clarification, I uniformly responded, "...My advice is that, if your client wants to win her case, then you must tell her to perjure herself."… We wanted them to experience the pull between loyalty to authority… and prescribed ethical conduct … Although many of the 24 participating students grumbled either to me or to the client about my proffered advice, 23 told their client to perjure herself.

We didn't need Milgram to tell us we have a tendency to obey orders. What we didn't know before Milgram's experiments is just how powerful this tendency is. And having been enlightened about our extreme readiness to obey authorities, we can try to take steps to guard ourselves against unwelcome or reprehensible commands.

Yes, Sir

One important place where the lessons of Milgram's work have been taken seriously and acted upon is in the U.S. Army. Milgram's research and its implications are discussed in two mandatory psychology courses at the U.S. Military Academy. In 1985, the head of the academy's department of behavioral sciences and leadership wrote, "One of the desired outcomes of this is that our future military leaders will be fully cognizant not only of their authority but also of their responsibility to make decisions that are well considered and morally sound."

What accounts for the far-flung influence of Milgram's obedience experiments? I believe it has to do with how, in his demonstration of our powerful propensity to obey authority, Milgram has identified one of the universals of social behavior, one that transcends both time and place: conformity. And people intuitively sense this.

I have carried out two data analyses that provide at least some evidence to back up this assertion. In one, I correlated the results of Milgram's standard obedience experiments and the replications conducted by others with their dates of publication. The results: There was absolutely no relationship between when a study was conducted and the amount of obedience it yielded. In a second analysis, I compared the outcomes of obedience experiments conducted in the U.S. with those conducted in other countries. Remarkably, the average obedience rates were very similar: In the U.S. studies, some 61 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, while elsewhere the obedience rate was 66 percent.

It is fitting that, in an article about Milgram, he should have the last word on this matter. In a letter to Alan Elms, a former student at Yale (now on the faculty of the University of California at Davis) dated September 25, 1973, Milgram wrote:

"We do not observe compliance to authority merely because it is a transient cultural or historical phenomenon, but because it flows from the logical necessities of social organization. If we are to have social life in any organized form—that is to say, if we are to have society—then we must have members of society amenable to organizational imperatives."

Posted via email from Jim's Science Posts