Obedience to Authority

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Summary
Obedience to Authority is Stanley Milgram's account of his famous and controversial experiments into the origins of obedience. The basic procedure of his experiment were as follows. A volunteer was brought into the lab at Yale University to participate in a study on "memory and learning." The volunteer was given the role of the "teacher," while another volunteer who was actually a volunteer working with the experimenter was given the role of the "learner." The teacher was instructed to read a list of word pairs to the learner, who was hooked up to an electric shock machine in the other room. Then, the teacher would ask a few questions about the word pairs, and if the learner got any of the answers wrong, the teacher was to shock him using a generator machine, increasing the voltage for each wrong answer. The voltage levels on the machine were labeled from "mild shock" to "severe shock" to "extreme shock" to "XXX," implying death. As the shock levels rose higher, the learner started to scream in pain and demand to be let out of the experiment, but the experimenter continually stressed that the experiment must go on and that the shocks did no permanent tissue damage. In reality, the learner was not actually being shocked, but instead acting in order to convince the teacher they were actually causing him harm.


Milgram found that generally about 60% of the participants were willing to shock the victim all the way to the last level of voltage, 450 volts, or supposed death. He made a few observations about the situation and explained the results in these ways:

• When an autonomous person is put into a situation with a perceived authority, they automatically give up their autonomy and follow the experimenter.
• Regardless of the fact that they felt what they were doing was morally wrong, the subject is still unable to break out of the perceived obedience and power hierarchy.
• Even when in close proximity to the subject, the victim would still follow the orders of the experimenter,  suggesting that they had lowered the status of the victim in their mind.
• Whenever an ordinary man gave the orders to shock and the experimenter was the "victim," the subject would listen to the experimenter's demands to stop the shocking, showing that the authority must have some sort of credibility (or at least claim to have some).
• When the experimenter was not in the room, the subject did not feel obligated to shock at the high levels, showing that when the structure of obedience and authority is broken, the person is free.
• The person does not feel responsibility for their actions in an authority structure because "they were just following orders" and the authority is the one with the responsibility.
• Lastly, whenever the subject was given a choice of what shock level to use, they continued to use smaller shock levels, showing that the act of shocking at the higher levels was not an outlet for the subject to get out their aggression but instead an act of obedience to the experimenter.

While his experiments did not completely sum up the ideas of obedience, he did show (in a controversial way) the extreme effects that situation have on an individuals propensity to act in horrible ways, and that it was not just the horrible character and nature of the subjects.

Discussion
This book was extremely interesting - it was definitely one of the best chapters of Opening Skinner's Box. While I would like to say that I would not have shocked all the way to the last level, I also know the nature of how I was brought up (and how many other people in America are brought up) to respect authority and always listen. Even though through my childhood I hated authority and would always talk bad about and resent those who had authority but did not deserve it, I never had the courage to actually stand up to that authority and do what I wanted to do. So, I can definitely see how these participants came to trust and respect the experimenter and were scared to go against him because of his position of authority. Especially interesting was the fact that the subjects that had access to the phone would tell the experimenter they were shocking at higher levels when they would actually shock at a lower level. To me, this showed that they were scared to defy the experimenter to his face but would do it if he wouldn't find out. Sounds kinda like doing something your parent's told you not to do when they're not home! In all, this book was extremely interesting, and impressive in the detail and experiment configurations that Milgram went through to thoroughly prove the nature of obedience to authority.