Building A Rationale Obedience To Authority

You may find yourself in situations where you feel you have no other choice than to listen to and obey orders, especially when they are delivered by perceived authority. Humans have been taught to obey orders, since they were children in school, being ordered to line up in a single file, all the way to adulthood, immediately pulling over when a police car signals their sirens and lights. Hence, obedience is a key factor that constantly impacts how humans interact in their everyday life, towards school, work, and social situations. It is the role of psychologists to gather evidence as to what drives us to obey, why we obey and use this insight to allow for long-term progression in society. In social psychology, the concept of obedience is explored through the extent to which an individual, when placed in certain situations, obeys orders & exhibits behavior that they would not condone under normal circumstances.

Milgram’s experiments & empirical research on the phenomenon of obedience are considered the ‘turning point’ for how human conduct and the implications of obedience are viewed today by not only psychologists but also the individual and society (Gibson, 2018). In his most famous experiment, study participants were selected as ‘teacher.’ The participant is encouraged to administer electric shocks to a ‘learner’ (covertly a confederate) as punishment for responding incorrectly to a question. The shock level is increased in proportion to the number of incorrect responses made by the learner in a word memory test. The experimenter running the session utilized verbal prompts, like “The experiment requires you to go on”, to elicit obedience whenever the participant portrayed signs of uncertainty or reluctance to continue (Milgram, 1963). It is assumed that a desire for the explanation of Nazi behavior during the Holocaust was a major influence that drove Milgram’s interest in conducting this obedience experiment, and so he devised his study where ‘ordinary people were given orders to carry out ‘aggressive acts’ towards another. It is this desire for explanation like Milgram’s that has proved the importance of obedience research to psychologists, and the individual in society. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment is an ample real-life example that sheds light on the influence of group roles and societal norms on obedience towards orders, where participants selected to play the role of ‘guard’ kept order in the prison setting by causing emotional distress and physical punishment towards the ‘prisoners’, assuming this was a justifiable response.

Experimental studies into obedience related to/following Milgram’s obedience studies were conducted to further investigate the acquiescence present in people’s responses to authoritative pressure and use this study to provide accounts for human behavior in the real world. In Dolinski’s replication of Milgram’s experiment (2017), he followed a similar methodology, but instead allowed gender to be a key variable for comparison, and reduced the number of shock buttons for ethical reasons. Though a 50-year contextual difference was present, Dolinski deduced that the majority of participants (90%) pressed the 10th lever; administering the highest shock, and that gender difference did not produce a statistically significant difference in his results (Dolinksi et. al., 2017). David Mantell (1976) also produced a variation of Milgram’s experiment, where he separated individuals into two conditions; self-decision and modeling de-legitimization. Mantell’s results showed that the participants with more decision-making power assumed more responsibility for their acts, even though they were rational and issued fewer shocks than those in the modeling de-legitimization condition. (Mantell, 1976). The core evidence we can take from these studies is that humans under pressure from an authoritative force are more likely to succumb to extreme obedience, to the point where these individuals can't help but obey the most vicious & destructive of authorities (Reicher, et. al, 2011).