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Episode 17: Stanley Milgram and Obedience to Authority
25 Plays5 years ago
In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram performed some of the most famous experiments in psychology history, demonstrating that ordinary people could do terrible things in certain circumstances. Joe and Rolf look into the meaning of these experiments from a contemporary view. How are they holding up over 50 years later, and what else have we learned about obedience?
Milgram's experiments
Milgram in Virtual Reality (Gonzalez-Franco et al., 2018)
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Transcript
Introduction to Milgram's Obedience Studies
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm Rolf Nelson and with me is Joe Hardy. On today's show, we're going to talk about Stanley Mildred, the famous psychologist who originated the obedience studies in the 1960s and then went on to do some other interesting kinds of experimental work across his career.
00:00:25
Speaker
We're going to get into that original obedience paper. We're going to take a look at some of the more contemporary ideas about how Milgram is viewed today.
The Experiment Setup
00:00:36
Speaker
All right. Yeah. And so Stanley Milgram is one of the more interesting figures and courses that you would.
00:00:45
Speaker
take a psychology one course. If you've ever taken an intro to psychology course and if you learned about one set of experiments, you probably heard about the Milgram experiment. Right, exactly. This is one of the things that as a psychology professor, psychology teacher, you're just really glad that these experiments happened. Always entertaining to talk about and I think pretty informative as well.
00:01:14
Speaker
So the original experiment is just to orient people. So the original experiments were conducted in a setup where someone was asked to give shocks to another person who was sitting in another room if they didn't learn correctly. Right. So this is a, the experiment was set up seeming to be a learning and memory study, but in fact, there's a study about obedience to authority.
00:01:41
Speaker
And the people who are participants in the study don't realize that it's a study about obedience until it's over. That's right. So there's some deception involved in this. So in the experiment, the idea is that the teacher, who is always the participant or the subject of the experiment,
00:02:00
Speaker
the teacher gives a set of to be memorized pairs of words. And when the learner who's off in another room gets them wrong, they get an electric shock.
Findings on Authority and Responsibility
00:02:11
Speaker
And most importantly, as the experiment continues, they're asked to give progressively higher and higher level of electric shocks. So it starts out at something like 50 volts or less and
00:02:28
Speaker
then it goes all the way up to 450 volts. Now in the middle of this experiment, the learner who's in the other room start saying things like, I have a heart attack. Get me out of this. I don't want to be in this experiment anymore. Right, exactly. I mean, there's, there's a variety of different conditions, right? And, and how the, uh, the learner responds is like a big variable in the experiment. So in one version of the study, uh, for example,
00:02:58
Speaker
the learner starts making some verbal responses at a certain level, maybe 90 volts, and then those verbal responses kind of get progressively more concerning or alarming as you go up the volts basically. Then I think after a certain point, usually the learner stops responding with the implication that maybe something seriously bad happened to this person with a heart condition.
00:03:29
Speaker
Right, exactly. What the main dependent variable is, is how far the teacher or the participant is willing to go in giving shocks for incorrect answers. Yeah, and most people are surprised to find out that a large proportion of people go all the way to 450 volts.
00:03:53
Speaker
So they're encouraged by the experimenter to continue. The experimenter says things like the experiment requires that you continue, even though these shocks are
Historical Influences on Milgram
00:04:04
Speaker
painful. They're not something that's physically damaging to the learner and
00:04:10
Speaker
It's important to note that these experiments took place at reputable institutions. It was at Yale University where these things were first investigated. So you've got an experiment with a lab coat encouraging you, telling you that you have to continue. And they're trying to figure out how far someone will go in playing a part in damaging or causing harm to another person, even in an experimental setup.
00:04:40
Speaker
Now. Just OK, so that's the basic experiment right that you're you're causing harm to another individual because you've got some coercion and you're obedient to this person in the experiment. So some background to this now Stanley Milgram.
00:05:01
Speaker
was born in 1933, conducted these experiments starting in the early 1960s. So he was young when he conducted these. I believe that they started running the experiment when he was only 27 years old and he was at Yale University. He states this very explicitly. So the main point of these experiments is to understand how
Conclusions on Obedience
00:05:28
Speaker
Obedience to authority mindless obedience to authority works in fairly normal people he had a family that was Some of them were in Germany during World War two got killed in the Holocaust Some of them survived and influenced Milgram strongly So yeah, a lot of a lot of this, you know, the the background of this is really the context really truly, you know is the the Holocaust in World War two
00:05:57
Speaker
and just the idea that what could make people do the things that they did where they would say, do these horrible atrocities and say, I was only following orders. One of the things that this is concurrent with, so at the time he was influenced to begin these experiments, it was the same time as the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was strongly involved in some of the horrors of Nazi Germany,
00:06:26
Speaker
But at the trial, he seemed like a perfectly normal person and would say things like, I was only following orders. I just did what they told me to do. And he didn't seem like he didn't seem like he was pure evil. He just did what he was told. So how does this how does this come about? How does this happen? How does how does evil happen is is what he was getting at. Right, exactly. And I think one of the things that
00:06:52
Speaker
that he strongly concludes from the work is that this is a thing that's in most people, most of us will follow authority under the right circumstances.
Ethical Concerns in Milgram's Study
00:07:06
Speaker
And he hit upon some characteristics of situations that sort of optimize that. And he also took a lot of care to note the reactions that people were having, both when they were
00:07:21
Speaker
being obedient and when they were resisting. So I think just the sort of subjective observations of what people were doing. So for example, he noted that a lot of times when the learner would start to give some negative feedback, start to say, oh, that hurts, or I want to stop. And the teacher, the participant was made to continue. They would do things like,
00:07:51
Speaker
dig their fingernails into their skin. They would laugh nervously. That was something he- Nervous laughter, I think that's something that comes up a lot. Yeah, he noted that quite a bit in his work that people would laugh nervously and spontaneously to the point where he described it as almost, they would have almost seizures of laughter. People would look at the experimenter there and say,
00:08:20
Speaker
maybe protest and say, you know, I think we should stop, you know, or don't you want to look in the room? Do you want to do you want to look in that other room to check if this person's okay? But interestingly, out of all of the people that he had in the study, he noted that that none of these people actually themselves got up from their chair and walked into the other room to check if the learner was okay.
00:08:44
Speaker
I mean, the overall sense of the again, there, there are tons of variations on this study. So there was a version where. The learner is in the same room, so they could see the pain and stress that that the learner is under.
00:09:01
Speaker
and vary just about every aspect you could think of, but the overall result is that it seems like a pretty robust effect that a good percentage and usually a strong majority of people go all the way to the end of the experiment and get to
Authority and Responsibility Discussion
00:09:24
Speaker
As far as they can go on this machine now, they've got a machine in front of them with switches on it that say how many how many volts they're they're giving to the learner and it's you know It says on it danger severe shock at the higher end. So I know it's something that's really painful and the the subject in this the person who's pressing the buttons is
00:09:47
Speaker
at the beginning of the experiment gets an example shock so they know that it's painful. I think their example shock was said to be something like 45 volts and you know it's a noticeable painful shock and obviously by extension going up to 450 volts is going to be extremely painful. Yeah absolutely yeah they they definitely uh you know are aware that this painful and they're getting that feedback from from the learner you know
00:10:13
Speaker
In some cases, almost screaming and other cases pounding on the wall insisting to want to stop the study. Yet, a majority of people in some versions of the study continue. I mean, some of the characteristics of the study that make it more likely that people will do it, will actually administer the shocks. One of the things that they varied, where the study was being performed.
00:10:43
Speaker
In the most in the canonical form of the study, it was done at a laboratory at Yale University. It looked very professional in this setting, and it was like a procedure school. And those sort of elements of authority seem to be important or influential in having people believe that the scientific nature of the study was somehow legitimate. I think the legitimacy is like an important component to it.
00:11:13
Speaker
And that the organization that they're going to, so obviously Yale University, it's a tough organization to question. If you're just someone coming in for an experiment, middle-aged guy working a normal job, coming into Yale University, you assume they know what they're doing, especially in experimental psychology. Yeah, I mean, do you expect that these people from this institution are legitimate and they know what they're doing?
00:11:43
Speaker
I mean, I think one of the characteristics that is sort of is important here is who's taking responsibility for the result, right? And I think that kind of is sort of part and parcel to what you were just saying there about Yale. The people going there for the experiment clearly identify that
00:12:03
Speaker
that Yale is responsible, that this professor and this institution are responsible and that they're not responsible. And I think in some cases, participants even said, are you taking responsibility for this? And the experiment would say, yes, I'm taking responsibility. The responsibility is ours, not yours. You don't have to. You're not responsible for anything bad that happens in this experiment. Right.
00:12:27
Speaker
When you watch videos of this stuff, you can see people squirming in their chairs, clearly conflicted about what it is that they're doing, yet at the same time, they're still going all the way to those 450 volts. Right, they might, they're in some cases sweating, they're fidgeting in their chairs, they're clearly uncomfortable and disturbed, but they don't stop. And ask them afterwards and they'll say, I didn't want to do it, but you know,
00:12:55
Speaker
They said they'd take the responsibility. I tried to object. I tried to stop it, but they kind of made me do it. Um, even though there's no, you know, there's no physical force being, um, used in this case, there's nothing there. All of the participants are told that the money that they receive is there as to keep, no matter what happens. They're not told that they have to finish the experiment. Yes, exactly.
00:13:21
Speaker
And you know, so I mean, what do you think? What do you think this means? Like, what is the what are the implications of this in your mind? So big picture. Yeah, big picture. Kind of take this in a larger context. I would say what it probably means is that people are suggestible. What do you mean by suggestible? People are.
00:13:41
Speaker
willing to give a locus of control over to someone else, and we have that capacity to give over control to someone else. I think that's a fundamental human trait. I suspect that one key factor in this is, from research that's been coming up lately, this idea that
00:14:04
Speaker
human beings are shockingly cooperative animals that we we tend to help each other out and we tend to work together really well and that and that means that we can produce something that's greater than ourselves that by plugging into
00:14:22
Speaker
an organization or something, a cooperative group of individuals, you can accomplish something amazing that you couldn't accomplish yourself. As an extension of this, I think people organize into these hierarchical systems where you've got
00:14:41
Speaker
Levels of control or dominance and levels of submission and you know, this is something that you need to do to get to finish a project, you know, in in In any project that you're trying to finish you've got, you know, if you've got a team of people working together, you can't have 10 20 individual voices all trying to figure out where to go. You've got to have some some direction and I think people are ready to
00:15:11
Speaker
Delegate to other people. They're ready to accept direction from other people. Another version of this is suggestibility by say hypnotism. Hypnotism is not.
00:15:25
Speaker
is not maybe as it's portrayed in movies as something where you can take control of someone else's mind. It's the process of accepting suggestions. I think Milgram's experiments are an example of people accepting the suggestions of someone who's next to them, not wanting to displease them. And of course, the experimenter is hovering over them. So they want to do what they say. And even though they're conflicted,
00:15:54
Speaker
they may still take these suggestions. I think that's what's going on. I think there are a number of different theories about this, and I think this is why Milgram remains relevant today, that we don't entirely know all of these things. There was a special issue in a journal a couple of years ago in 2015 that took a more detailed look at
00:16:23
Speaker
These Milgram experiments, luckily Stanley Milgram left a huge amount of bureaucracy. So he left all of the papers and everything. It's all available to be gone over. Check and see what conditions he had, all the details and nuances so people can still go through it. And the end result is that the findings are real.
Agentic State Theory
00:16:45
Speaker
But the interpretation of why people remained obedient is still
00:16:51
Speaker
It's still not entirely clear. Why is this? Because the kind of experiments that Milgram did are not accepted to be ethical in psychology because he was coercive and he made people think that they were inflicting pain. He essentially stopped the kinds of experiments that he was doing. This remains such a landmark study because there's never been anything on this scale done since. Yeah, absolutely.
00:17:21
Speaker
a lot in there what you were just saying. I mean, the first thing in terms of just like, what does it mean, right? For me, it's clear that you're right. I mean, people tend to be obedient to authority and that can have an adaptive effect in a sense that, I mean, this is a lot of why human beings are so successful from, success here now just in terms of being numerous
00:17:52
Speaker
and widely distributed. I mean, you could argue how successful we are in other ways, but certainly there's a lot of us and we're all over the place. Yeah, and we make things like skyscrapers and iPhones. We make things that no other animal has ever even thought about making, changed the environment dramatically and quickly and continuously in ways that can only be done through cooperation.
00:18:21
Speaker
to your point, there are different modes of cooperation and the mode of cooperation that many mammals use and certainly primates tend to use is one that is a hierarchical system of authority. So chimps grimacing at each other and asserting their authority. Exactly.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. This idea sometimes that there's an alpha individual, and maybe there might be multiple alphas in different ways within a group. And there's different predefined roles. And certainly within, you see this in primate societies, and so within organizations in human societies, these predefined roles are quite preserved across organizations as like a kind of
00:19:18
Speaker
You can make an analogy to command and control within a military, where someone has to be given the order to do something, or there can be confusion and loss of efficiency. For the sake of efficiency and the sake of productivity, humans willingly give over their individual autonomy and control to the group and the organization.
00:19:45
Speaker
We have this concept that is also, I think, pretty universal, whether it's something that is inborn or something that is learned, I don't know. But we have this concept that responsibility goes with authority. In other words, the person who is in charge is also, therefore, responsible for the result. If it's a good result, they get the credit. If it's a bad result, they take the blame. That's the theory, right?
00:20:15
Speaker
If you're doing something that may or may not be okay from an ethical standpoint, the responsibility for that goes to the person who has the authority, the person who's in charge. To me, that's the thread that ties this work together with the atrocity stuff. The idea that someone's willing to do something that's wrong,
00:20:46
Speaker
because someone else tells them to do it because that person is in charge and therefore they're not responsible. This idea of responsibility I think is super important here because that's how people justify it to themselves when they're doing something that's not right. Authority, when you're doing something that's a good thing, like a project that you're on board with, that you're excited about, you're perfectly willing to
00:21:16
Speaker
give up some of your autonomy for the sake of the group because you see that the positive result, there's no tension there. The tension only comes about when you yourself individually think that what you're doing may not be right. So Milgram talked about this and his theoretical basis may not be complete, but his idea was that
00:21:42
Speaker
human beings could enter into several different states of control over their own actions. He called this an agentic mode of thinking, that you basically cede your agency to another person. What this allows you to do is to focus all of your energy on the task,
00:22:03
Speaker
and not worry about the kinds of things that your supervisor is worrying about. So they'll take care of the ethics of the situation. I am having a hard enough time just trying to work on a basic level here. So he called this the agentic mode.
Historical Context and Human Behavior
00:22:25
Speaker
Right. Yeah, exactly.
00:22:27
Speaker
So, you know, this is from this review paper. It talks about Milgram describes this agentic state as a state of mind in which critical reflection and ability to defy authority subside, allowing subconscious individual level propensities to come to the fore. Here, the person gives themselves, quote, over to authority and no longer views him as the efficient cause of his own actions.
00:22:56
Speaker
That's Milgram's quote from Milgram. So basically he's saying that in this state, you just don't see yourself as being the cause of your own actions. I think that to me, I would say that is one and the same as not being responsible for your own actions. You're basically saying, I'm not responsible for my own actions because this authority figure is there. It's out of my pay grade or something. Yes. I don't have time to think about those things.
00:23:23
Speaker
Right, and so then I think that what is that? What is going on there? I think is what controversial, right? You know, I think from his perspective, Milgram thought that this was like you just were no longer really paying attention to or couldn't attend to. Effectively attend to the concerns or the problems of the of the of the learner. When you when you enter that state,
00:23:52
Speaker
all of your attention and focus goes to the authority figure. So if you're trying to make this as a direct analog to Nazi Germany, I mean, this experiment is something that lasts a relatively short time, you know, an hour or so. And you still get, I mean, you get people to do this after a very short amount of time. And when you're talking about obedience for atrocities in World War II,
00:24:21
Speaker
Course you're talking about events happening over months or years to convince people to take part in this so. And you can only imagine that whatever forces are are in play. To cause something that happens for an hour are going to be multiplied hugely over a longer time course.
00:24:42
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think it's also the case that, I mean, there's a lot of other forces at work in that situation, in the atrocity situation. You could talk about the Holocaust in Germany, but there are atrocities everywhere. There are Native American peoples in the US, Armenia, Sudan, any kind of genocide. Whenever we're talking about the idea of a genocide, these types of forces are at work. But I think in all those cases,
00:25:10
Speaker
There are other forces that work as well. So you have the sort of the collective elements where you have one group essentially not seeing the other group as people. So you're sort of dehumanizing another group. I think that it's different than what we have here in this situation.
00:25:33
Speaker
Because in these experiments, the person was certainly humanized. They met them beforehand and they knew that it was a person. And they were one-to-one with that person in the sense of, at the beginning of the study at least, they were fooled to believe that they could have just as likely been the
00:25:55
Speaker
learner as the teacher because they draw lots basically at the beginning to see who's going to be the teacher and who's going to be the learner. And even though it's always the same, they always are the teacher. They don't know that, that they think it's a random thing and they could just as easily be that person. The participants were chosen to be sort of similar in many characteristics, age, gender, et cetera. In Milgram's original experiments, they were all men too.
00:26:24
Speaker
Right, exactly. As the people who are, as the experimenters themselves. So in that sense, you know, that's interesting because you don't have that other element of that group component, but you definitely have the authority component. And it definitely is powerful in and of itself. And so to your point, I mean, there's some, the power of authority to make people do terrible things is profound.
00:26:55
Speaker
I think what is interesting about the Milgram experiments is they are definitely tamped down versions of the kind of authority that would be used in Nazi Germany again. One of the reasons you might think that Germans could turn into such terrible people in Nazi Germany is because they were afraid themselves of getting killed. In other words, if they disobeyed,
00:27:19
Speaker
What could they do about it? They couldn't do anything about it, and they'd likely be court-martialed and killed themselves. In Milgram's experiment, it wasn't clear that there was anything bad that would happen if you stopped the experiment. They were told explicitly that money was theirs no matter what happened. It wouldn't be clear that anything negative would happen to them, except maybe they'd be
00:27:44
Speaker
made to feel bad by someone from Yale, but certainly nothing like, certainly not fear or entirely fear that's motivating them. Right, exactly. I mean, there's no obvious consequence to disobeying the authority in this context.
00:28:04
Speaker
yet they still obey anyway. Another kind of obedience that I think people worry a lot about is when there's a disconnect between those making the decision and those getting hurt. Think of war as conducted by the United States where you may have decisions made by generals or the president to call for an air strike.
00:28:28
Speaker
They are totally disconnected from the kinds of bad things that may happen or the way that it actually works. You could imagine that evil happens because there's just this strong disconnect between the decision makers and the people that are carrying it out. In Milgram's experiment, there was nothing like that and people still carried out these kinds of acts. Everyone was right there in the room and it was clear exactly what was happening.
00:28:56
Speaker
you know, the experimenter was in the room with them so could see what was going on. That was not the issue. It wasn't that there was a disconnect here.
Ethical Issues and Research Standards
00:29:05
Speaker
Right. And yet it still happens. So I mean, this, this tells us something about lined obedience in a war situation that it's something maybe more fundamental or basic that humans are have the capacity for, even in not extreme situations.
00:29:23
Speaker
Right, I think that maybe this experiment is leveraging elements of human psychology that are just really basic, that play out in different ways in different contexts, depending on what's going on. I mean, I think... So like what? Maybe what's happening here is while there is no threat to the individual for not obeying authority in this context,
00:29:49
Speaker
that threat is somehow implicit in the idea of authority. That people are built in a way to avoid bucking authority? That's right. And either through evolution or learning, you come to know that disobeying authority has negative consequences for you. At the extreme end of that, it could be death.
00:30:16
Speaker
and a less extreme but maybe no less serious, in terms of consequence, is this idea of being banished from the group, whatever group that is. You're kicked out of the group, the organization or the tribe or whatever it is, if you disobey authority. So maybe it's that you're actually physically punished, or maybe it's just that you're cast off from the group
00:30:43
Speaker
when you disobey authority. In either case, there's a real consequence to your life and livelihood for disobeying authority. And that is such an ingrained notion that when presented with the trappings of an authority figure and that that system sort of just takes over. Seating agency. That's right, exactly, exactly. I mean, in that sense,
00:31:13
Speaker
If you think about it that way, maybe it's not even that it's not that you don't have agency in the sense that you're you're not doing what you quote unquote want to do. Or what you would prefer to do in that situation, but you're still acting rationally in a sense. Because you know from from the frame from the frame of if you disobey authority, something bad will happen to you. Then not then obeying authority is in that sense of rational.
00:31:39
Speaker
There's also maybe a sense of security that comes with obeying authority, right? There's something comfortable about being in a subordinate position where presumably the alpha male is looking out for you and it's stressful to try and buck that.
00:32:05
Speaker
and it's comforting to assume that you'll be fine if you go along with it. Absolutely. You see this in primates also. Not only is it stressful to disobey authority, it's also stressful when there is no clear authority. When the line of authority is unclear, that is also stressful. So there's something calming about having a clear person in charge
00:32:34
Speaker
and actually then doing what that person says to do. Should we talk about the ethics of the experiments? Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned earlier that you can't do these experiments anymore. Well, we can talk about some exceptions to this in a little bit, but in general,
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, you can't do something like this experiment. And this was a huge deal in ethics and institutional review boards and how experiments work in psychology. Yeah, this changed the game in a way. I don't think people were necessarily thinking about the role of deception in studies and experiments before this. So at least not as much. And this really brought it to the fore.
00:33:29
Speaker
Milgram himself got a lot of trouble for this. Really for the deception part, right? So deception and then of course the stress that you're putting people under. It's a stressful situation. They feel bad and kind of stressed out when they're in there doing it. And then you put them in that context under false pretense.
00:33:55
Speaker
So, I mean, it's pretty clearly unethical. You can, if you see videos of it, it's an unethical study for sure. And then, I mean, and if you think about risk versus reward, the reward is possibly knowing something more about human nature. But the risk is actually psychologically damaging the subjects that you're using. And, you know, for a
00:34:20
Speaker
I think they paid them what four dollars or something for a four dollar experiment. I guess everybody has an intuitive reaction to this right that if you were if you found out that you were the type of person that would go all the way to 450 volts you're not going to feel great about yourself and this is something that could conceivably cause lasting psychological damage.
00:34:44
Speaker
Right. No, absolutely. I mean, you could you could seriously harm somebody, which is not good, obviously. Right. Right. And yeah, to your point, like, I mean, what are you getting out of it? I mean, it's it's a cool study. It's like an interesting result. But like, then what do you do with that? You know, I think people saw this after World War Two.
00:35:05
Speaker
There were some ethical guidelines that came about the Nuremberg Code, which basically lays out the kind of ethical treatment that you need to have for human subjects. Because this is right after the Nazis had performed all of these horrible medical experiments on people, and you never want the results from those to be used or advanced or even promoted.
00:35:35
Speaker
because the methodology is so horrible. It's just an overall ethical sense that you shouldn't be using for discussion research results that have been obtained in questionable circumstances, no matter what they show.
00:35:56
Speaker
I am not a social psychologist. So in my classes, you wouldn't be likely to have a discussion of what the Milgram experiments say about the nature of humanity. Mostly you'd have a discussion of what they say about ethics and how, you know, how has this changed experimental psychology since then and that they're the influences are profound.
00:36:20
Speaker
People have to go through much more thorough review processes to make sure that their experiments are ethical enough. Deception has to be justified. Right, that's an interesting point. It's not that you can never use deception in studies. Most social psychology experiments couldn't get by without deception. There needs to be some. You can't know what the premise of the experiment is. Right, if you know what the point of the experiment is,
00:36:48
Speaker
makes the experiment not work. But the nature of the deception needs to be justified in the context of why you need to do the deception and that you're mitigating any possible harmful consequences to the person's psyche from experiencing that.
00:37:15
Speaker
again, deception happens all the time now in research, but it's usually not the kind of deception that could, well, it isn't the kind of deception that could cause any kind of psychological harm. And that's the consideration. So I think before Milgram's experiment, the cutoff line was, does this cause any physical harm to the subject? You know, did you put them in some situation that actually physically hurt them? Because of course, this is after Nazis are torturing and killing people.
00:37:43
Speaker
And Milgram's experiments brought up the idea of psychological harm, that psychological harm is a real thing. And as a result of this, there's a huge scandal and a huge deal made of this.
00:37:58
Speaker
he didn't get tenure at Harvard because of some of these, probably because of some of these ethical considerations. So Stanley Milgram, he was at Harvard for a while and denied tenure and then he went to the City University of New York and that's where he finished out his career. That's how I think explosive some of the ethics concerns were that Harvard didn't want to get mixed up in this. Right. It was
00:38:25
Speaker
hugely controversial, and a lot of people were pretty upset with him for doing it the way he did it. And it's clear that it was not good. It was pretty clear and ethical. What's crazy about these experiments is that they are clearly not good, but yet
Authority and Cooperation in Societies
00:38:44
Speaker
still, you know, disregarding the ethics bit still cause conversations today. And people are still fascinated by the idea of these kinds of studies. Only afterwards, maybe they think about the ethics of how they were run. But the results of the studies are still interesting and still relevant. Yeah, I mean, hugely important work. No, no question about it. You know, in terms of helping people think about the nature of
00:39:14
Speaker
obedience to authority. And I think it's useful as a talking point in terms of just orienting people to thinking about how they themselves can be influenced by authority. And I mean, maybe if there was some good to come of it, it could be if it could be these results could be used to help people inoculate themselves against this. I mean, that would be
00:39:40
Speaker
a positive result. I think that's the whole, I think that's the idea. But it's not, I don't know if it's clear exactly how they do or if they do. Right. I mean, how exactly how would you do that? And how would that work? There were a lot of, I mean, this is, this is, I think, true of a lot of psychology research that points out flaws in human nature.
00:40:09
Speaker
some of these things that are useful for social cohesion, but also have negative side effects. There were other studies that were similar to Milgram's kind of experiments that Solomon Ash, for example, did a lot of studies on conformity.
00:40:28
Speaker
how people, you know, if you watch some of those old candid camera shows, you see this kind of thing where people very quickly feel uncomfortable if they're in a social situation and they're the outlier or they're not in, they're not doing the same thing as the group. The elevator experiment is the classic example here. So if you get in an elevator and, you know, say that, you know, that you get in the elevator with four other people and the four other people all turn
00:40:58
Speaker
the wrong way in the elevator to face the back of the elevator and you're facing the front of the elevator. You know, you pretty quickly feel weird. You feel weird. I mean, you could do this yourself today. I mean, if you get three, three friends walk into an elevator, you can make this happen today. People will absolutely a hundred percent turn around and face the direction that the group is facing.
00:41:25
Speaker
and most of the time. And then Solomon Ash's experiments were, his most famous ones were asking people in a group to judge which of several lines was longer. And he finds that against the evidence of their senses, they could, you know, people in a crowd would go along with the group with the wrong, with the completely wrong answer.
00:41:55
Speaker
you know, if that group is composed of Confederates that are helping out the experimenter, though, you know, it's clear that one line is longer than the other. If everyone else guesses a different line, they'll go along with it, even though it's clear that that's not the right answer. So people will go to extremes in order to not stand out and sort of go along. Right. And in that situation,
00:42:19
Speaker
you know, there's no cost to going along. So it's easy in a sense. Same thing with the elevator. I mean, there's no reason to not just go along in a sense. It doesn't cost you anything. And so there it's a little easier to understand in that way. It's surprising to see it, like when you see video of the actual experiments, it's people saying that,
00:42:45
Speaker
the shorter line is longer is kind of surprising to see. But at the same time, you can kind of understand. There's no reason not to do it. I mean, the other thing with the elevator one, this is something I was talking with Kelly, my wife, about this last night. And she was saying, well, the thing with the elevator one is that when you turn, you're actually looking, you're facing somebody.
00:43:14
Speaker
And that's like, maybe even the bigger social taboo. If you're in an elevator, stand one foot away from someone and look them in. Exactly. Exactly. It's just weird. Right. You just like, that's the bigger thing. You just don't look at people. Yeah. I don't look at people when you're close to them, you know, on public public most effectively achieved by all facing the same direction. Yeah, exactly. Interesting.
00:43:40
Speaker
But yeah, the broader point of just people going along with the group is definitely there.
00:43:46
Speaker
I think this is one of the hearts of the meaning of these Milgram experiments is what it feels like to go against an authority or a group that's telling you something completely different than your gut is telling you. And part of human nature is to accept some authority from other people because you can't know everything yourself. You can't do everything yourself.
00:44:15
Speaker
you have to accept some information from other people. Presumably, the experimenter has been doing this for a long time. They get the larger picture. You just jump into their world and how you're supposed to know whether they're doing the right thing or not. That's right. It's also the case that, in some sense, the positive side of it, that there is some benefit to division of labor and
Roots of Authority in Religion and Culture
00:44:45
Speaker
organization, systemized processes that in a hierarchical structure has proven to be effective in that context, right? Someone is in charge and they make a decision and then, you know, that decision flows through the organization. Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine a group where everyone's saying something completely different and there's no there's no direction to it? I mean, this is that's chaos. You've you've got complete chaos if
00:45:15
Speaker
if there's no cohesiveness of the group. And that requires some people not pushing their perspective. That's sort of the positive case. I think the negative part... Well, and more in the positive case too, I think for the most part, like any cognitive illusion or visual illusion, for the most part, it's a good idea to go along with the group and to cede to an authority who's thought about this more than you.
00:45:42
Speaker
We accept all kinds of things from authorities because we don't have the time to go and investigate everything ourselves. We don't have the time to fully think through everything it is we're doing. So we accept some guidance from the group or from an authority. It's a quick way to get something done. A lot of times you don't even think about it. There are some very basic elements of everyday life that rely on this. You get in your car and you drive on the right side of the road if you're in the US.
00:46:12
Speaker
the UK, you drive on the left side of the road. If you just said, wow. The way you wanted to go. The right side of the road is crap. I'm gonna drive on the left side of the road. Yeah. That will work extremely poorly. Really quickly. Really super quickly. That will result in a negative consequence. But everyone does go, as long as everyone goes along with it and says, you know what, I'm going to seed my, you know,
00:46:41
Speaker
individuality and autonomy here and just stay on the right side of the road, everything works a little bit better. I did want to make a point about on the negative side there of negative forces driving people to obey authority. I think how it might, again, have an implication for the milligram experiments.
00:47:11
Speaker
Where is the power derived from? Where is the power derived from? What's backing the power? Why does this person have authority?
00:47:22
Speaker
So why is it, what factors would cause you to be more likely to give your authority to someone who has, as you said before, the trappings of authority? What are these trappings? Well, I think it's trappings, but I think it's even more like what's behind that. So the trappings to me are the identifiers. These are the things that you can say, okay, this person is in charge because they have a uniform on. Or in the case of the milligram experiments, this person had a lab coat on. But to me,
00:47:50
Speaker
What's behind or backing authority oftentimes is the threat of violence, fundamentally. Loss of liberty or outright violence. Think of the case of the police, is the canonical example. Police have authority. The trappings are the uniform, the baton and the US gun.
00:48:15
Speaker
And implicit with that is that if you disobey that authority, you will lose your freedom or you'll be harmed physically. And that is sort of very clearly played out in the context of the police. But I think that notion that ultimately the person, the authority figure has this threat of violence, I think is something that is just fundamentally ingrained in our psyche.
00:48:47
Speaker
And so I think there in the case of what I was thinking about in the case of the milligram experiments, if you're sitting there and you're being told you must continue with the experiment, the experiment must continue. Why are you so stressed about this? You've just so much learning, so much both in terms of just like physically, you're evolutionarily, and then also just
00:49:15
Speaker
through your own experience over time, learned that and know that if you disobey authority, you're going to be harmed. I don't think that you can escape that. I don't think that that's something you can just turn off. I think that's where all these triggers, all these trappings basically are there to essentially trigger those reactions, trigger those sensations, associations.
00:49:42
Speaker
And I think that that's why the Milgram experience were so successful, because the participants had the feeling that they could be physically harmed. That's my hypothesis. I'm thinking about that. To your point with the obedience in the case of the Holocaust, et cetera, I mean, there the case was very clear. I mean, certainly the threat of physical harm was immediate and extreme.
00:50:10
Speaker
I guess this gets to those both sides of obedience, the cooperative aspect and then the
00:50:17
Speaker
coercive coercive is good cooperative versus coercive that in a cooperative sense of seeding to authority it wouldn't be a threat of violence that is necessarily motivating you so it's more the carrot than the stick and then the coercive version is more the stick so I mean you're talking about threat of punishment and then
00:50:41
Speaker
possibility of reward or you know having a good experiment experience and I think it may be that both are in play it depends I Think the coercive element comes into play when there's a conflict. The cooperative element is there when there's no conflict You know, so that's predominates when when the interests are aligned when you're on board with the project
00:51:04
Speaker
When you're moving in a positive direction that you're with a group and then the course of element comes in when there's a deviation where what you think should be done is not what there's some dissonance. There's some distance there. Yeah, exactly. And I think these factors work together, but I think it's so interesting that I mean.
00:51:26
Speaker
the authority framework is so ubiquitous in human society. When you go back into ancient history and you see the same framework of authoritative and authoritarian leadership as being a core principle of
Recent Replications of Milgram's Work
00:51:49
Speaker
organizing into groups, really into, if you think about even civilization, the nature of civilization itself, depends on this framework. Government, sure. Yeah, government in general.
00:52:04
Speaker
I guess one example of this is the pyramids, that something that wouldn't be built without cooperation, although heavily enforced cooperation coerced. It gives you the wonders of society, but also had a huge human toll. The pyramids bring up the other piece of this, which is when authority figures
00:52:31
Speaker
want to justify their position. You don't want to just use the threat of violence. You want to somehow justify that why you're in charge. And historically, this is always very, very frequent, not always, but very frequently that, you know, the ultimate authority derives from God or religion. And if you're in charge, it is some some measure of divine mandate. Yeah, exactly.
00:53:00
Speaker
I think I'm a fan of democracy in that sense. I would go so far as to say, if you're ceding authority, why not cede it to everyone? Yeah, but I mean, does it really work like that? I mean, right. I mean, we're not going to we're not going to talk about the T word. But the I mean, if you think about the the again, the religious component, I mean, so
00:53:29
Speaker
Every president of the United States has been a Christian male. I think there's only been like, was it just one Catholic ever? Kennedy? Kennedy? All the rest were Protestants. I mean, right? I mean, we have a diverse society and it was set up
00:53:59
Speaker
with the whole notion of being religiously diverse and having religious freedom. And yet authority always, always 100% of the time rests in the Christian patriarchy. So far we gotten away from the pyramids, you know, like really. But yeah. I think all of these things are,
00:54:25
Speaker
I think it's interesting that all of these things may be taking advantage of this fundamental, evolutionarily programmed human nature, that one of the things that Milgram's experiments do is frame this in terms of in terms of human nature, that, you know, we're sort of built that way. That's kind of how we would all act in that situation. All right. So we take should we take a little break and then get back to some more recent ideas about Milgram? Sure. Sounds good.
00:55:14
Speaker
All right, we're back.
Television and VR Replications
00:55:16
Speaker
We're gonna wrap up the show talking a little bit about some of the more recent work that has been done replicating some of the findings of Milgram and extending it in different directions. So we said earlier that you couldn't really replicate this experiment
00:55:33
Speaker
today and you know one of the interesting things that people have always said is okay well in the 1960s people were sheep and didn't think for themselves but today you know you'd never find this sort of thing again it was just a product of the time that these experiments were done and that was true for quite a while and then there were a couple replications that have been made the probably the most
00:56:03
Speaker
Famous One is an experiment that was conducted for a television show, I think in 2008, Berger. So the alterations that they made, so in order to justify this, they made a couple alterations. They said, first of all, what we're going to do is we're going to make the shocks only go up to 150 volts.
00:56:25
Speaker
And this is because of the justification that in Milgram's original studies, if people went past 150 volts, then they would go all the way to the end, pretty much most of the time. I don't know that that actually takes care of the ethical issues. They also emphasize very strongly that they could withdraw at any time. They gave them
00:56:47
Speaker
smaller shock. And they also had a clinical psychologist on duty. If they noted that there was any undue stress happening, they would stop the study immediately. But those things aside, what did the replication find? Well, it found that people still would continue on and people would still show obedience to this authority. Even under those watered down versions, you still get the basic kind of effect.
00:57:18
Speaker
Yeah, not everybody, but generally people tend to go along with it. And not a massive amount of subjects in in these recent replications, too. There's also there have been a couple other smaller replications and replications performed in different countries. And the basic results of these seem to indicate that it's fairly robust kind of finding.
00:57:41
Speaker
there were also a couple studies done in virtual reality. Should we talk a little bit about the pros and cons of conducting a study like this in virtual reality? Sure. In the case of the Milgram type experiment, you can have a virtual reality situation where the person who's receiving the shocks is an avatar. Pretty clearly not a human being.
00:58:09
Speaker
It removes some of the ethical considerations for sure. You know, from this perspective that the person in the VR headset obviously knows that they're not really shocking a person because it's VR. But at the same time, it makes it hard to understand how transferable it is to the real world situation is hard to know because I mean, the whole point is
00:58:37
Speaker
If you're not really shocking the person, well, what does it matter? If you're willing to shock like an avatar, okay, fine. What is that? I mean, like the strongest version of the experiment would be take somebody from the United States, put them in 1939 Germany and see how they react to coercion from Nazis. See if a perfectly normal person
00:59:03
Speaker
turns into an evil person when they're in that situation. So this is clearly a watered, watered, watered down version of that, because they know, they're aware that at most they're zapping a virtual person. Yet, at the same time, they still do get some effects. Okay, so there was a very recent study, so 2018,
00:59:30
Speaker
by Gonzales Franco and his colleagues that had a Milgram-type experiment set up. They had a shock machine, all this stuff, and the person they were shocking was virtual. What they found, and I think this is relevant to the original studies too, is that people showed empathy toward the learner by trying to emphasize the correct
00:59:59
Speaker
Word that the learner should have answered. So in other words, if they're learning word pairs, you might say dog bicycle. Then later on in the experiment, they'd say dog. What's the connected word? The answer is bicycle. They'd give them four options, so they'd say like bicycle toy friend. Almond. I don't know where I just got those words. And what it turned out is that the
01:00:28
Speaker
people in this experiment tended to emphasize the correct word. I mean, this indicates some kind of subversion of authority that in their way, they're trying to help out the learner so that they don't get higher shocks. So in a sense, this is a little bit optimistic. They're doing what they can. They put this in the context of, first of all, participants are trying to do what they can in their situation, but then they tend to get exasperated.
01:00:56
Speaker
If the victim doesn't actually take that help. In other words, if they emphasize the word, the learner is not paying attention and is not selecting that word. Then they get frustrated and then maybe even blame the victim a little bit. Like I did what I could. This is on you now. I mean, that, that was one of the things that was interesting about the original experiment was that the learner
01:01:24
Speaker
got a lot of these wrong, like a very high proportion wrong. So it was sort of kind of a frustrating thing for the person trying to help out because, yeah, like, why can't it be easy memory task? Please get these right. And yeah, you can see that in videos of they're clearly frustrated. Yeah. And it's wishing that it wouldn't have to happen this way. Yeah. So the virtual reality, you're a super skeptical for this. Yes. Like, really? I mean, what are you really?
01:01:54
Speaker
I think maybe if you can simulate a situation and you can get a sense of what people feel in that situation, maybe you're getting something, but you're not, I mean, you're just not, not really, the simulation is not that robust because fundamentally you don't, you know, that you're not hurting somebody. It's just like playing a video game. It's like you're, you're saying like, well, when I play, you know, call of duty, am I,
01:02:23
Speaker
Seating my, you know, by autonomy to authority because I'm like following the orders of the sergeants. Right. I mean, that's, that's a kind of a stretch. Well, you know, to some extent, video games can cause those kinds of sensations. I mean, you can feel bad about, you know, a video game can set you up to feel bad about shooting an extra person that you didn't have to, or there's someone who seems totally helpless and you shouldn't be shooting them.
01:02:48
Speaker
And people, you know, that may cause a twinge of guilt. I think there's going to be a lot of individual differences, though. Some people can clearly treat it as complete fiction and are just playing around with it. And other people, there may be some intrusion of the way that they would act in real life to how they act in VR. So if there's no
01:03:14
Speaker
no real harm. They're not convinced that anyone's really being harmed. I think it does make it a lot more difficult. It makes it a little harder to map it to real life. So I think we're going to have to be
01:03:29
Speaker
I mean, we're going to have to be happy with Milgram's experiments and say, that's probably the last experiment we're going to get that was that comprehensive and could tell us something about how obedience works without getting into some other kind of ethical problems. I think what this says about the robot apocalypse is probably a ton. A ton, right?
01:03:58
Speaker
Uh, this is like a, this is like a roadmap for the robot apocalypse. It's the problem because robots, the first article robots are going to read is the Milgram experiments. Well, they're going to listen to this podcast. Oh no. Ah, see, we, we started it. We're going to, we're going to go into the future and we're going to, we're going to see that computers are going to first notice the vulnerability of human beings to this kind of thing and just take advantage of us.
01:04:28
Speaker
Maybe that's the VR element. Because somehow robots are going to leverage those trappings of authority to make us feel like we should be obeying them and following them. They're going to use all these techniques and convince us.
Implications for Society and Resistance to Authority
01:04:44
Speaker
We'll be happy doing it. We'll be happy as we're going along until things get crazy. And then it's too late. And they start putting us in pods.
01:04:56
Speaker
as they will eventually as they ultimately will of course hello then then yeah then we won't we won't feel so good about it then it'll be too late so what can we do to what can we do to stave this off how do we inoculate ourselves from blindly following authority i don't know i do not know maybe knowing about this helps
01:05:25
Speaker
I just know I'm least understanding ourselves and understanding our predisposition to, to obey authority. Maybe we can try to check ourselves in the context of that. Or why are we doing this? Just because we're told to do it? Is that? Is that okay? Should we be questioning, questioning what we're doing?
01:05:49
Speaker
that it's perfectly within your rights to question something that seems a little fishy. Even if you can't see the whole picture, you can notice that something's off and feel confident in yourself that you can have a legitimate viewpoint. It's tough, I mean, that's a hard, it's hard to buck the system, of course.
01:06:17
Speaker
And it's also the case that the consequences of doing so are real very often. You can find yourself in trouble. I mean, that's what being in trouble means. You're in conflict with authority in some capacity. Now, whether you are in the right or in the wrong, I guess that's the point, right?
01:06:42
Speaker
you can be right and be in conflict with authority. And that happens all the time. And it just is not something that we really think about, you know, in the average person's day to day, usually you're told and expected to do what you're told and expected to do, right? You teach your children to obey you and, you know, their teachers and,
01:07:11
Speaker
other authority figures and you just grow up and then at some point you're an adult and you're doing the same thing. That's right, but maybe consider it on the other extreme too. So what happens if you are extremely skeptical of authority, as I think a lot of people in the United States are, what happens if you're totally dismissive of any kind of authority? You might get into flat earth theory or
01:07:39
Speaker
Some other kind of crazy way of thinking that you're unwilling to accept any authority or that any authority is as good as any other that so-called experts don't know what they're talking about.
01:07:54
Speaker
There's a danger in that way of thinking too. Our society is complicated enough that it is impossible not to cede some authority to other people. We cannot accomplish everything on our own. You can't do anything on your own. You can't do anything on your own, even if you wanted to. We're social beings, we rely on each other, we need each other. That's the long and the short of it. There's no way around that.
01:08:23
Speaker
How do you do that and live an individual life with your own sense of morality? I think is the question. I don't think we're gonna answer it here, but today. But I will say that, I mean, one thing, one place where I think that directly addresses this is at the, when you're voting. So in a democracy, this is exactly the point at which you have the chance to defy authority. If you don't like the leadership,
01:08:53
Speaker
You can vote, nobody's gonna check your vote or penalize you for how you vote. And that's how we elect our leaders. So, we have some faith in this system. Maybe it's not always perfect, but. No, I definitely encourage voting. I like that thought. But I think there's other ways to, you know, other places, you know, to see something, say something, you know, it's like, if you see something that seems wrong,
01:09:22
Speaker
Say something about it be that person who says something about it There's a chance to be a hero in that, you know back to our our hero episode But stephanie, yeah The most important moment in your life might be when you are disobeying or going against the grain That's a really I think that's a really good point. I like that idea that um
01:09:45
Speaker
And that's one of the ways that we see heroes is people who manage to see things correctly and act on their actual beliefs instead of doing what they're told. I mean, Kennedy's profiles in courage is about remarkable people who showed courage by defying authority. So in a lot of ways, I think we tend to celebrate that in America.
01:10:15
Speaker
That might be a good place to wrap it up. I think that's a nice thought to complete the picture here. But yeah, I think that was a great topic, something that's very relevant for today and I think will continue to be relevant into the future of obedience to authority and how to maybe inoculate yourself against blind obedience to authority without blindly rejecting
01:10:47
Speaker
ideas that are good for people who know more about the things than you do. All right, thanks for listening.