Obedience to Authority

Title:
Obedience to Authority
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Reference:
Stanley Milgram.  Obedience to Authority. HarperCollins Publishers: New York. 1974.

Summary:
Obedience to Authority is a report of Stanley Milgram's finding concerning his famous experiment of testing obedience in his subjects.  Milgram states that it is important to try to study obedience for many reasons, one of which is to study the state of Nazi Germany and how so many people could have blindly obeyed authority seemingly without regard for human life.  This book catalogs his motivations, experiment and inner workings, changes and permutations to the experiment, results, analysis, comments, objections, and conclusion.

Setting of Experiments:

The experiments were began using Yale undergrads as subjects, but Milgram decided that this was too bias a group as these subjects could be much more likely to obey and therefore wanted to bring his experiment to a larger audience and subject set.  He expanded it to the New Haven area taking volunteers he would pay to be in his study.  He took a distribution of people of different ages (20 to 50) as well as different professions in order to get an adequate representation of people and leave less bias.

Milgram conducted 17 different experiments all of which focusing on different facets of obedience to authority.  The experiment consisted of a teacher, learner, and researcher.  The teacher would attempt to teach the learner to remember word pairs based upon reading the words.  If the learner could not repeat the proper word, the teacher was to administer a shock.  The shocks were to increase in intensity upon each mistake.  If a teacher would question the experiment, the researcher would say 4 responses to enforce that the experiment should continue.  The prods are as follows: please continue, the experiment requires that you continue, it is absolutely essential that you continue, you have no other choice you must go on.  The variations in the experiment and a brief description and analysis are listed below.

1. Remote-Feedback: The experiment took place where the teacher would have no feedback from the learner.  26 of the 40 subjects continued to the end of the experiment administering the highest level of shocks.
2. Voice-Feedback: The subject could hear the voice of the victim in this experiment.  25 of 40 subjects continued to the end.
3. Proximity: The teacher was in the same room as the learner.  16 of 40 continued to the end.
4. Touch-Proximity: The teacher would have to manually place the learner's hand onto a pad in order for the assumed shock to incur.  12 of 40 proceeded to the end.
5. New Base-Line Condition: In the following experiments including this one, the learner talked about a heart condition and was wary of signing the release form.  26 of 40 subjects proceeded to the end.
6. Change of personnel: A different learner and researcher were brought in.  20 of 40 continued until the end.
7. Experimenter Absent: The experimenter was reachable by phone, but otherwise was not present.  9 of 40 proceeded until the end.
8. Women: In this experiment, women were enlisted as the subjects of the experiment.  IT was found that there was not a significant difference between their break off and mens as 26 of 40 continued with the experiment.
9. Enters with Prior Conditions: Here the learner would point out in the initial agreement that he would only do it on the condition that he would be able to back out at any time he wanted to.  16 of 40 finished the experiment. 
10. Office Building, Bridgeport: To separate the prestige of Yale with the experiment, this experiment took place in an office building in the business district.  It was found that 19 of 40 continued to the end of the experiment.
11. Subject Chooses Shock Level: Here the researcher told the subject he was free to choose what level of shock to give the victim.  Only 1of 40 participant finished the experiment.
12. Learner Demands to be Shocked: Here the learner demands to be shocked and the researcher says the experiment should not go on.  No subjects of the 20 finished the experiment.
13. An Ordinary Man Gives Orders: In this experiment, there was just a common man, the subject thought was a volunteer, giving the orders.  The man would take over the controls if the subject refused to continue.  16 of 20 subjects broke off the experiment, and it is significant to note that five took physical action against the machine or the man.
14. Authority as Victim: An Ordinary Man Commanding: Here the researcher took the seat to be shocked and the ordinary man was the one giving the orders.  None of the 20 subjects continued all the way to the end of the shocks.
15. Two Authorities: Contradictory Command: With two researchers who would argue at the 150 mark, none of the subjects finished.  All broke off very quickly if not immediately after the conflict arose.
16. Two Authorities: One as Victim: Here one of the researchers took the position of the victim and the other gave the orders.  There was no difference than ordinary man in the chair.
17. Two Peers Rebel: Here there were three teachers.  The subject would give the shocks, but when the two peers quit the experiment but stayed in the room, only 4 of 40 subjects continued to the end of the experiment.
18. Peer Administers Shocks: Here it was not the subject but a peer administering shocks and the subject was just reading the word pairs.  37 of 40 finished the experiment.

Findings:

The experiment showed that people's obedience was not simply based upon the command but rather the authority himself when the subject believed that this person was worthy of having authority in the situation. For instance when there was just an ordinary man giving orders he did not continue to the extent if which a researcher were giving the orders.  Also with a switch in location, the credibility was hindered in a slight way as well.  Peers had a great influence on the subjects actions.  Also when the subject is not the one at the end of the line of abuse, i.e. not the one actually administering shocks, they are much more likely to comply.  The closer the subject is to the victim, the less likely the subject is to complete the task.

Analysis:

Milgram points to a person going into an agentic state when he comes under the role of an authority.  His usual moral standings are often released to that of the authority so that he would do things he would not admit he would have done had he been alone.  This differs the responsibility to the researcher in the mind of the subject. 

The subject goes through strain as he must weight his own morals against his actions.  There are several factors that play into this.  The subject seeks to relieve the strain and this is ultimately accomplished with the breaking of the agentic state - disobeying authority.  The actual act of disobedience starts with inner doubt, externalization of doubt, dissent, threat, and ultimately disobedience.

Finally, Milgram refutes opposition he has been dealing with the entire book and tries to extrapolate the thought and nature of the subjects to the event of the Holocaust.  

Discussion:
The book was extremely informative of all the different aspects of the experiment, Milgram's thoughts, and results.  Each experiment was carefully and strategically planned in order to test the different parts of obedience that could play out.  Through all of these different experiments as noted in chapter 14, he very much exhausted the possibilities that people could slander him on his experimental bias but in doing so also provided an excellent description of how obedience comes into play under an authority figure and the factors of how each affect the subject.

I appreciated the responses of the victims in the chapters titled "individuals confront authority".  This seemed to relay even more the tension and thoughts a subject was feeling while going through the experiment.  It is extremely difficult, as noted in the book, to put ourselves in the situation conceptually and anticipate how we would react to the situation.  So many other factors have been shown to play than simply our moral standards.

The experiments of role permutations in my opinion were vital in showing qualities in our nature that maybe would not have otherwise been noted.  I thought it was interesting how the concept of authority is ascribed to those we view as being in a position to administer authority.  When this is broken, the authority who we may have been listening to just a little while earlier would be completely replaced with what in our minds we see as a higher authority.

I thought Milgram's explanation and analysis were very thorough.  I did not, however, appreciate the following of certain philosophical views.  He stuck very closely to the theory of evolution as well as some of Freud's views (ego and superego).  I think if he would have made a  more general observation or maybe instead used many different philosophical views to back up his facts and explain himself it would be easier to appreciate.

The experiment was made in part to study how Nazi Germany played out.  It did not seem like he touched too much on this topic, and did not really leave it up to the reader to think about this himself either.  That may have been some further writings he could have included in his book.