Obedience

When someone obeys someone else, they are usually submitting to the orders of someone who has more authority than they do. This is something that people will do every day without actually realising it. For example, every time someone stops their car at a red traffic light or a child does what their parents says, this is classed as obedience – in these instances the laws of the land and the parents are the authority figures.

For the most part, obedience is useful as it helps to keep society in an appropriate order. However, when someone obeys someone else ‘blindly’, meaning that they do so without questioning why, this can cause problems and can give people who may not deserve it the ability to abuse their authority.

After the Second World War, where it was found that military officers had committed horrific acts on people (such as in the Holocaust) just because they were told to by a superior officer, researcher Stanley Milgram wanted to find out how far ordinary people would go in blindly obeying just because they were being told to do something by someone who appeared to be in authority. The research enables us to see the conditions under which people are more or less likely to obey.

Milgram’s experiments

In 1963, Milgram recruited participants for an experiment, which they believed was about memory and learning. They were invited to Yale University, where they were introduced to someone acting as a stooge (someone who knows about the experiment and is not a real participant), who was referred to as ‘Mr Wallace’.

Participants observed Mr Wallace being strapped into a chair and electrodes placed on his arm so that participants could give him an ‘electric shock’ if he failed to learn and remember word pairs that were read to him. The electric shocks were not real but the participants did not know this.

When the word pairs were being read out by each participant, they could not see Mr Wallace as he was allegedly in another room but they could hear through a speaker his protests at being ‘shocked’. This was actually a pre-recorded set of protests that was played to every participant in the same way.

As the experiment continued and the level of electric shock increased, the protests became louder and louder, and if participants tried to stop, they were encouraged to continue by ‘Mr Williams’ who was an experimenter, wearing a lab coat and standing very close to participants, giving them scripted instructions to continue if they tried to stop.

It was found that 65% of participants were willing to administer a shock of 450v, which, had they been real, would have been fatal to Mr Wallace. All participants were willing to administer shocks up to 300v.

It was concluded by Milgram (and others who have since replicated his research in similar, but more ethical, ways) that two sets of factors affect obedience to an authority figure:

• Situational
• Personality

Situational factors affecting obedience

• Proximity of the authority figure: when Mr Williams was asking participants to continue, he was standing in the same room, close to the participants and this seemed to encourage them to give higher levels of shock. When he left the room, this level fell
• Proximity of the ‘victim’: it is argued that since participants were not in the same room as Mr Wallace and could not see him, shock levels were high. When this was amended in later research to participants being in the same room, the shock levels fell dramatically to around just 40%
• The clothing of the authority figure: Mr Wallace was wearing a lab coat, which appeared to give him some form of legitimate authority. In other experiments when a normal member of the public attempted to give instructions to continue, obedience fell to 20%
• Prestige of the location: this experiment took place at Yale University, which is a well-known and highly respected American university and therefore it had both prestige and legitimacy. When experiments were moved to a rundown office block, obedience was much lower (less than 50%)
• Responsibility: in one of the video clips from the experiment, a participant can clearly be heard asking who is responsible if the person is hurt. Mr Williams replied that he (Mr Williams) is responsible. The participant then continues to administer shocks, apparently because the responsibility for the consequences of the experiment has been taken from him
• Support: it was found that if participants worked in pairs (one of whom was a stooge who was told to refuse to continue) then this increased the likelihood that the other person would refuse as well; social support therefore appears to prevent blind obedience

Personality affecting obedience

It is thought that levels of obedience might be due, in part at least, to someone’s personality. As we have seen in the previous section, someone with an external locus of control is more likely to obey because they are less likely to take responsibility for their own actions and more likely to place blame on others. On the other hand, someone with an internal locus of control is less likely to obey because they think more independently and take responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions.

An authoritarian personality means that someone tends to be more respectful to authority and therefore more likely to blindly obey. In 1950 Theodor Adorno presented the theory of the authoritarian personality in an attempt to explain the levels of anti-Semitic behaviour by the Nazis in World War II. He argued that this type of behaviour came about because of certain attitudes by people who had specific characteristics:

• Respect for authority figures
• Beliefs and attitudes that are rigid
• Strong belief in justice
• Aggression towards those people perceived as inferior
• Right-wing political views

Adorno developed a questionnaire called the F-Scale in order to test if someone had an authoritarian personality and this was used by Milgram to see which participants were more likely to obey. He found that the higher the obedience, the more likely someone was to have an authoritarian personality, making him conclude that personality may affect obedience.

Other factors affecting obedience

In addition to situational and personality factors, other factors which may have influenced obedience in Milgram’s experiment include:

• Participants were told that although the ‘shocks’ would be painful to Mr Wallace, they would not harm him, so they believed that they would not cause any long-term damage
• Many participants may have continued as they felt obliged to do so having agreed to take part in the experiment in the first place – this is known as a momentum of compliance
• The ethics of the study were extremely questionable and participants were not told of their right to withdraw, which, had they been told, may have reduced levels of obedience

The effect of collective behaviour

When we think of crowds, we may think of those which are peaceful such as at a concert or a parade. In these instances, people who are brought together in a group show pro-social behaviour. You may, however, think of crowds as being violent or intimidating, such as those which occur when protests turn into mob attacks, and then the crowd is said to show antisocial behaviour.

Deindividuation leading to conformity

Deindividuation is what occurs when someone loses their personal identity and takes on that of the group which they are in. When this happens, individuals are far more likely to conform to the behaviour of the rest of the group because their sense of being an individual who is responsible for their own actions has been lost. It is thought that this is why people end up being involved in riots, for example, when this is something that is completely out of character compared to how they would behave normally.

Some research maintains that crowds encourage people to develop new identities rather than losing their own. For example, if someone was caught up in a crowd who were protesting against inequality, people become so involved that their views match those of the group, showing conformity to group norms rather than loss of individual identity.

Obedience

As well as on an individual level, someone with authority can assert this over a crowd, meaning that they can influence people either positively or negatively. When someone is in close proximity to others, they are more likely to be able to exert authority (as we saw with Milgram’s experiment) and this is common when crowds are gathered.  The person with authority therefore has the power to ensure that a crowd behaves in a way that is peaceful or is aggressive and inflammatory.

Preventing blind obedience to authority figures

Blind obedience to authority figures can have negative consequences, as we saw with the research of Milgram. In order to try and prevent this from happening in society, it is important that we try and understand why it comes about, and several factors are thought to be influential:

• Social support: when a person has the support of someone else who is able to resist blind obedience, they are much more able to resist this themselves. In situations which are uncertain, people often look to others and if other people are behaving in a way that resists blind obedience then others are likely to follow

• Familiarity of the situation: when someone is familiar with what to expect in a situation, they are much less likely to obey blindly than when in a situation that is unfamiliar to them or is ambiguous. In Hofling’s study, the nurses were not familiar with the drug they were being instructed to administer, which may account for high levels of obedience in this instance
• Proximity: if someone is further away from a situation, they are much less likely to obey than if they are very close to it. For example, if an instruction is given in person, obedience is much more likely than if an instruction is given from a different building, over the phone or by email