Obedience Makes People Commit Atrocious Acts

Ordinary people will perform acts that go against their morals and conscious just because an authority figure tells them to do so.

Three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, in July 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram began experiments to see how normal people, living ordinary lives, can commit atrocious acts simply because they are following orders from people they perceived as authority figures. The purpose of his experiment was to answer the question: how could seemingly ordinary, decent Germans who ran Nazi death camps turn into vicious, cruel and immoral people committing atrocious acts. Could it be that they were just following orders? Could they be called accomplices?

Milgram, who was 28 at the time, set up the experiment to see how much pain ordinary citizens would inflict on innocent people, going against their morals and conscious, just because the ‘authority figure’ instructs them to do so.

The experiment 

Milgram’s volunteers, or “teachers”, as he named them, had the task of teaching “learners” a list of word pairs. The scientist instructed the teacher to administer to the learner painful electric shocks, starting at 15 volts, by pressing a lever on a machine every time the learner made a mistake on a word-matching question. After every subsequent wrong answer, the teacher had to increase the voltage by another 15 volts, going up to the maximum voltage of 450.

However the ‘learners’ were in fact actors and were not being given electric shocks at all. A tape recorder, located in a separate room where the ‘learner’ was, played pre-recorded sounds of groans and screams for each shock level. As the ‘voltage’ increased, the sounds of screams of pain, moans and banging on the wall grew louder until there was no sound from the ‘learner’ at all, giving the ‘teacher’ the impression that the learner had passed out from the pain or even worse.

Some of the volunteers wanted to stop the experiment after having administered 135 volts, some questioned the purpose of the experiment and most of them wanted to check on the condition of the ‘learner’. But the ‘authority figure’, the scientist, would give them instructions to continue with the experiment over and over again.

What was stunning was that none of the participants refused to administer shocks lower than the 300-volt level and as many as 65 percent of the participants actually went all the way, giving the maximum 450-volt shocks three times in a row, which was when the experiment was halted.

Only a few people can resist authority

In his 1974 article “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram wrote:

- The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

 One of the participants of Milgram’s experiment later said: “While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realise when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority”.

Today the Milgram experiment is considered vastly unethical by psychologists because of the emotional trauma many of the volunteers in the experiment suffered afterwards.