Obedience to Authority

Definition

Obedience is distinguished from conformity by the presence of an explicit instruction from someone with recognised standing, rather than an implicit group norm.

Milgram's paradigm had participants deliver what they believed were escalating electric shocks to a learner, on instruction from an experimenter. In the best-known variant, 65 percent continued to the maximum level.

History

Milgram ran the studies at Yale from 1961, explicitly motivated by the Eichmann trial and by the question of how ordinary people participate in atrocity.

The work became among the most cited in psychology and among the most criticised on ethical grounds. It is a substantial part of why institutional review boards exist in their current form.

Theory

Milgram's own explanation was the agentic state: the person shifts from seeing themselves as an autonomous actor to seeing themselves as an instrument of another's will. This account has little independent support and is not the mainstream explanation now.

The engaged followership account (Haslam and Reicher) fits the archival evidence better. Participants did not obey blindly; they were persuaded, and the prod that worked least well was the most directly commanding one — you have no other choice — while the prod appealing to the scientific value of the work worked best. On this reading obedience is identification with a cause, not surrender of agency.

Research

Burger's 2009 partial replication, stopping at 150 volts for ethical reasons, found rates comparable to Milgram's at that point, suggesting the basic phenomenon is real.

But Gina Perry's archival work found serious problems with how the studies were reported: the experimenter improvised prods well beyond the protocol, some participants were pressured far more than described, many did not believe the shocks were real, and the variations were reported selectively. Obedience rates varied enormously across the 24 conditions, from near zero to over 90 percent, and the 65 percent figure represents one condition presented as though it were the result.

Situational factors that mattered most: physical proximity of the learner, proximity and perceived legitimacy of the authority, and the presence of disobedient peers, which reduced full obedience to around 10 percent.

Applications

Institutional safety and whistleblowing design, military and medical hierarchies, aviation crew resource management, and understanding administrative complicity in mass harm.

The operational lesson is the same as for conformity: structures matter more than character. Explicit permission to stop, and a peer who has stopped, change behaviour more than moral instruction does.

Criticism

• The reporting was not accurate. Archival work has documented protocol deviations and selective presentation.
• Participant belief varied, and those who doubted the shocks were more likely to continue, which is a serious confound.
• The ethics would not pass now, and participants were subjected to considerable distress.
• The agentic state has no real evidential support.
• The single headline number misrepresents the study, which was a series of variations whose whole point was that the rate moved.

References

• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.
• Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1-11.
• Perry, G. (2012). Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. Scribe.
• Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2012). Contesting the nature of conformity. PLoS Biology, 10(11), e1001426.