Lecture 2 - Obedience

• The assumption was that if we manage to explain what happened during the war, we would be able to prevent it from happening again.
• Theories proposed to explain obedience were focussed on individual differences (e.g., authoritarian personality, frustration-aggression); whereas other theories were focused on the situation of the person.
• Milgram suggested that the conformity observed by Asch was partially explained because the task had little ‘real’ relevance.
• Participants in Milgram’s experiments were not focusing on important problems, with negative consequences for anyone.
• When people are faced with ‘real’ decisions, a ‘good’ person will oppose conformity.
• Milgram designed some experiments that he felt were more realistic.
• Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies focused on the question of how people obey even when they know the orders are ‘wrong’.
• The defence of the captured Nazi leaders was that they were following orders.
• Stanley Milgram stated that obedience, as determinant of behaviour, is of particular relevance to our time.
• From 1933-1945 million of innocent persons were systematically slaughtered on command.
• These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.
• In Milgram’s infamous study, participants were subjected to a 'learning' experiment at Yale university, using a shock generator with switches ranging from 15-450 volts.
• Psychiatrists predicted that participants would disobey by about 135 volts.
• None expected them to go over 300 volts.
• In Milgram’s study, participants were subjected to a series of prods delivered in order when they refused to continue, such as "Please continue" or "Please go on".
• The dependent measure in Milgram’s study was the maximum shock administered before the participant refused to continue.
• Criticisms of Milgram’s study include the deception involved, using only male participants, improvised instructions, and not fully debriefing all participants.
• Variations of Milgram’s experiment include an experiment in an office building where obedience was mostly maintained, an experiment with an ordinary person giving the orders, and two experimenters, contradictory commands.
• To test obedience beyond Milgram, an experiment was conducted with nurses as participants, where 21 of 22 nurses administered a lethal dosage of medication to a patient.
• Law students were told to recommend to a client to lie under oath, with 23 of 24 law students recommending the client to lie.
• Stanley Milgram’s explanation for obedience is that humans obey because of the survival value of hierarchies, coping better with threats as a group, giving stability and harmony to relations within groups, and obedience is usually rewarded from experiences in their family and institutional settings.
• Most ideologies justify obedience, such as scientific progress.
• People move from a self-directed, autonomous state to an agentic state when they obey.
• Dispositional explanations are only appropriate when the situation fails to make sense of behaviour.
• Agentic state: people turns into an agent who acts on behalf of someone else
• Tuning: We are more receptive to the authority figure
• Reasons for agentic state: Loss of personal responsibility and inhibition of self-evaluation
• Philip Zimbardo’s ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’
• Two groups of students were assigned to be either prisoners or guards, in a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford University
• Among other aims, the experiment (Stanford experiment) was trying to investigate differences between situational and dispositional attributions
• The guards quickly became abusive towards the prisoners, who also rebel against the guards
• Deindividuation allows for dehumanization of outgroup members, such as seeing prisoners as less than human and treating them in a degrading way.
• Zimbardo stated that "most of us can undergo significant character transformations when we are caught up in the crucible of social forces".
• In Zimbardo's study, participants went beyond the surface demands of role-playing, with most sadistic behaviours occurring when guards thought they weren't being observed and were in an 'off' phase of the experiment.
• Zimbardo pointed to various situational/psychological processes to explain how negative situational forces can overwhelm positive dispositional tendencies.
• When in 'off' phases, only 10% of prisoner conversations were autobiographical, indicating a lack of opportunity to transcend the experimental environment and present their personal identity.
• Internalisation of social roles is a process where individuals adopt the attitudes, values, and behaviours of the social roles they occupy.
• One prisoner became ill after only 36 hours
• Zimbardo's conclusions include that situations can have a profound effect on individual behaviour and mental functioning to a point where people behave in ways they would not have thought possible.
• Deindividuation and dehumanisation are processes that occur when anonymity and reduction of individual identity serve to deindividuate participants.