Obedience To Authority And The Milgram Experiment
While I have been aware of the Milgram Experiment for a long time (so long, I’m not sure when or where I first read about it), I hadn’t heard of the book written by Dr Stanley Milgram about these experiments until I recently read The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose.
If you’ve not heard about the Milgram Experiment, which was first conducted in the 1960s, then in simple terms, what he did was persuade regular people to give increasingly strong electric shocks to a “victim”.
In actual fact, no shocks were ever actually administered – the “victim” was somebody just playing the part, screaming out in pain and for the experiment to shock based on a pre-written script.
The real goal of the experiment was to observe how people respond to authority – that authority, in this experiment, being a staff member posing as the experimenter (and who was therefore, in the eyes of the volunteers, in a position of authority).
It’s worth noting that the subjects could refuse to shock the victim at any point (shocks started at 15 volts and went up, in 15-volt increments, all the way up to 450 volts). If they did say they no longer wished to continue, the experimenter encouraged them to follow the testing protocol and continue up to the maximum voltage – but there was absolutely no tangible penalty for stopping.
The shocking conclusion, which has been contested in spite of this experiment, or forms of it, having been repeated over and over again, is that many people will do things they know to be morally wrong if the orders come from somebody who they perceive as having the necessary authority to issue those orders.
Interestingly, when these volunteers were asked what was the highest voltage they would agree to receive, it was much, much lower than the ones they actually thought they were administering to the victim.
The basic study information, as summarized above, is, as I said, relatively well-known – but this book goes into a lot more detail, about:
- The many variations of the experiment they ran to try to understand the underlying compulsion to obey authority figures.
- Results and statistics derived from all these experiments.
- Extracts from some of the post-experiment interviews that were conducted with the volunteers, which are illuminating.
- Some of the criticisms raised about the experiments, and the author’s responses to those.
And that is what I love about this book – the inclusion of all the information that you don’t usually hear about.
And the fact that the book was written by the man who devised and oversaw these experiments makes it even better, because you almost get to look inside his head and discover his thought processes as the series of experiments progressed.
For example, he doesn’t only describe different variations, but the reasons for those different experiments.
Conclusion
I’m writing this short review during the coronavirus scare, and you only have to look around at what’s happening to see how willing so many people are to obey authority, with no good evidence that those commands are backed by facts.
But this article isn’t about whether you should or should not wear face masks (and what type), or social distance – it’s about the much larger issue of people blindly obeying, to the point of apparently violating their own personal moral codes, those in positions of authority. (Again, this is a subject Larken Rose covers in great detail in his book.)
Personally, I would like to think that, if I had been a volunteer in one of those experiments, I would have either refused to administer any shocks, or, at least, any that were stronger than ones I would be willing to receive.
And I’m sure you would too.
But here’s the thing – many (or most?) of the actual volunteers thought much the same, until they were caught up in the process and found themselves harming other people (or so they thought).
If there’s anything to take away from the results of these experiments, then to me, it’s this: you should always ask questions, because remember that just because something is legal does not make it morally right, and vice versa, of course.
The fact that somebody in a position of authority (e.g. a state governor) issues a mandate that gatherings of more than a specific number of people is now illegal does not make it right (because there have been many different limits specified by different people, none of which is really backed by the results of true science) – and it doesn’t even mean it’s actually legal (because a governor issuing a “mandate” does not equate to it having gone through the necessary due process to become an enforceable law).
Questioning things, especially those coming from people whom you perceive as being in positions of authority, can be difficult – you will probably find yourself being isolated, even ostracized (or worse), by those who blindly follow these orders without thinking.
And if you dig deeper at who controls the main media outlets, you’ll discover it’s a handful of corporations (or, more accurately, the people who own and/or run them) – so is it any wonder that people are so easily manipulated when they hear the exact same message (often word for word) from so many “different” news outlets?
But this is a serious issue, because what’s at stake here is yourself – are you going to stick to what you believe, and demand evidence before taking potentially life-changing actions (e.g. having to shut down your business), or are you going to simply follow orders, which was the excuse given by so many of the people during the post-World War II war crimes trials?
And as for Dr Milgram’s book, I highly recommend it – because while you may or may not agree with my opinions on this book and what is going on, it’s difficult to ignore what the author documents in this short but powerful book.
Additional Resources
These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:
