Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, conducted an experiment to see whether people would obey an “authority figure” instead of following their own conscience.
The experiments were started in 1961, a year after the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. (a really bad guy who convinced seemingly normal people to kill others, even though they knew it was wrong…)
Milgram wanted to know if Nazi soldiers could use the “just following orders” excuse for the atrocities they committed.
The results were startling...
In Milgram’s experiment, a researcher in a grey lab coat, (the authority) told participants that they would either be teachers or students in a science experiment on learning and memory.
They drew straws to see who would be the teachers, but the straws were fixed so that the participants only became teachers.
The students were actors but the participant teachers weren’t aware of this.
The researcher asked the teacher participants to administer electric shocks to the learner participants if they answered questions incorrectly.
Astonishingly, the teacher participants did this willingly even though it caused them stress.
The teacher participants continued to administer electrical torture even though they knew that the—shocks would kill the learner participants.
The results of Milgram’s experiments were truly frightening.
Over 2/3 of the teacher participants continued to give shocks all the way to the point where the learner participants would have been killed.
The experiment was repeated many times across varying demographics with the same morbid results.
Milgram explained the participants’ behavior by categorizing social behavior into two states: autonomous and agentic.
In the autonomous state, people direct their own actions and take responsibility for the consequences.
In the agentic state, people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the authority giving the orders.
In other words, they act as agents for another person’s will.
In order to enter the agentic state, the person giving the orders must be perceived as qualified to direct other people’s behavior.
They must be seen as legitimate and credible.
As an Authority.