Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, set up 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.
Milgram wanted to know if Nazi soldiers could use the excuse “just following orders” for the atrocities they had committed.
In Milgram’s experiment, an authority, a science researcher in a grey lab coat, told individuals that they would either be teachers or learners in a science experiment on learning and memory.
They supposedly drew lots to see who would be the teachers, but the lots were fixed so that the participants only became teachers.
The learners were actors but the participant teachers weren’t aware of this.
When the authority asked them to administer shocks to the learners when they got questions wrong, the teacher participants did this willingly even though it was paining them and causing them a great deal of stress to do so.
They kept doing so, even when they thought they were giving very high levels of electrical shock to the learners—shocks that could have killed them.
The results of Milgram’s experiments were truly frightening.
Over 2/3 of the participants continued to give shocks all the way to the point where the learners would have been killed.
No one expected these results and the experiment was done many times across all varying demographics with the same 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.
And as an Authority.