I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the news show Primetime Live, along with social psychologist Jerry Burger, recreated the infamous Milgram experiment.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram used an authoritarian figure, dressed in a white lab coat, to coerce people into committing evil acts. The "scientist" instructed people to shock a screaming subject sitting in the next room. Although no one was actually being shocked, the participants heard a man screaming in pain, and eventually pleading to be released from the experiment. When the subjects questioned the experimenter about what was happening, they were told they must continue.
What made the experiment so infamous were the results: more than two-thirds of Milgram's participants delivered shocks after hearing cries of pain, signs of heart trouble, and then, after a particularly shrill scream, nothing at all. The experiment seemed to elucidate how ordinary people could commit extraordinary atrocities: they were just following orders, "doing their job".
In the 1970's, experiments like the one performed by Milgram were criticized as being unethical. Since subjects were temporarily convinced that they had killed somebody, they experienced tremendous emotional duress. So ABC decided to slightly amend the Milgram protocol. Although subjects knew they were causing someone else pain through intense electrical shocks, the pain never get out of control.
So have we improved since 1961? Are ordinary citizens less likely to torture a fellow citizen when commanded by a scientist in a lab coat? Alas, the answer is no.
We tested 18 men, and found that 65 percent of them agreed to administer increasingly painful electric shocks when ordered by an authority figure.22 women signed up for our experiment. Even though most people said that women would be less likely to inflict pain on the learner, a surprising 73 percent yielded to the orders of the experimenter.
Out of the 30 people we tested with an additional accomplice acting as a moral guide, 63 percent still inflicted electric shocks, even though the accomplice refused to go on.
Comments (8)
Milgram's Obedience to Authority (Harper & Row 1974) should be required reading in high schools world wide. A number of other works shed light on this characteristic. Two that are particularly worthwhile are Robert J. Lifton's The Nazi Doctors (Basic Book, 1986) and Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men (Harper Collins, 1992.)
Obedience to authority was also considered by Lawrence Kohlberg in his Stages of Moral Development.
Obedience to authority explains much about the dark side human society and individual behavior.
A particularly interesting facet of this characteristic is the phenomena of situational blindness. In nearly every case of societally sanctioned atrocity, the agents themselves simply can't see that they are doing something wrong.
Browning observed that government sanction could be so strong as to excuse any crime in the mind of the perpetrator.
This explains why, in the face of a significant body of evidence that other animals have emotions and cognitive characteristics describable and understandable in human terms, that we continue to actively harm them on such an obscene scale.
Posted by: Rick Bogle | January 8, 2007 11:40 AM