The Perils of Obedience

[callady]

The Perils of Obedience
by Stanley Milgram

Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in almost every historical epoch. Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience.

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

In tile basic experimental designs two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated " a "teacher" and the other a "learner." The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a kind of miniature electric chair, his arms are strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he will be read lists of simple word pairs, and that he will then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.

http://remus.rutgers.edu/~rhoads/PerilsofObedience.html

[Kagemusha]

1. Good lord.

Um, look, when you have someone who is not simply in a position of authority but who presents himself as an expert who knows better and who is openly lying to you and disputing your own knowledge about what you think is going on (totally besides the acting job about the severity of the shocks here), it's not the same as ordering people to commit actions they are FULLY AWARE are harmful, and not something that they are GUESSING are harmful, simply because you tell them it's ok.

Obedience out of ignorance and obedience out of willful submission to evil are not the same (insert expletive here) thing.

[callady]

5. Interesting to note

the context from which this experiment arose, namely the notion put forth by Hannah Arendt that the technocrats in Nazi Germany were not evil but everyday people who had completely normal lives but were so removed from witnessing the consequences of their actions that the evil act they participated in was never as powerful to their psyche as the firsthand reality of the pressures of obedience.

How many do we have now who are presented as experts and are openly lying? The entire school of neo-liberal economics could be accurately described in this manner. The entire school of business at Harvard and elsewhere fits this bill.

And don't we live in the world of the commodified manufactured reality where you are constantly told that what you think is what we tell you to think. It's called advertising and pop-politics.

[Kagemusha]

7. Ugh, thank you for confirming my sad hypothesis.

So this really is all about Holocaust notions.

Well then it's just too damned bad, because the science here is rotten, and we didn't need an experiment to tell us that a state willing to make genocide legal within its military occupied territory will get more people cooperating with a genocidal effort than a state that is not willing to make genocide legal.

...I don't understand to whom that isn't obvious.

[callady]

9. That's a simplified

explanation.

The more relevant aspect of this study was the removal from the consequences of your actions and the accompanying pressures to perform actions that would harm others. This study was a rather simple demonstration a more complex one occurs in our everyday lives as we are so very removed from how our daily patterns of consumption affect others in faraway lands.

How many who use cell phones would knowingly contribute to the creation of a climate that creates child prostitution in the Congo?I'd like to think very few. How many would want to or even dare to draw the connections? And yet it is the case. There are many, many other examples that are very complex and seemingly abstract but have very real implications.

[Syncronaut Seven]

2. One of the most telling expose's of true human nature ever conducted

Yup, Sadists and sheep. That makes up about 98% of us. The other 2% are "mentally disturbed"

[Kagemusha]

3. No, it's an enormous pile of bullshit, as I see it.

Are these doctors being tested for their capacity to submit? Do they have special knowledge about the effects of electricity on the human body? Are these engineers in a position to ask if the voltage being used has such and such amperage behind it? Or even if the voltage being used has a constant amperage and is an accurate measure of increasing electrical flow within the human body?

Or are they relying on professors to know what the hell is really going on and attempting to defer to experts in a situation where someone's health might depend on it?

#1 thing I can't stand about science: scientists who don't know to what degree they influence the experiment. Social sciences in particular.

[Syncronaut Seven]

4. The experiment had nothing to do with quantifying levels of electrical

shock. It had everything to do about human behavior and power over relationships.

In the end the study was terminated due to the shockingly brutal behavior displayed by it's subjects.

It was not ever a "controlled" experiment, it was never really meant to be. It's extraordinarily difficult to do controlled experiments in psychology.

Read the entire study. I've never heard anyone dispute it's validity, it's dynamics play out in schools, factories and prisons all over the world, as we speak.

[Kagemusha]

6. Look. If you tell people, no punishment no matter how brutal you are,

you get more brutality. That is not a response to obedience. That is a response to giving people a Get out of Jail Free card.

I mean, for gods sakes, look at the whole torture debate in the US today. You will not find military officers surprised to find out that if you tell soldiers it's OK and necessary and useful and even desirable to torture a bunch of Arabs suspecting of having critical military intelligence for the benefit of the American People, that you wlll get more torture. I mean, gee. How shocking. How completely illogical, right? You tell people they will not be punished for something considered bad and generally illegal and all of a sudden you find more people doing it. I mean come on.

I'm sorry, I do not have the time to read the entire study, because I spent enough time denouncing the worship of the Stanford Experiment previously to bother with this. And as for never hearing anyone dispute its validity...

There's a lot of sheep out there.

[Syncronaut Seven]

8. "I do not have the time to read the entire study"

Too bad, We studied it in college. IMHO it's a highly informative peek in to our "dark sides". Your doing yourself a dis-service by not reading it.

We had 2 people in class get physically ill just discussing it. A few flatly refused to believe that each of us is capable.

You have much to learn Grasshopper.

[TahitiNut]

10. "You have much to learn Grasshopper."

Amen.