Obedience to Authority

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram opens by framing obedience to authority as one of the most basic and dangerous elements of human social life. He connects it immediately to the Holocaust, arguing that the systematic slaughter of millions was possible only because vast numbers of ordinary individuals obeyed orders. Citing British author C. P. Snow's observation that more crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than rebellion, Milgram sets out to study this phenomenon not through abstract philosophizing but through controlled laboratory experiments at Yale University.

The experimental design is straightforward. A volunteer, recruited from the New Haven, Connecticut, community, arrives at the laboratory believing he will participate in a study of memory and learning. Through a rigged drawing, the volunteer is always assigned the role of "teacher," while a confederate, an actor secretly working with the experimenter, plays the "learner." The confederate, a mild-mannered 47-year-old accountant, is strapped into a chair with electrodes. The teacher sits before a shock generator with 30 switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts, labeled from SLIGHT SHOCK to DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK. The teacher reads word pairs and delivers an escalating electric shock for each wrong answer. In reality, no shocks are administered, but the learner's scripted protests grow increasingly desperate: grunts at 75 volts, demands for release at 150, agonized screams at 285, and silence after 330. When the teacher hesitates, an experimenter in a gray technician's coat uses a sequence of prods, culminating in "You have no other choice, you must go on" (21).

Before presenting results, Milgram establishes a benchmark. He asks psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults to predict how subjects will behave. All groups predict that virtually everyone will refuse to obey, with only a tiny pathological fringe reaching the highest shock level. The assumptions behind these predictions, Milgram notes, rest on the belief that behavior flows from an inner core of personal values and that decent people will not readily harm the innocent.

The actual results are starkly different. In the first experiment, where the learner is in a separate room and can only be heard pounding on the wall, 26 of 40 subjects (65%) obey to the maximum 450-volt shock. Milgram then reports a series of four proximity experiments in which the victim is brought progressively closer to the subject. When vocal protests are introduced, 62.5% still obey. When the learner is placed in the same room, obedience drops to 40%. When the subject must physically force the learner's hand onto a shock plate, it falls to 30%. Milgram attributes this decline to richer empathic cues, the impossibility of denying the victim's suffering, mutual visibility creating shame, and the potential for alliance between subject and victim against the experimenter.

The book devotes substantial attention to individual subjects. Bruno Batta, a 37-year-old welder, forces the learner's hand onto the shock plate with robotic indifference and blames the learner for being stubborn. Jan Rensaleer, a Dutch-born engineer who lived through Nazi occupation, defies the experimenter at 255 volts and insists on taking full responsibility. Morris Braverman, a social worker, continues to 450 volts while convulsed by uncontrollable nervous laughter, later expressing horror at his own compliance. Gretchen Brandt, a medical technician who grew up in Hitler's Germany, calmly refuses at 210 volts, remarking, "Perhaps we have seen too much pain" (85). These portraits illustrate that obedience and defiance cut across personality types and that the conflict between conscience and compliance manifests in varied ways.

Milgram systematically isolates the factors governing obedience through additional variations. When the experimenter leaves the room and gives orders by telephone, obedience drops to about 20%, and some subjects covertly administer lower shocks than required. When women serve as subjects, obedience rates are virtually identical to men's, though women report greater tension. When the experiment moves from Yale to a nondescript office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with no university affiliation, obedience drops only modestly, to about 48%. A critical control allows subjects to choose any shock level; the mean shock is only 3.6 on the 30-point scale. This result, Milgram argues, demolishes the theory that the experiment merely provides an outlet for latent aggression. The high shock levels in other conditions are produced specifically by obedience to orders.

A set of role-permutation experiments rearranges the positions of authority, subject, and victim. When the learner demands to be shocked further and the experimenter orders the procedure stopped, not a single subject complies with the learner's demand. When an ordinary person rather than an authority figure instructs the subject to escalate shocks, only 20% obey. When two experimenters of equal authority give contradictory commands, action freezes, with nearly all subjects stopping at the exact point of disagreement. These findings confirm that the decisive factor is the subject's relationship to authority, not the content of the command.

Group dynamics prove equally revealing. When two confederates posing as fellow teachers refuse to continue, 90% of subjects also defy the experimenter, making peer rebellion the most effective manipulation for breaking obedience. Conversely, when a subject performs only a subsidiary task while a confederate presses the shock lever, 92.5% participate to the end. This demonstrates how inserting distance between a person and the destructive act reduces the psychological strain that might otherwise lead to disobedience.

The theoretical core of the book introduces what Milgram calls the "agentic state": a psychological shift in which a person ceases to view himself as acting on his own purposes and instead sees himself as an instrument executing the wishes of a higher authority. Drawing on evolutionary theory and cybernetics, the science of regulation and control, Milgram argues that the capacity for obedience is built into humans because hierarchical social organization confers survival advantages. When individuals enter a hierarchy, the internal mechanisms that normally regulate behavior, including conscience and moral judgment, are suppressed in favor of directives from above. Responsibility is displaced upward, and the subject feels virtually guiltless because the actions do not originate in the self.

Milgram identifies binding factors that lock subjects into obedience: the sequential nature of the action, which makes each step harder to repudiate; situational etiquette, including the reluctance to embarrass the experimenter; and anxiety rooted in socialization to respect authority. Strain arises from competing forces: visceral reactions to the victim's suffering, violation of internalized moral values, and incongruity between the subject's self-image and actions. Various mechanisms help resolve strain without disobedience, including avoidance, denial, minimal compliance, blaming the victim, and verbal dissent that serves as a safety valve. Only when strain exceeds the binding forces does the subject break free, a process Milgram traces through inner doubt, externalization of doubt, dissent, threat, and the final disobedient act.

In the epilogue, Milgram extends his findings beyond the laboratory, arguing that the conflict between conscience and authority is inherent in any organized society. He traces the psychology of obedience through the Vietnam War, presenting a transcript of a CBS News interview with a soldier who participated in the My Lai massacre, in which unarmed men, women, and children were killed on orders. The soldier's explanation echoes Milgram's laboratory subjects: He felt he was doing the right thing because he was ordered to do it.

Milgram identifies what he calls a fatal flaw in human nature: the capacity to abandon individual moral judgment when absorbed into institutional structures. The qualities society values most, loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice, "are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority" (189). An appendix addresses ethical criticisms of the research, noting that 84% of subjects later said they were glad to have participated and that an independent psychiatric examination found no lasting harm. Milgram concludes that the central lesson confirms a basic tenet of social psychology: The situation in which a person finds himself often matters more than the kind of person he is.