50 Psychology Classics (41 page)

From 1951 to 1969 Maslow headed the psychology department at Brandeis University, where he wrote
Motivation and Personality
(1954) and
Towards a Psychology of Being
(1968). In 1962 he held a visiting fellowship at a Californian high-tech company, which helped him relate the idea of self-actualization to a business setting
.

In 1968 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and at the time of his death in 1970 he was a fellow with the Laughlin Foundation
.

“Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhuman policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.”

“Men do become angry; they do act hatefully and explode in rage against others. But not here. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.”

In a nutshell

Awareness of our natural tendency to obey authority may lessen the chance of blindly following orders that go against our conscience.

In a similar vein
Robert Cialdini
Influence
(p 62)
Eric Hoffer
The True Believer
(p 152)

In 1961 and 1962, a series of experiments were carried out at Yale University. Volunteers were paid a small sum to participate in what they understood would be “a study of memory and learning.” In most cases, a white-coated experimenter took charge of two of the volunteers, one of whom was given the role of “teacher” and the other “learner.” The learner was strapped into a chair and told he had to remember lists of word pairs. If he couldn't recall them, the teacher was asked to give him a small electric shock. With each incorrect answer the voltage rose, and the teacher was forced to watch as the learner moved from small grunts of discomfort to screams of agony.

What the teacher didn't know was that there was actually no current running between his control box and the learner's chair, and that the volunteer “learner” was in fact an actor who was only
pretending
to get painful shocks. The real focus of the experiment was not the “victim,” but the reactions of the teacher pressing the buttons. How would he cope with administering greater and greater pain to a defenseless human being?

The experiment, described in
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
, is one of the most famous in psychology. Here, we take a look at what actually happened and why the results are important.

Most people would expect that at the first sign of genuine pain on the part of the person being shocked, the experiment would be halted. After all, it was only an experiment. This is the response that Milgram received when, outside the actual experiments, he surveyed a range of people on how they believed subjects would react in these circumstances. Most predicted that the teachers would not give shocks beyond the point where the learners asked to be freed. These expectations were entirely in line with Milgram's own. But what actually happened?

Most subjects asked to act as teachers were very stressed by the experiment, and protested to the experimenter that the person in the chair should not have to take any more pain. The logical next step would then have been to demand that the experiment be terminated. In reality, this rarely happened.

Despite their reservations,
most people
continued to follow the orders of the experimenter and inflict progressively greater shocks. Indeed, as Milgram noted, “a substantial proportion continued to the last shock on the generator.” That was even when they could hear the cries of the learner, and even when that person pleaded to be let out of the experiment.

Milgram's experiments have caused controversy over the years; many people are simply unwilling to accept that normal human beings would act like this. Many scientists have tried to find holes in the methodology, but the experiment has been replicated around the world with similar outcomes. As Milgram noted, the results astonish people. They want to believe that the subjects who volunteered were sadistic monsters. However, he made sure that they came from a range of social classes and professions, and that they were normal people put in unusual circumstances.

Why don't the subjects administering the “shocks” feel guilty and just opt out of the experiment? Milgram was careful to point out that most of his subjects knew that what they were doing was not right. They hated giving the shocks, especially when the victim was objecting to them. Yet even though they thought that the experiment was cruel or senseless, most were not able to extract themselves from it. Instead, they developed coping mechanisms to justify what they were doing. These included:

Getting absorbed in the technical side of the experiment. People have a strong desire to be competent in their work. The experiment and its successful implementation became more important than the welfare of the people involved.

Transferring moral responsibility for the experiment to its leader. This is the common “I was just following orders” defense found in any war crimes trial. The moral sense or conscience of the subject is not lost, but is transformed into a wish to please the boss or leader.

Choosing to believe that their actions needed to be done as part of a larger, worthy cause. Where in the past wars have been waged over religion or political ideology, in this case the cause was science.

Devaluing the person receiving the shocks: “If they are dumb enough not remember the word pairs, they
deserve
to be punished.” Such impugning of intelligence or character is commonly used by tyrants to encourage followers to get rid of whole groups of people. They are not worth much, the thinking goes, so who really cares if they are eliminated? The world will be a better place.

Perhaps the most surprising result was Milgram's observation that the subject's sense of morality did not disappear, but was
reoriented
, so that they felt duty and loyalty not to those they were harming but to the person giving the orders. The subject was not able to extract themselves from the situation
because—amazingly—it would have been
impolite
to go against the wishes of the experimenter. The subject felt they had agreed to do the experiment, so to pull out would make them appear a promise-breaker.

The desire to please authority was seemingly more powerful than the moral force of the other volunteer's cries. When the subject did voice opposition to what was going on, he or she typically couched it in the most deferential terms. As Milgram described one subject: “He thinks he is killing someone, yet he uses the language of the tea table.”

Why are we like this? Milgram observed that humans' tendency to obey authority evolved for simple survival purposes. There had to be leaders and followers and hierarchies in order to get things done. Man is a communal animal, and does not want to rock the boat. Worse even than the bad conscience of harming others who are defenseless, it seems, is the fear of being isolated.

Most of us are inculcated from a very young age with the idea that it is wrong to hurt others needlessly, yet we spend the first 20 years of our life being told what to do, so we get used to obeying authority. Milgram's experiments threw subjects right into the middle of this conundrum. Should they “be good” in the sense of not harming, or “be good” in the sense of doing what they're told? Most subjects chose the latter—suggesting that our brain is hardwired to accept authority above all else.

The natural impulse not to harm others is dramatically altered when a person is put into a hierarchical structure. On our own we take full responsibility for what we do and consider ourselves autonomous, but once in a system or hierarchy we are more than willing to give over that responsibility to someone else. We stop being ourselves, and instead become an “agent” for some other person or thing.

Milgram was influenced by the story of Adolf Eichmann, whose job it was to engineer the death of six million Jews under Hitler. Hannah Arendt's book
Eichmann in Jerusalem
argued that Eichmann was not really a psychopath, but an obedient bureaucrat whose distance from the actual death camps allowed him to order the atrocities in the name of some higher goal. Milgram's experiments confirmed the truth of Arendt's idea of the “banality of evil.” That is, humans are not inherently cruel, but become so when cruelty is demanded by authority. This was the main lesson of his study:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process
.

Obedience to Authority
can make for painful reading, especially the transcript of an interview with an American soldier who participated in the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam. Milgram concluded that there was such a thing as inherent psychopathy, or “evil,” but that it was statistically not common. His alarm was more about how an average person (his experiments included women too, who showed almost no difference in obedience to men), if put into the right conditions, can do terrible things to other people—and not feel too bad about it.

This, Milgram noted, is the purpose of military training. Trainee soldiers are put into an environment separate from normal society and its moral niceties and instead are made to think in terms of “the enemy.” They are instilled with a love of “duty”; the belief that they are fighting for a great cause; and a tremendous fear of disobeying orders: “Although its ostensible purpose is to provide the recruit with military skills, its fundamental aim is to break down any residues of individuality and selfhood.” Trainee soldiers are made to become agents for a cause, rather than freethinking individuals, and herein lies their vulnerability to dreadful actions. Other people stop being human beings, and become “collateral damage.”