The year is 1942, and across Europe various German concentration camps have been established.
Most of these are slave labor facilities, where Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally
retarded, and various other undesirables are forced to work on behalf of the Reich.
A few though have a much darker, more sinister purpose.
These don't have factories, mines or quarries to be worked, and in fact only exist for one
purpose: mass murder on an industrial scale.
No different than cattle to the slaughter, over six million people are herded into gas
chambers and killed, the guards overseeing one of the worst crimes against humanity in
history, simply going about their job like it was a regular nine to five.
But why did tens of thousands of German guards just idly obey commands to help kill millions
of people?
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're taking a look
at the infamous Stanley Milgram psychological study that proved people were perfectly willing
to obey orders and shock others to death.
When World War II ended many former Nazis found themselves dragged up before international
tribunals to answer for their heinous war crimes.
Time and again the men and women on trial offered a single excuse: I was just following
orders.
They didn't deny knowledge of what their actions were helping facilitate, and they didn't sugarcoat
what they did- they simply excused their part in one of the greatest genocides in history
by simply saying, I was told to.
The former Allies weren't buying any of this blind obedience, and many Nazis found themselves
imprisoned or hung on the gallows for their crimes.
But in 1961 a psychologist named Stanley Milgram grew curious about just how much a role obedience
had in the execution of these heinous crimes.
After all, no matter the racial prejudice it was extremely unlikely that any one of
the men and women involved would have personally murdered a concentration camp prisoner.
If this were true then our streets would every day be running in rivers of blood, and yet
society continues to function relatively well, and rather than minorities being executed,
they see their social and legal status continually improved in liberal democracies around the
world.
Why this paradox then?
Why were these thousands of Nazis perfectly normal and law-abiding citizens before the
war, but then turned into mass murderers during the war?
Could simple obedience really be the difference between genocide and peaceful cohabitation?
To help answer this question Milgram developed an experiment at Yale University and put out
an advertisement in the local newspaper asking for male participants.
Each participant would be paired with another person- secretly an accomplice of Milgram's
that was pretending to be just another normal participant.
The real participant would take on the role of teacher, and the accomplice would take
on the role of learner, although to mask the deception lots were drawn to determine roles.
Naturally the draw was always fixed to ensure the accomplice was the learner.
In all the experiment drew in forty males aged between twenty and fifty, and who's jobs
ranged from unskilled to professional.
The wide variety of test subjects would prove vital in determining if there was a difference
in age or profession as far as obedience to authority was concerned.
As the experiment began, the learner would be taken to a separate room and have electrodes
strapped to their body, with a thin wall separating the accomplice learner from the teacher who
was seated directly on the other side of it.
The learner was then given a list of word pairs to learn, and the teacher was asked
to test the learner by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner from a list
of four choices.
The learner, as an accomplice, purposefully picked the wrong word most of the time, which
prompted the experimenter to deliver an electric shock every time that the learner made a mistake.
Each time that a shock was delivered though, the voltage was increased so that the next
shock would be more painful.
The punishment shocks began at 15 volts- or a particularly strong static shock- to 450
volts- a voltage lethal enough to kill if its path were to cross the heart.
As the experiment continued, the learner would keep giving wrong answers, and the teacher
was prompted to deliver a fresh shock.
On the other side of a wall from the learner, all the teacher heard was the shouts of pain
from the learner, and as the shocks grew in intensity the learner would begin to plead
to please not be shocked again, or to be let go from the experiment.
The worse the shocks got, the more pleading and begging, and the louder the screams of
pain became.
When the teacher started balking at delivering another shock, they would be given exactly
four prods to continue the experiment, the first being: Please continue.
If the teacher still refused, then they would be told: the experiment requires you to continue.
If that was still not enough, then they would be told: it is absolutely essential that you
continue.
Finally, if that didn't work then they would be told: you have no other choice but to continue.
After the fourth prodding if the teacher refused to keep going then they would not be asked
again and the experiment would end.
Each response was carefully crafted to slowly increase the level of authority projected
onto the participant, until at last making that authority absolute.
It's important to note that the participants were not restrained or under any legal obligation
to continue the experiment, and could have quit at any time.
The results of the experiment were shocking- pun fully intended.
Of the forty individuals who took part, a full two thirds of them continued the experiment
to the highest power level- 450 volts.
This is despite the learner on the other side of the wall begging for the experiment to
stop, crying and sobbing, and screaming in agony.
The other third refused to continue the experiment, though they all made it at least three fourths
of the way through, hitting at minimum 300 volts.
Milgram's experiment discovered something truly terrifying about humanity.
As he said himself, “Stark authority was pitted against the participant's strongest
moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the participant's 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.”
Milgram would go on to explain the behavior exhibited in his experiment, and at Nazi death
camps across Europe, by suggesting that every day people have two distinct states of behavior
when in social situations.
The autonomous state is where people direct their own actions and take responsibility
for those actions.
The agentic state is when people allow others to direct their actions, and then pass off
the consequences of those actions to the person giving the orders.
They are happy to act as agents of the other's will, but don't believe that they themselves
bear the responsibility for the consequences.
Known as the Agent Theory, Milgram suggested that in order for a person to enter the agentic
state two things must be in place: the person giving the orders must be perceived as being
qualified to direct other people's behavior.
In other words, the person giving orders must be a valid form of authority, and the person
being ordered must be able to believe that the authority giving the orders will end up
accepting responsibility for what happens.
The second point was brought to light as the experiment progressed to higher and higher
shocks.
Here, some participants were told that they had responsibility for their own actions-
meaning that any harm they were doing to the other individual, and the consequence of that
harm, would be on their own heads.
These individuals showed the highest rate of refusal to continue the experiment, with
very few continuing to obey.
Others were told that the responsibility for any harm being done to the other individual
would fall directly on the organizers of the experiment, and of these participants they
showed the highest willingness to continue obeying.
Some who balked at continuing even changed their mind and went on after being told they
wouldn't be responsible for what happened.
Milgram would go on to conduct the experiment again in 18 studies with a variety of different
factors in each.
In one experiment the experimenter- or the individual ordering the electric shocks- would
wear a gray lab coat, a symbol of authority and kind of uniform.
Then the experimenter would be called out of the room because of a phone call right
as the experiment began, and he would be replaced by another individual dressed as an ordinary
member of the public.
In this experiment obedience level dropped from over 65% to just 20%.
In another variation, Milgram changed the location of the experiment to a set of run
down offices instead of the very impressive and prestigious Yale University.
Here, despite the experiment remaining exactly the same as in Yale, obedience dropped to
47.5%.
This suggested that the environment, or the status of the location also affects obedience-
leading credence to the theory that authority is perceived more than it is learned.
In a third variation the participants could tell an assistant, who was also in on the
experiment, to do the shocking for them, rather than doing it themselves.
Incredibly this changed obedience rate to a whopping 92.5%, proving that as there's
less personal responsibility, obedience to authority- even if immoral- increases exponentially.
In a fourth variation the participant had to physically force the learner's hand down
onto a shock plate once the learner began to refuse to take part after reaching 150
volts.
Not surprisingly this plummeted obedience to just 30%, proving that when the participant
was not buffered or protected from seeing the consequence of their actions, many would
not choose to continue obeying.
In a fifth variation the participant was joined by two other teachers- who were also in on
the experiment.
One of the fake teachers would refuse to participate at 150 volts, and the second would choose
to stop at 210 volts.
When the real participant saw others disobeying an authority figure, obedience dropped to
just 10%.
In a sixth variation the experimenter was not physically in the room with the participant,
and instead relayed his instructions via telephone.
When the experimenter instructed the participant to deliver an electric shock but the participant
was not physically in the room with the authority figure, obedience rate fell to 20.5%.
Interestingly, when not directly observed, many of the participants actually cheated
and purposefully missed giving electric shocks or gave far less voltage than they had been
ordered to.
This proves that proximity to an authority figure affects obedience.
While Milgram's study revealed a shocking disposition to obey authority, even when immoral,
there was hefty criticism aimed at it by other psychologists.
One set of criticism alleged that the participants may not have fully believed the experimental
set-up, and did not believe the learner was actually receiving electric shocks.
There are also problems with the sample group used, as all of the participants were male,
which begs the question if females would act differently.
Future studies involving females would disprove the notion that there is any major difference
in obedience to authority between men and women.
However another critical flaw in the study is that the entire sample population was self-selected-
or in other words they had volunteered themselves for the study.
This may point to them having more of a 'volunteer personality' which might directly affect how
they react to authority figures overseeing their behavior in a study that they themselves
wanted to be a part of.
The Milgram study has been plagued with controversy almost since its inception, yet seeing the
pattern of genocide and mass atrocities committed by both soldiers and every day men and women
across history, there can't be any denying the underlying finding: we humans are disturbingly
prone to obeying even immoral authority, as long as we can plausibly shift the blame from
ourselves to an authority figure.
It's ok if you round up all the Jews in your city and march them to a concentration camp,
because in truth it's not really you doing it, but the system that you're just a small
part of.
Even the guilt of mass murder can be easily discarded, or rather shifted from the self
to those giving the orders.
Perhaps then the legal defense offered by thousands of Nazis that they were just following
orders should have been a valid one after all, and we can't help but wonder just how
much of a push do we ourselves need to turn from law-abiding citizen, to a facilitator
of mass murder?
Would you have obeyed orders to shock an innocent person?
Why or why not?
Also.
make sure you check out our other video, would you survive the stanford prison experiment!
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