Obedience To Authority Research Articles

The Milgram-Holocaust Linkage: Challenging the Present Consensus

Stanley Milgram's assertion that his “Obedience to Authority” (OTA) experiments replicated, in a laboratory setting, quintessential features of perpetrator behaviour during the Holocaust has been widely challenged. Most contemporary scholarship on this issue, known as the “Milgram-Holocaust (M-H) linkage”, argues that Milgram's experiments failed to capture important factors such as ideology, policy, bureaucracy and technology, which more fully explain perpetrator behaviour. However, it is argued here that when the obedience research programme is viewed from a different angle – that of being an emerging policy-driven bureaucratic process in pursuit of “scientific” goals with an impersonal means of inflicting harm – the interplay of factors such as ideology, policy, bureaucracy and technology did in fact play a central role in generating Milgram's high baseline completion rate. Hence, there is a much stronger theoretical connection between the OTA experiments and the Nazi state's perpetration of the Holocaust than the current scholarly consensus allows.

Is the brain really a small-world network?

It is commonly assumed that the brain is a small-world network (e.g., Sporns and Honey 2006). Indeed, one of the present authors claimed as much 15 years ago (Hilgetag et al. 2000). The small-worldness is believed to be a crucial aspect of efficient brain organization that confers significant advantages in signal processing (e.g., LagoFernandez et al. 2000). Correspondingly, the small-world organization is deemed essential for healthy brain function, as alterations of small-world features are observed in patient groups with Alzheimer’s disease (Stam et al. 2007), autism (Barttfeld et al. 2011) or schizophrenia spectrum diseases (Liu et al. 2008; Wang et al. 2012; Zalesky et al. 2011). While the colloquial idea of a small, interconnected world has a long tradition (e.g., Klemperer 1938), the present concept of small-world features of networks is frequently associated with the Milgram experiment (Milgram 1967) that demonstrated surprisingly short paths across social networks (‘six degrees of separation’). The concept was formalized by Watts and Strogatz (1998), who derived small-world networks from regular networks by including a small proportion of random network shortcuts. Such an organization results in short paths across the whole network—almost as small as in random networks—combined with local ‘cliquishness’ (or clustering) of neighboring nodes, due to dense local interconnections. These features can be mathematically summarized by the smallworld coefficient (Humphries et al. 2006), which is defined as the clustering coefficient of a given network (normalized by the clustering coefficient of a same-size random network) divided by the network’s normalized average shortest pathlength. While any network that has a smallworld coefficient larger than one is formally a small-world network, for many researchers, the term has become associated with the specific Watts and Strogatz model that is based on the partial random rewiring of a regular network (Fig. 1a). Indeed, the estimation of the rewiring probability has been used to directly associate real-world networks with the Watts and Strogatz model (Humphries and Gurney 2008). Incidentally, the small-world coefficient might not faithfully capture the small-world property as originally described by Watts and Strogatz (1998). Therefore, an alternative coefficient has been proposed that compares the clustering of the network to a lattice instead of a random network (Telesford et al. 2011). A large number of empirical network data conform to the small-world features of short paths combined with high clustering, including many neural networks—but do these Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00429-015-1035-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Lost in the city: revisiting Milgram's experiment in the age of social networks.

As more and more users access social network services from smart devices with GPS receivers, the available amount of geo-tagged information makes repeating classical experiments possible on global scales and with unprecedented precision. Inspired by the original experiments of Milgram, we simulated message routing within a representative sub-graph of the network of Twitter users with about 6 million geo-located nodes and 122 million edges. We picked pairs of users from two distant metropolitan areas and tried to find a route between them using local geographic information only; our method was to forward messages to a friend living closest to the target. We found that the examined network is navigable on large scales, but navigability breaks down at the city scale and the network becomes unnavigable on intra-city distances. This means that messages usually arrived to the close proximity of the target in only 3–6 steps, but only in about 20% of the cases was it possible to find a route all the way to the recipient, in spite of the network being connected. This phenomenon is supported by the distribution of link lengths; on larger scales the distribution behaves approximately as , which was found earlier by Kleinberg to allow efficient navigation, while on smaller scales, a fractal structure becomes apparent. The intra-city correlation dimension of the network was found to be , less than the dimension of the distribution of the population.

50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram's Obedience Experiments

Over the last 50 years, interest in Milgram's obedience experiments has hardly waned and debate about his contribution to our understanding of obedience is alive and well. Moreover, many questions remain. For example, is obedience blind and ordinary? Are people basically weak in the presence of an authority? Drawing on the contributions to this issue, we discuss the new insights that emerge from reflections on the experiments, theorizing, the communication of findings, and the way Milgram's experiments relate to the Holocaust. By focusing on aspects of Milgram's work that have received less attention and findings that have emerged since the Milgram archives were first accessed (e.g., previously unknown experiments, notes, recordings), contributions to this issue provide many fresh insights. This much is very clear: now 50 years on, the obedience experiments continue to inspire and there is still much more that can be learned from engagement with his work.

“Ordinary Men,” Extraordinary Circumstances: Historians, Social Psychology, and the Holocaust

For historians the Holocaust is among the most complex historical situations in which to explain perpetrator obedience. There has been a long tradition of trying to comprehend the “Nazi mind,” but Milgram's obedience experiments came at just the point when judicial proceedings in West Germany were shifting the focus to the collective behavior of the cohorts of regular policemen and security officers who actually had to do the face‐to‐face killing, and whose ideological commitment was muted or even nonexistent. This explains why Milgram's experiments had an immediate appeal to anyone trying to explain obedience to commit atrocity once it was evident that those who had perpetrated it were not psychopaths or criminally abnormal. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between history and psychology as it has evolved over the past 50 years and to suggest ways in which Milgram's work still stimulates current history writing.

Authorities and Uncertainties: Applying Lessons from the Study of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust to the Milgram Legacy

Milgram's experiments were born out of a desire to understand the Nazis’ persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. This article argues that the study of Jewish resistance against that persecution also furthers our understanding of Milgram's experiments. Case data from the Nazi‐created ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Łódź—settings in which Jews reached very different decisions with regard to resistance—illustrate that decisions about resistance reflect obedience and disobedience to multiple authorities, including agents of the Nazi regime as well as moral and religious dictates. Whereas Milgram himself recognized the role of multiple authorities, these cases also point to the role of uncertainty, which is relevant to yet not discussed explicitly in Milgram's experiments. A recognition of uncertainty and multiple authorities provides a more nuanced understanding of obedience and shows that, contrary to common assumptions about both Milgram's experiments and the Holocaust, neither resistance nor obedience is “ordinary” or straightforward.

Discourse, Defiance, and Rationality: “Knowledge Work” in the “Obedience” Experiments

In this article, I present a secondary qualitative analysis of archived audio data from two conditions (“voice‐feedback” and “women as subjects”) in Milgram's experiments. Using a perspective informed by rhetorical and discursive psychologies, I focus on the rhetorical strategies employed by participants. This highlights the use of strategies based around direct invocations of “knowledge.” Analysis explores the ways in which participants could use such strategies to challenge the experimenter's definition of the situation in their efforts to extricate themselves from the experiment. Findings are discussed in relation to two ongoing debates in the study of Milgram's experiments: First, the importance of attending to defiance and resistance as much as compliance and obedience; second, the questioning of the status of the phenomena captured in Milgram's studies as necessarily being concerned with “(dis)obedience.”

The Emergence of Milgram's Bureaucratic Machine

Based on documents from Yale University, this article advances new sociological insights on Milgram's experiments, which bolster and extend Russell and Gregory's largely psychological explanation. From behind‐the‐scenes, Milgram's experiments are viewed as an ideologically driven, inherently coercive, and goal‐orientated bureaucratic process. The individual links within this organisational chain included Milgram (project manager), Yale University (institutional support), the National Science Foundation (funding), Milgram's research team (the actors), ending with the final link, the “shock”‐inflicting participants. Analysis illustrates how the division of labour inherent within this bureaucratic process facilitated Milgram's high completion rates because when highly stressed participants inflicted the most intense shocks, every link in the chain had the opportunity to displace or diffuse personal responsibility for their actually or, for the participants, seemingly harmful contributions. This analysis is consistent with Durkheim's insistence that to better understand the behavior of individuals, the social—and therefore sociological—context must also be considered.

The Explanatory Value of Milgram's Obedience Experiments: A Contemporary Appraisal

A contemporary appraisal of the explanatory value of the obedience experiments is presented, focusing upon a sample of recent generalizations linked to Milgram's theoretical interpretation. Processes emphasized include justification, the agentic shift, dehumanization, and resistance. These constructs have helped explain diverse phenomena in business ethics and corporate corruption, harmful obedience in legal practice, and whistleblowing, in addition to genocide. The major legacy continues to be the situational thesis that serious harm may be perpetrated upon protesting victims by ordinary, good people under the influence of authority. However, this thesis is still limiting and problematic in the view of many scholars, particularly with respect to the Holocaust. Unanswered questions are discussed. Individual differences in obedience (or disobedience) were noteworthy in Milgram's research, and convincing explanations for these differences remain unaddressed. An empirically validated theory, accounting for Milgram's entire set of observations, is needed, which would facilitate generalizations to relevant contexts.

Obedience, Self‐Control, and the Voice of Culture

Milgram's obedience studies dramatically demonstrated how obeying authority can have grim consequences. Nevertheless, we propose that obedience to legitimate authority is a vital aspect of human culture. Among other things, obedience to authority can encourage individuals to set aside their selfish desires for the good of their group. Often, such selfish desires are violent in nature. Thus, obedience can function to limit violence. We challenge the notion that people typically respond to the commands of authority with blind obedience. Last, we suggest that the implications of Milgram's findings have in some cases been overstated.

Situational Features in Milgram's Experiment That Kept His Participants Shocking

Although people are often astonished by the high rates of obedience in Milgram's famous studies, research on social influence processes in other settings provides considerable insight into why so many of Milgram's participants continued to press the shock levers all the way to 450 volts. That research suggests that four situational features Milgram built into his experimental procedure contributed to the high levels of obedience. The four features are the incremental nature of the task, the novelty of the situation and the kind of normative information made available, the opportunity to deny or diffuse responsibility, and the limited opportunity to ponder decisions. When looked at in this light, Milgram's research can be seen as a dramatic example of some well‐documented psychological effects.

Obeying, Joining, Following, Resisting, and Other Processes in the Milgram Studies, and in the Holocaust and Other Genocides: Situations, Personality, and Bystanders

Stanley Milgram was motivated to show how something as horrible as the Holocaust could happen. To what extent does his research provide understanding of this? This article reviews a conception of the origins of genocide and other mass violence, based on case studies of actual instances, ranging from the Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda and great violence in the Congo, in which psychological and social science principles were applied to historical data. This analysis and conception shows that a multiplicity of societal conditions and cultural characteristics together lead to group violence. Under certain societal and cultural conditions, many people rather than obey, seek, and join, and then subsequently follow, leaders, and groups. However, one cultural characteristic that is usually present and is relevant to Milgram's work, strong “authority orientation,” promotes the tendency to obedience and reduces the likelihood of resistance. The article also discusses the multiplicity of influences present both in Milgram's experiments and other violence‐producing situations, which includes people following rules of conventional behavior, and the multiplicity of psychological processes that arise, and questions some interpretations of Milgram's findings. It discusses the neglected but important role of personality, and the potential inherent in socialization and education to promote inclusive caring and resistance to violence producing situations. It points to the great potential of bystanders, their “authority,” in preventing violent behavior.

What Makes a Person a Perpetrator? The Intellectual, Moral, and Methodological Arguments for Revisiting Milgram's Research on the Influence of Authority

In this article, we outline the rationale for reexamining Milgram's explanation of how ordinary people can become perpetrators of atrocity. We argue, first, that any consideration of these issues cannot ignore the impact of Milgram's ideas in psychology, in other disciplines such as history, and in society at large. Second, we outline recent research in both psychology and history which challenges Milgram's perspective—specifically his “agentic state” account. Third, we identify the moral dangers as well as the analytic weaknesses of his work. Fourth, we point to recent methodological developments that make it ethically possible to revisit Milgram's studies. Combining all four elements we argue that there is a compelling and timely case for reexamining Milgram's legacy and developing our understanding of perpetrator behavior. We then outline how the various articles in this special issue contribute to such a project.

Observing Obedience: How Sophisticated are Social Perceivers?

How does the general public understand the behavior of Milgram's teachers—those participants who ostensibly tortured an innocent stranger? In our social perception analysis, we contrast two research traditions that attempt to answer this question. On one hand, lay dispositionism argues that people make harsh, person‐focused judgments of Milgram's teachers. On the other hand, a mental state account suggests that perceivers integrate information about social situations and agents’ behavior to infer the mental states of others. Mental state inferences then, in turn, drive social judgments of others. We review the theory of lay dispositionism, its application to the Milgram experiments, and several limitations of the theory. We then offer an alternative mental state account and support this view with recent studies on the Milgram experiments, and extensions to everyday behavior explanation. A final section considers the research and policy implications of our analysis.

Situationism, going mental, and modal akrasia

Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris (Nous 32:504–530, 1998; Lack of character: personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002) and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ (Philos Stud 148:135–146, 2010) further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by low-level (in some cases even perceptual), emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing (or at least from recognizing, at the level of deliberation) that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable.

Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority “Relationship” Condition: Some Methodological and Theoretical Implications

In May 1962, social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, ran what was arguably the most controversial variation of his Obedience to Authority (OTA) experiments: the Relationship Condition (RC). In the RC, participants were required to bring a friend, with one becoming the teacher and the other the learner. The learners were covertly informed that the experiment was actually exploring whether their friend would obey an experimenter’s orders to hurt them. Learners were quickly trained in how to react to the impending “shocks”. Only 15 percent of teachers completed the RC. In an article published in 1965, Milgram discussed most of the variations on his baseline experiment, but only named the RC in passing, promising a more detailed account in his forthcoming book. However, his 1974 book failed to mention the RC and it remained unpublished until François Rochat and Andre Modigliani discovered it in Milgram’s personal archive in 1997 at Yale University. Their overview of the RC’s procedure and results left a number of questions unanswered. For example, what were the etiological origins of the RC? Why did Milgram decide against publishing this experiment? And does the RC have any significant methodological or theoretical implications on the Obedience studies discourse? Based on documents obtained from Milgram’s personal archive, the aim of this article is to shed new light on these questions.

Meta-Milgram: An Empirical Synthesis of the Obedience Experiments

Milgram's famous experiment contained 23 small-sample conditions that elicited striking variations in obedient responding. A synthesis of these diverse conditions could clarify the factors that influence obedience in the Milgram paradigm. We assembled data from the 21 conditions (N = 740) in which obedience involved progression to maximum voltage (overall rate 43.6%) and coded these conditions on 14 properties pertaining to the learner, the teacher, the experimenter, the learner-teacher relation, the experimenter-teacher relation, and the experimental setting. Logistic regression analysis indicated that eight factors influenced the likelihood that teachers continued to the 450 volt shock: the experimenter's directiveness, legitimacy, and consistency; group pressure on the teacher to disobey; the indirectness, proximity, and intimacy of the relation between teacher and learner; and the distance between the teacher and the experimenter. Implications are discussed.

Rethinking Dabrowski's Theory: I. The Case Against Primary Integration

Some terms of Dabrowski's theory are misleading. The construct of level and the concepts of integration and disintegration mean different things. The concept of primary integration as a starting point for personality development is untenable in light of research on child development. In its place, Level I as a type of development that is constrained by social pressures and the effort to succeed in life will serve better. Milgram's studies of obedience and Bandura's of the ways of bypassing one's conscience are sufficient to explain how the Level I type of integration can take hold of a person. The descriptive term of disintegration is too extreme and too limiting to enclose the diversity of processes at each level that also include partial integration. Common errors that have crept into the usage of the theory are identified and corrected.

Victims’ Dehumanization and the Alteration of Other-Oriented Empathy within the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment

Using the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment (IVMOE; Dambrun & Vatiné, 2010), we studied victims’ dehumanization and its underlying processes. Under the supervision of the national service of security, participants were ordered to psychologically weaken a person suspected of preparing an attack. We manipulated the ethnicity of the victim and his terrorist membership. The doubly stigmatized victim (i.e. a North African victim member of al Qaeda) was tortured more severely than the other victims. We found some evidence that this effect was mediated by a decrease in term of other-oriented empathy, but not by personal distress. These results suggest that an empathy alteration process underlies dehumanization in crimes of obedience perpetrated against members of extreme out-groups.

Rewriting Milgram Behind the Shock Machine The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments by Gina Perry New Press, New York, 2013. 351 pp. $26.95. ISBN 9781595589217. Scribe, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia, 2012. 432 pp. AU$32.95. ISBN 9781921844553.

Perry draws on interviews and archival research to examine the methodology and conclusions of Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments.