A long time ago on Saturday Night Live, Fr. Guido Sarducci talked about the Five Minute University, an educational program that would teach you what you'd remember after you graduated.
Sample: Economics...supply and demand.
In the spirit of Fr. Sarducci, if you ever had a psychology class or talked with someone you had, you would probably remember "some dude who told people to shock other people and they did."
That would be the late Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who, in light of the many atrocities of obedience in the 20th century, wondered how and under what conditions ordinarly people would follow orders to inflict harm on people they had nothing against.
Short answer: it was WAY easier than he initially thought.
To briefly recap, Milgram set up a situation in which subjects thought they were participating in an experiment on the relationship of punishment or negative reinforcement to learning. They were to give a task invovling word memory to a learner who was in fact an actor. Each time the learner/actor made a "mistake," the subjects were asked to give them an electric shock of steadily increasing severity.
According to the StanleyMilgram.com website, published by Dr. Thomas Blass,
He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.
(Blass, by the way, wrote a biography of Milgram cleverly titled The Man Who Shocked the World. That's going on my list.)
Milgram tried lots of variations of the experiment, but the above will do if you remember nothing else.
The question of why people obey authority when they are asked to do things they would never do as individuals has taken on urgency since the Nazi holocaust and subsequent atrocities.
It's pretty easy to understand why people would obey if violence or the clear threat of violence was involved. But most of the time it isn't (although the unspoken threat of violence or other sanctions is often a factor).
In general rulers prefer not to rule by force alone but by making the ruled obey in a way that appears to be voluntary (Marx called the belief system that supports this ideology).
Obviously socialization, as in experiences in learning from and dealing with other individuals and institutions from birth on plays a major role. As Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment, "Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel."
Sociology pioneer Max Weber identified three types of authority that have prevailed at one time or another in various societies. These were often seen as legitimate by both rulers and ruled. They are traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal.
(Note: Weber used the word "rational" in several senses and would be the first to say that so-called rational authority can be very irrational in a substantive sense.)
Traditional authority is pretty much what it sounds like. An example would be hereditary monarchy, chieftains, or any long-standing social institution.
Charismatic authority involves the special power of the leader, who may lack other forms of authority. Charismatic authority can be as good or bad as the leader involved. Jesus would be a classic example. He was neither a priest or a ruler and people responded to him on the basis of his personal characteristics. On the bad side, Hitler would be an example of a charismatic leader who fascinated his followers. Charisma still plays a role even in rational-legal systems. It tends to be fairly unstable.
In our world, the kind of authority that prevails is rational-legal, which is based on rules, laws, and procedures that are generally written down. We obey this kind of authority figure not because of personal traits or long standing tradition (though both can be a factor) but rather because these are seen to be legitimate within their sphere of influence.
To use some examples, most people would write a term paper assigned by a teacher in a class in which they are enrolled but wouldn't accept a parking ticket from him or her. They might obey a supervisor at work but not at home, etc.
Obeying isn't always or even usually a bad thing. But it gets interesting and tragic when rational-legal authorities demand from their subjects acts of injustice, violence and aggression on others.
When that happens, people too often seem to stop being morally autonomous individuals and enter what Stanley Milgram called "the agentic state" in which they become in effect a cog in the machinery of power.
More on this next time.
(This series appeared first in The Goat Rope, a social and economic justice blog.)