This is the second post in a series about psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic and, well, shocking experiment on obedience. Here's the first.
Obedience is related to but different from conformity in that the former applies to people in a higher organization position while the latter applies to people in a similar position.
One generally obeys people who occupy a higher position within a bureaucratic structure and conforms with the opinions and actions of peers. Still, conformity can reinforce obedience. An example would be a society or subculture where people frown on those who question their leaders. (Good thing that doesn't happen around here, huh?)
In his book Obedience to Authority, Milgram writes
Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. Facts of recent history and observation in daily life suggest that for many people obedience may be a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed, a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.
He was speaking not only of his well known experiment in which subjects supplied what were apparently lethal shocks to another person when commanded to by a scientist, but also of the complicity of many ordinary Germans in the Nazi Holocaust and more recent examples of military atrocities committed under orders in wartime which inspired it.
Regarding the experiment, he said
It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation....
This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with the fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources need to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his place.
Next time: possible explanations.
(Note: This series appeared first in The Goat Rope, a social and economic justice blog with gratuitous animal pictures.)