This is the third post in a series on obedience to authority and all the carnage that has caused over the years. It was initially inspired by reflections on psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic experiment.
Two briefly recap the experiment, Milgram found that about 65 percent of participants in the experiment were willing to administer apparently lethal shocks to another person simply because they were told to by a scientific authority.
Here are the parts one and two.
So why is it so easy to get people to hurt other people who have done them no harm when told to do so by an authority figure?
It would be nice to think that people who do so are abnormally cruel or sadistic, but that's not the case. They (we?) are pretty normal people.
Could it be that a dark and aggressive side of human nature accounts for it?
Milgram explored but dismissed that explanation in Obedience to Authority at least as it applied to the results of his "shocking" experiment and presumably in many related situations.
He describes the aggression argument thus:
By aggression we mean an impulse or action to harm another organism. In the Freudian view, destructive forces are present in all individuals, but they do not always find ready release, for their expression is inhibited by superego, or conscience. Furthermore, ego functions--the reality-oriented side of man--also keep destructive tendencies under control. (If we strike out every time we are angry, it will ultimately bring us harm, and thus we restrain ourselves.) Indeed, so unacceptable are these destructive instincts that they are not always available to conscious scrutiny. However, they continually press for expression and, in the end, find release in the violence of war, sadistic pleasures, individual acts of anti-social destruction, and under certain circumstances self-destruction.
But he ultimately rejects it:
Although aggressive tendencies are part and parcel of human nature, they have hardly anything to do with the behavior observed in the experiment. Nor do they have much to do with the destructive obedience of soldiers in war, of bombardiers killing thousands on a single mission, or enveloping a Vietnamese village in searing napalm. The typical soldier kills because he is told to kill and he regards it as his duty to obey orders. The act of shocking the victim does not stem from destructive urges but from the fact that subjects have become integrated into a social structure and are unable to get out of it.
In one of the permutations of the experiment, subjects were allowed to choose the level of shock they could administer. Overwhelmingly, they gave the lowest possible shocks. Only when they were in a structured environment directly supervised by an apparently "legitimate" authority did most subjects administer the highest shocks.
Another variation on the experiment deliberately frustrated subjects to see if anger and similar emotions would increase the probability that they would choose to inflict severe shocks given the choice. It had very little effect.
Milgram concludes that
The key to the behavior of subjects lies not in pent-up anger or aggression but in the nature of their relationship to authority. They have given themselves to the authority; they see themselves as instruments for the execution of his wishes; once so defined, they are unable to break free.
In other words, our problem is not that we are "killer apes," rather that we are all too human.
He called this relationship to authority "the agentic state," which will keep until next time...
(This series appeared first in The Goat Rope, a social and economic justice blog.)