The Milgram Experiment: Blind obedience to Authority

Andrew D Atkin:

The Milgram experiment is a famous psychology experiment. It brought attention to common responsiveness to authority, and to how a normal person can torture and even kill someone when a perceived authority tells them to do so.

I believe that the essence of what the Milgram experiment shows us basically relates to the dynamic of displaced responsibility, which itself mostly comes from a blind (as it often is) faith in authority.

We assume that the authority knows best, so we can (and do) do their "dirty work" and with only the faith that it's for a higher and ultimately justified good.

VIDEO of the Milgram experiment.

.....Some "Milgram in action":

Religion:

A couple of weeks ago I was watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel about Blast Fishing. This is where people from third-world countries use cheap explosives to blast-out an area of coral reef, because it offers a cheap and fast way to catch a few fish (the fish just float to the surface dead, after the blast). The problem with it is that it totally destroys the coral eco-system from over a wide area of the blast, which in turn takes hundreds of years to recover.

A man was interviewed who performed blast-fishing (which is illegal, for the record) and was asked how he justified his actions. He emphatically stated that he was doing nothing against his religion - he said that he did not steel, lie or kill.

I think this is a good example of the Milgram effect. The man had effectively displaced moral responsibility for his actions onto his religion. As long as it was ok according to his religion, he could be "happily blind" (morally) to whatever else he was doing. This is similar to what I have written about before, where I describe the mentality of.. "All I have to do is follow the 10 commandments and Jesus will clean up the mess", which religion can create I believe.

It boils down to the same dynamic: displacing responsibility onto a [perceived] higher authority, and going "conveniently" blind to what is real.

The Group:

I would say "the group" is the strongest functional authority for most of us, and the strongest authority that we displace responsibility to. Countless people eat meat, for example, without feeling the need to give even a second thought as to whether or not it is morally acceptable*, and for no other reason than everyone else is doing it.

Of course you could catalogue a library's worth of historic "mob" behaviours of questionable morality.

*I am not saying it's either good or bad to eat meat here, only that the morality of it is often not even tested.

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Another famous experiment: The Asch experiment:

It following video (very short) makes quite a statement of the power of the group over the individual.

The Asch experiment reminds me of one of my old sayings..."If everybody thinks what everybody else thinks, and only because everybody else thinks it, then who exactly is doing the thinking?"

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The Military:

The military gives us an obvious and striking example of the Milgram dynamic, because the military is completely dependant on the direct displacement of responsibility from subordinates to above.

Shouldn't military personnel be checking intensively to make sure their boss's are doing the right thing? Isn't that the least you can do if you going to go around killing people in someone else's name? Alas, I doubt enormously that it would be encouraged. Indeed, the hyper-patriotic mentality (of which is heavily indoctrinated into military personnel) works directly to dis-encourage it.

It's unfortunate, but the military is and always has been dependant on blind obedience to function. The obvious cost is that ultimate power doesn't have to answer to itself, leaving the door open for Tyrants.

Note: Apparently compulsion schooling as we know it today was a direct import from early Germany. It was, as I understand, originally (and specifically) designed to produce good (obedient) military personnel.

You can see how virtually every child that grows up gets the overwhelming message from school--and usually parents too--that obedience is inherently equitable to virtue.

Conclusion:

In my view we all need to learn about the Milgram experiment, so we can understand how dangerous we can be. The Milgram experiment shows us how people who aren't really "bad" can still much too easily do bad. Fronting-up to the Milgram dynamic could do a lot to help us not let it get the better of us.

We can see that we need to actively hold our authorities to account. Displacing responsibility on the basis of a mere faith in authority is immoral, because it can and does lead to immoral actions of which did not otherwise need to occur.

Finally, I will point out that an authority that does not like to be questioned or challenged is the worst kind of authority, because that is an authority that wants you to behave like the people in the Milgram experiment. Of course we should never accept this.