Bordens Social Psychology (3rd ed)

Destructive Obedience and the Social Psychology of Evil

There is a tendency to attribute acts of destructive obedience to some abnormal internal characteristics of those who perpetrate such acts. Often we refer to individuals such as Adolph Eichmann (the “architect” of the Holocaust) as “evil.” The term evil has been widely used historically and in contemporary culture. For example, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, President George Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil” because of their pursuit of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. In 1983, the late President Ronald Reagan referred to the former Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” and the focus of all evil in the world at the time. And, of course Osama bin Laden is commonly tagged with the “evil” moniker.

What does the term evil actually entail? Traditionally, notions of evil have been left to philosophers and theologians. Recently, however, social psychologists have given consideration to the concept and have developed social psychological concepts of evil. In contrast to the traditional notion of evil that imbues a person with aberrant internal characteristics, social psychologists favor a situational definition of evil focusing on overt behavior. For example, Zimbardo (2004) defines evil as “intentionally behaving, or causing others to act, in ways that demean, dehumanize, harm, destroy or kill innocent people” (p. 22). Under this definition, a wide range of behaviors including terrorism, genocide, and even corporate misdeeds could be considered evil (Zimbardo, 2004).

How does a social psychological definition of evil relate to obedience? Obedience to a command from an authority figure can produce evil outcomes. For example, Adolph Eichmann, carrying out orders of his Nazi superiors, was directly responsible for the extermination of millions of innocent human beings. Obedience has the power to transform ordinary people into those who are willing do things they would not ordinarily do (Zimbardo, 2004). Zimbardo has identified 10 principles inherent in obedience that can bring about this transformation. These are shown in Table 7.2.

What are roots that underlie evil? This question of course can be addressed from a number of perspectives, including philosophical and religious. However, we will limit ourselves to a social psychological answer to the question. Baumeister and Vohs (2004) identify four roots of evil deeds. These are:

1.Instrumentality: Using violence to achieve a goal or solve a conflict.

2.Threatened egotism: Violence as a response to impugned honor or wounded pride.

3.Idealism: Evil deeds performed to achieve some higher good.

4.Sadism: Enjoying harming others (more likely to be reported by victims than perpetrators).

According to Baumeister and Vohs, the four roots form a causal chain that moves one toward perpetrating evil deeds.Afinal link between the four roots and the actual evil behavior, however, is a loss of self-control (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004). When one loses normal constraints against carrying out evil deeds (e.g., mass violence), evil is more likely to be the result. When mechanisms of self-control are maintained, evil deeds are less likely.

Staub (1989) suggests three other roots of evil. These are: difficult life conditions, cultural and personal preconditions, and the social-political organization. Staub points out that evil deeds are often perpetrated under difficult life conditions such as economic depression and social disorganization. For example, the dismal economic conditions in Germany after World War I certainly contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party and the subsequent evil perpetrated on Jews and others. Cultural and personal factors are rooted

Table 7.2 Ten Principles Inherent in Obedience That Can Bring About

Transformation of Obedience to Evil

1.Providing an acceptable reason for the objectionable action.

2.Arranging for a written or verbal contract to perform action.

3.Providing individuals with meaningful roles to play (e.g. prison guard).

4.Developing rules that must be followed, which are then used to justify action.

5.Altering language so that the individual believes he or she is not really hurting a victim.

6.Providing opportunities for passing responsibility on to others (diffusion of responsibility), absolving individual of direct personal responsibility for actions.

7.Beginning the process of obedience with small initial acts and then requiring larger acts later.

8.Increasing the level of harm to the victims incrementally over time.

9.Gradually changing the nature of the authority from reasonable to unreasonable.

10.Making it difficult to suspend obedience and making the costs for disobedience high.

Based on Zimbardo (2004, p. 28).

in individual self-concept and traditional in-group/out-group separations in a culture. When oneʼs self-esteem is threatened, that individual will move toward regaining a sense of control and power. This can be accomplished by establishing a sense of superiority of oneʼs in-group over out-groups. This is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany. Finally, certain social-political organization structures are more likely to give rise to evil deeds than others. Totalitarian, authoritarian systems that institutionalize prejudice and discrimination are most likely to lead to evil deeds. Again, this is precisely what existed in Nazi Germany prior to the implementation of the “Final Solution” of the Jewish problem resulting in the murder of millions.

The Banality of Evil: Eichmannʼs Fallacy

It would be a relief if those carrying out acts of destructive obedience were deviant individuals predisposed to antisocial behavior. Unfortunately, history tells us that those who perpetrate evil are often quite ordinary. William Calley, who was in command of the platoon that committed a massacre at the Vietnamese village of My Lai, was ordinary before and after My Lai. So too was Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. So was Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust and the Nazi officer responsible for the delivery of European Jews to concentration camps in World War II.

Eichmannʼs job was to ensure that the death camps had a steady flow of victims. He secured the railroad cattle cars needed to transport the human cargo. His job was managerial, bureaucratic; often he had to fight with competing German interests to get enough boxcars. When the war was over, Eichmann, a most-wanted war criminal, escaped to Argentina. From 1945 to 1961, he worked as a laborer outside Buenos Aires. His uneventful existence ended in 1961 when he was captured by Israeli secret agents, who spirited him to Israel. There he stood trial for crimes against humanity. After a long trial, Eichmann was found guilty and was later hanged.

The cases of Eichmann and Heinrich raise some important issues about responsibility. Is “I was only following orders” a valid defense? Does it erase personal responsibility? Or should individuals be held accountable for their behavior, even if they were following orders? On the surface it would appear that Eichmann and Heinrich were personally responsible for their behavior. However, a deeper examination of authority and its effects on behavior suggests a more complex picture, a picture with many aspects. These issues and questions served as the catalyst for what are probably the most famous experiments on obedience.

Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience

How does one test destructive obedience in a laboratory setting? The late Stanley Milgram devised a simple yet powerful situation. Before we look at it, letʼs consider the sociohistorical “climate” in the United States at the time. The year was 1962. Vietnam was but a blip on the back pages of the newspapers. The Kennedy assassinations had not yet occurred, nor had the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., Watergate, or the riots in the streets of Newark, Detroit, and Watts. This was America before the real 1960s began, still holding on to some of the innocence, however illusory, of the 1950s. This context is important to consider because it may have influenced how people behaved in Milgramʼs experiments.

The Participantʼs Perspective

Letʼs begin by considering what these experiments looked like from a participantʼs perspective (Elms, 1972). Imagine you are living in New Haven, Connecticut. One day you notice an ad in the paper asking for volunteers for an experiment on learning and memory at nearby Yale University. The researchers are clearly seeking a good representation of the general population. The ad piques your curiosity, and you decide to sign up for the experiment.

When you arrive for the experiment, a young man, Mr. Williams, Dr. Milgramʼs associate, writes out a check to each of you for $4.50. Williams tells you that little is known about the impact of punishment on learning, and that is what this experiment is about. You become a bit concerned when Williams says that one of you will be a learner and the other will be a teacher. Your fears about getting punished soon evaporate when you draw lots to see who will be the learner and you draw the role of the teacher.

Preliminaries out of the way, Williams leads you both into a room past an ominous-looking piece of equipment labeled “Shock Generator, Thorpe ZLB . . .

Output 15 volts—450 volts” (Milgram, 1974). The learner, Mr. Wallace, is told to sit in a straight–backed metal chair. Williams coolly tells you to help strap Wallaceʼs arms down to prevent “excessive movement” during the experiment, which you do. Williams then applies a white paste to Wallaceʼs arms, which he says is electrode paste “to avoid blisters and burns.” Wallace is now worried, and he asks if there is any danger. Williams says, “Although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage” (Elms, 1972, p. 114).

In front of the learner is a row of switches that he will use to respond to your questions. Williams tells you that a light panel in the other room will register the learnerʼs responses. If his answers are correct, you, the teacher, tell him so. If incorrect, you deliver an electric shock from the shock generator.

Itʼs time to start the experiment. You leave Wallace strapped to the shock generator and follow Williams into the next room. He places you before a control panel that has 30 levers, each with a little red light and a big purple light above. The lights have signs above them reading 15 volts, 30 volts, 45 volts, and so on, up to 450 volts. There

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are also printed descriptions of the shock levels above the labels, reading Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intense Shock, and finally, over the last few switches, in red, Danger: Severe Shock XXXXX. At this point, you hope that Wallace is brighter than he looks (Elms, 1972).

Before you begin the experiment, Williams gives you a sample shock of 45 volts, which gives you a little jolt. Next, you are told that your task is to teach Wallace several lists of word pairs, such as blue–box, nice–day, wild–duck. You read the entire list of word pairs and then test him, one pair at a time, by providing the first word from each pair.

At first the test is uneventful; Wallace makes no errors. Then he makes his first mistake, and you are required to give him a 15-volt shock. Williams tells you that for every error after that, you are to increase the shock by 15 volts. On subsequent trials Wallace makes frequent errors. When you get to 105 volts, you hear Wallace yell through the wall, “Hey, this really hurts!”

Williams, cool as ever, doesnʼt seem to notice. You certainly do. At 150 volts, the moaning Walace yells, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I wonʼt be in the experiment anymore. I refuse to go on!” (Elms, 1972, p. 115). You look at Williams. He says softly but firmly, “Continue.”

Williams brings you more word-pair lists. You begin to wonder what you and Wallace have gotten into for $4.50. You are now at 255 volts, Intense Shock. Wallace screams after every shock. Whenever you ask Williams if you can quit, he tells you to continue. At 300 volts, you wonder if Wallace is going to die. “But,” you think, “they wouldnʼt let that happen at Yale . . . or would they?”

“Hey, Mr. Williams,” you say, “whose responsibility is this? What if he dies or is seriously injured?” Williams does not bat an eye: “Itʼs my responsibility, not yours, just continue with the experiment.” He reminds you that, as he told you before, the labels apply to small animals, not humans.

Finally it is over. There are no more shock switches to throw. You are sweaty, uneasy. Wallace comes in from the other room. He is alive and seems okay. You apologize. He tells you to forget it, he would have done the same if he had been in your shoes. He smiles and rubs his sore wrists, everybody shakes hands, and you and Wallace walk out together.

Predicted Behavior and Results in the Milgram Experiment

How do you think you would behave in Milgramʼs experiment? Most people think they would refuse to obey the experimenterʼs orders. Milgram was interested in this question, so he asked a wide range of individuals, both expert (psychiatrists) and nonexpert (college students and noncollege adults), how they thought participants would behave in this situation. They all predicted that they would break off the experiment, defying the experimenter. The psychiatrists predicted that participants would break off when the learner began to protest, at the 150-volt level. So, if you believe that you would defy the experimenter and refuse to inflict pain on another person, you are not alone.

Another study, independent from Milgramʼs, investigated the role of several variables in predicting obedience in a Milgram-type experiment (Miller, Gillen, Schenker, & Radlove, 1974). Miller et al. provided participants with verbal descriptions and a slide show depicting Milgramʼs experiment. Miller et al. looked at two classes of variables: Perceiver variables (gender and normative information [some participants were provided with the results of Milgramʼs baseline experiment and others were not]) and stimulus person variables (gender and physical attractiveness). The dependent variable was the

predicted shock level that would be administered in the situation. The results showed that participants believed that males would administer higher shock levels than females and that unattractive individuals would administer higher shock levels than attractive individuals. The latter finding was true mainly for female shock administrators. Interestingly, males showed greater consistency between predictions of another personʼs obedience behavior than did females. Female participants believed they themselves would administer lower levels of shock than would another person in the same situation.

The underlying assumption of these predictions is that individual characteristics will be more powerful determinants of behavior than situational factors. The predictions of Milgramʼs participants reflect the notion that moral knowledge predicts moral behavior; in other words, if you know what is right, you will do it. However, the results of Milgramʼs first “baseline” experiment (in which there was no feedback from the victim) donʼt support these rosy predictions. A majority of participants (65%) went all the way to 450 volts. In fact, the average shock level delivered by the participants in this first experiment was 405 volts! We can infer from this result that under the right circumstances, most of us probably also would go all the way to 450 volts.

Of course, no electric shock was ever given to Wallace, who was, in fact, a professional actor, playing out a script. However, Milgramʼs participants did not know that the entire situation was contrived.

Situational Determinants of Obedience

Milgram himself was surprised at the levels of obedience observed in his first experiment. He and others conducted several additional experiments investigating the situational factors that influence levels of obedience. In the following sections, we explore some of these situational factors.

Proximity of the Victim In his first series of experiments, Milgram tested the limits of obedience by varying the proximity, or closeness, between the teacher and the learner (victim). The conditions were:

1.Remote victim. The teacher and the learner were in separate rooms. There was no feedback from the victim to the teacher. That is, Wallace didnʼt speak, moan, or scream.

2.Voice feedback. The teacher and the learner were in separate rooms, but Wallace began to protest the shocks as they became more intense. This is the experiment just described. In one version of the voice-feedback condition, Wallace makes it clear that he has a heart condition. After receiving 330 volts he screams,

“Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart is bothering me” (Milgram, 1974, p. 55).

3.Proximity. The teacher and the learner were in the same room, sitting only a few feet apart.

4.Touch proximity. The teacher and the learner were in the same room, but the learner received the shock only if his hand was placed on a shock plate. At one point the learner refused to keep his hand on the plate. The teacher was told to hold the learnerʼs hand down while delivering the shock. The teacher often had to hand-wrestle the victim to be sure the hand was properly placed on the shock plate.

continue to do harm to others in a face-to-face, intimate-contact situation. For example, there was no shortage of Nazis willing to shoot Jews at close range during the early stages of the Holocaust.

Milgram also suggested that in the remote-victim condition a “narrowing of the cognitive field,” or cognitive narrowing, occurs. That is, the teacher can put the learner out of mind and focus on the learning task instead. As the victim becomes more observable, such narrowing becomes more difficult, and obedience is reduced. These results suggest that it is more difficult to inflict harm on someone you can see, hear, or touch. This is why it is probably easier to drop bombs on a city of 500,000 from 30,000 feet than to strangle one person with your bare hands.

Power of the Situation A second variable Milgram investigated was the nature of the institution behind the authority. The original studies were conducted at Yale University. To test the possibility that participants were intimidated by the schoolʼs power and prestige, Milgram rented a loft in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut, and conducted the experiment under the name “Research Associates of Bridgeport.” He also had the experimenter represent himself as a high school biology teacher. Under these conditions, obedience fell to 47.5%, down from 65% in the original, baseline study. Although this difference of 17.5% does not meet conventional levels of statistical significance, it does suggest that removing some of the trappings of legitimacy from an authority source reduces obedience somewhat.

Presence and Legitimacy of the Authority Figure What if the authority figure was physically removed from the obedience situation? In another variation on his original experiment, Milgram had the experimenter give orders by telephone, which varied the immediacy of the authority figure, as opposed to varying the immediacy of the victim. He found that when the experimenter is absent or tried to phone in his instructions to give shock, obedience levels dropped sharply, to as little as 20%. The closer the authority figure, the greater the obedience.

After Milgramʼs original research was publicized, other researchers became interested in the aspects of authority that might influence obedience levels. One line of research pursued the perceived legitimacy of the authority figure. Two different studies examined the effect of a uniform on obedience (Bickman, 1974; Geffner & Gross, 1984). In one study (Geffner & Gross, 1984), experimenters approached participants who were about to cross a street and requested that they cross at another crosswalk. Half the time the experimenter was uniformed as a public works employee, and half the time the experimenter was not in uniform. The researchers found that participants were more likely to obey uniformed than nonuniformed individuals.

Conflicting Messages about Obedience Milgram also investigated the impact of receiving conflicting orders. In two variations, participants received such conflicting messages. In one, the conflicting messages came from the learner and the experimenter. The learner demanded that the teacher continue delivering shocks whereas the experimenter advocated stopping the experiment. In the second variation, two authority figures delivered the conflicting messages. One urged the teacher to continue whereas the other urged the teacher to stop.

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When such a conflict arose, participants chose the path that lead to a positive outcome: termination of harm to the learner. When there was conflict between authority sources, or between the learner and the authority source, not one participant went all the way to 450 volts.

Group Effects A fourth variation involved groups of teachers, rather than a single teacher. In this variation, a real participant was led to believe that two others would act as co-teachers. (These other two were confederates of the experimenter.) When the learner began to protest, at 150 volts, one confederate decided not to continue. Defying the experimenterʼs instructions, he walked away and sat in a chair across the room. At 210 volts the second confederate followed. Milgramʼs results showed that having the two confederates defy the experimenter reduced obedience markedly. Only 10% of the participants obeyed to 450 volts (mean shock intensity 305 volts). Thirty-three percent of the participants broke off after the first confederate defied the experimenter but before the second confederate. An additional 33% broke off at the 210-volt level after the second confederate defied the experimenter. Thus, two-thirds of the participants who disobeyed the experimenter did so immediately after the confederates defied the experimenter.

Why does seeing two others disobey the experimenter significantly reduce the participantʼs obedience? One explanation centers on a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility. Diffusion of responsibility occurs when an individual spreads responsibility for his or her action to other individuals present. In the obedience situation in which there were two other teachers delivering shocks, the participant could tell himself that he was not solely responsible for inflicting pain on the learner. However, when the two confederates broke off, he was left holding the bag; he was now solely responsible for delivering shocks. Generally, when people are in a position where they can diffuse responsibility for harming another person, obedience is higher than if they have to deliver the harm entirely on their own and cannot diffuse responsibility (Kilharn & Mann, 1974). In short, having two people defy the experimenter placed the participant in a position of conflict about who was responsible for harming the learner.

There is another explanation for the group effects Milgram observed. When the two confederates broke off from the experiment, a new norm began to form: disobedience. The old norm of obedience to the experimenter is placed into conflict with the new norm of disobedience. The norm of disobedience is more “positive” than the norm of obedience with respect to the harm to the learner. Remember that when participants were given the choice between a positive and a negative command, most chose the positive. The lone participants in the original studies, however, had no such opposing norms and so were more inclined to respond to the norm of obedience. Evidently, having role models who defy authority with impunity emboldens us against authority. Once new norms develop, disobedience to oppressive authority becomes a more viable possibility.

The Role of Gender in Obedience

In Milgramʼs original research, only male participants were used. In a later replication, Milgram also included female participants and found that males and females obeyed at the same levels. However, later research showed that there is a gender difference in obedience. In an experiment conducted inAustralia, Kilham and Mann (1974) found that males obeyed more than females. In another study conducted in the United States, Geffner and Gross (1984) found that males obeyed a uniformed authority more than females did.