Conformity

In World War 2, Hitler and the Nazis murdered roughly 6 million people. They committed atrocious crimes that any sane person would call immoral, if not outright crazy. But Hitler did not personally kill all those people himself. Thousands of people were involved in the plot, and many more were aware of the situation but said nothing. Why did so many people acquiesce, by word, deed, or inaction, to those terrible crimes? Were they all insane? Or were they all simply bad people?

After the war, Western psychologists wondered how such a thing could happen. They came up with theories such as groupthink and peer pressure. They also devised experiments to examine the how humans are influenced by others, for better or for worse.

A psychologist named Milgram devised an experiment to examine how humans responded to orders that were morally ambiguous, if not outright wrong. He took forty volunteers and put them in a lab together with forty confederates (people who were put there by the psychologist to perform a specific set of actions, unknown to the volunteers). They were subsequently paired up, one volunteer to one confederate, and the volunteer was told that he was to play the role of the "teacher", and the confederate the "learner". The experiment, they were told, would involve the teacher reading a series of word pairs to the learner on the other side of a partition and then testing the learner's memory by giving a word and asking for the correct matching word from four alternatives. During set-up the teacher watched the learner being strapped into an electric chair, and the teacher was told that the most effective learning occurred with punishment. At the teacher's station there was a panel with 30 switches labeled from 15 to 450 volts- subjective labels included: slight shock/moderate shock/strong shock/very strong shock/intense shock/extremely intense shock/danger-severe shock/XXX. The teacher was then told that at the first error the 15 volt switch was to be used, moving up one level each time the learner made an error. In reality, no shocks were delivered other than a “sample shock” to the teacher. The learner was trained to respond with protests as the shock level increased- at 150 he stated he did not want to continue with the experiment [the experimenter in white lab coat told the teacher, in a level tone of voice, “the experiment must go on” or “it is absolutely necessary to continue” or similar], then he began to shout. At 300 volts he began to kick the wall, and at the highest level he no longer made any noise at all – not even answering the question [the experimenter told the teacher that refusal to answer was the same as a wrong answer].

Disturbing though the experiment may be, the results were even more incredible. A full 65% of the “teachers” went all the way to 450 volts under the original conditions [N = 40]. 5 stopped after using “intense shock”, 8 stopped after using “extreme–intensity" shock, 1 stopped after using “danger – severe" shock, and 26 used the 450 volt “XXX” switch.

Furthermore, in a repeat of the experiment with varying conditions (the teacher pulled a lever to signal another person to actually administer the shock by using a lever on the shock panel- he did not personally deliver the "punishment"), a whopping 93% of the subjects went all the way to XXX.

Kinda chilling, don't you think? The experiment clearly demonstrated that almost everybody would "go along" with something clearly immoral, given certain situations. When someone with higher rank or status tells us to do something, we more often than not go along with the order, even if the order goes against our personal morality.

But the experiment fails to explain WHY men (and women!) behave like that in such a situation. What makes us repress our conscience and do such terrible things to other people? Why do most of us conform to situations that are clearly wrong? Why are we so easily influenced by negative pressures? The experiment questions the strength of human morality and paints an overall bleak picture of humanity. Those who dare stand up against the tyrants of injustice and cruel immorality are justly called the few.

This leads me to ask the question- if I were put in such a situation, how would I react? Would I be part of the conforming 93% or the brave 7%? I would, of course, like to believe that I would be part of the latter, but in truth I honestly don't know.

I have a friend here that signs off his letters and messages with "Unconformingly, (insert name)". If only that were true for more people in real life.

What do you think you would have done as a subject in the experiment?



Citation
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.