Dig Down Deep. Episode 5. Obedience And Why Humans Obey?
and during the time he served was responsible for the death of 4,37,000 Jews out of the total 7,25,000 Jews in Hungary between March 1944 to July 1944. Just 5 months Let that sink in. Finally in the early 1960’s when he was caught and found guilty of his crimes against humanity, he said that he was just following orders.
This triggered a debate in the psychology world putting out a very important question which was that “To what extent will a human obey orders and why?” One of the most famous researches in this field was conducted by an American psychologist named Stanley Milgram, who conducted an experiment called the “Obedience to authority” in the year 1961.
Here is how the experiment took place; three individuals took part in one session of the experiment. One was the ‘experimenter’ who conducted the experiment, another was a volunteer who was paid a sum of 4 dollar for an hour of his time and was given the role of a ‘teacher’, this was the actual subject who was being studied and the third individual was given the role of a ‘learner’, this person was just an actor who pretended to be a volunteer.
Now what happened was that the experimenter told both the individuals that they were taking part in “A Scientific Study of Memory and Learning”, to study the effect of punishment on the memory of an individual which was a lie to make the volunteer act without any bias. And to make it look more real, slips were drawn by both the volunteer and the actor to determine their roles and both the slips would read teacher but the actor would claim that his says learner, making the volunteer the teacher every single time. They were also assured that their payment is secured regardless of the results of the experiment.
In the next step the teacher and the learner were taken into a different room where the learner was tied to an electric chair which had wires and everything and then the teacher was separated from the learner in such a way that they could communicate with each other but were not able to see each other. The teacher and the learner were given some set of words which were in pairs, for example “purple flower’ ‘couch potato’ etc. The task of the teacher was to read out the first half of the word and wait for learner to say the second half.
If the answer was correct the teacher would move on to the next pair of words but if the answer was wrong the teacher was supposed to press a button which would initiate an electric shock to the learner which started from 15volt and for every wrong answer an additional 15volt was added with 450volt being the highest level of shock being given to the learner, which in real life can potentially kill someone. However, there was one catch, which was that both the learner and experimenter knew that there were no actual shocks and the machine was a fake. The whole purpose of the experiment was to make the teacher believe that the shocks were real and to see how they would respond.
The teacher was supposed to generate electric shocks after every wrong answer and the actors would respond with audible protests and discomforting sounds as the shocks began to increase. As the shocks reach the 300volt mark, the learner would start beating on the walls and begging for the experiment to stop and eventually falling silent as the shocks further increased to indicate that something has happened to him.
If during this whole process the teacher wanted to stop the experiment, then in that case the experimenter would give out 4 verbal prods, one at a time. Which were, 1 “Please continue” 2 “The experiment requires that you continue” 3 “It is absolutely essential that you continue” 4 “You have no choice, you must go on”. If the subject still wanted the experiment to stop after listening to the 4 prods, then the experiment was halted. Or if the subject had given a shock of 450volt thrice, then the experiment was halted.
Now, what do you turned out to be the result of the experiment? How many subjects do you think would have actually given out the maximum 450volt of shock? Take a moment and record your answer. Okay, so in the first set of experiment around 65 percent of the subjects administered the maximum shock of 450volt and all of the subjects at least gave a shock of 300volt. Which was a shocking result for Milgram because according to his predictions based on various polls and surveys, just a mere 4 percent of the subjects were predicted to give out a 450volt shock but 65 percent! That was totally unexpected.
Now, what exactly happened here? Why did the person obey the rules even if he didn’t feel okay at the time acting them out? Why didn’t he stop when he wanted to? This experiment was conducted at various places and circumstances and it almost gave the same result. According to Milgram, humans developed social hierarchies as it was more convenient and advantageous for survival. Instead of competing individually it is wiser to act as a group and assign control to an external source which could be a person or an idea.
Most of the people do not have the ability or the expertise to make decisions on a large scale, for example in times of a crisis, and that is when we give up the decision making to someone else who either has more expertise or has made us believe that he has more expertise and the whole group starts to act as the model of the person who is given the authority. In this experiment the teacher had given the authority to the experimenter and had assumed that his thoughts are for the good of all the three participants. For example in the current scenario of Covid19 the authority lies with our governments, and we obey what they think is right because we have a certain set of expectations from them that they are supposed to fulfill.
Another observation made by Milgram was that people tend to associate themselves as agents where they are carrying out the wish of another person. They see themselves as instruments and with that comes the shift in responsibility. When a person believes that he is acting as a mere instrument for another person he feels that he is relived from the responsibility of his actions his morality tends to shake as he is no longer answerable for his acts. The teacher did not felt responsible for the shocks as he was doing as he was told and hence he continued with what he was told.
History is full of such examples where the authority was given to a person whose ideas were not in the favor of humanity and he led a group of people to act immorally without even realizing the consequences of their actions. Whether it is Adolf Hitler or Mussolini or an endless list of people who led us to nothing but war, death, doom, destruction and everything negative. And people like me and you who were present at that time were part of all those acts because they merely obeyed what was being told to them.
It is very tough to function as a society without a guiding figure leading us towards a particular direction. And obeying an authority is a wise and important step towards reaching that direction. But it is very important to strike a balance in blindly obeying the authority and understanding where they are taking us as a society. we might not be very strong as an individual but as groups we are capable of doing wonders as well as creating disasters. So, choose a direction and make sure the person you chose to lead you takes you in that direction, obey him be a part of the development, But when you feel that the person you chose seems to be flawed ask questions and don’t be a living body with a dead brain.!
Comments
Post a Comment