Exercising judgment in evaluating obedience to rules and authority

Psychology and Obedience

The Milgram and Zimbardo Experiments:

Two of the most important experiments ever conducted in human psychology in the field of obedience to authority and "groupthink" were those conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. Milgram's classic experiment involved a situation where subjects believed they were responsible for giving out painful electric shocks to "learners" in what the subjects believed were experiments into human learning. In fact, the purpose of the experiment was to see how far the subjects would go in obeying an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat.

The experimenter expected few subjects to continue giving shocks to the learners but actually many of them continued giving bigger and bigger shocks even when the learners were pleading to stop the experiment and pretending to be in severe pain. Some of the subjects did refuse to go further but Milgram demonstrated how many ordinary people were capable of following horrible orders exactly the way the German people followed the Nazi party before and during the Second World War.

Zimbardo conducted the famous "Stanford Prison Experiment" in which he assigned some volunteers to be "prison guards" and others (all Stanford undergraduates) to be "prisoners." The "prison" was actually the basement of the Stanford University Psychology building. To make the simulation as real as possible, Zimbardo had the prisoners rounded up from their dormitories in the middle of the night as if they had been raided and arrested by real police.

The only instruction given by Zimbardo to the guards was that they were not allowed to use physical violence against the prisoners. Originally, the experiment was scheduled to last two weeks. Almost immediately, the prison guards began treating the prisoners very harshly as though they were real prison guards and convicts. They abused them verbally and intimidated and punished them for minor violations and before the experiment was even halfway over, Zimbardo had no choice but to terminate it because he was concerned for the safety of the prisoners.

Both the experiments revealed disturbing truths about human psychology. In the Milgram experiment, the subjects followed the instructions of someone who played the part of the person in charge of the experiment against their better judgment. In several cases, the subjects became extremely upset, but after the experimenter explained that he would be fully responsible for anything that happened to the subject, they kept on giving what they thought were very painful and dangerous electric shocks.

Both experiments were filmed and have been taught in psychology classes for decades. Since they were conducted, the American Psychological Association (APA) has established rules and strict guidelines for ethical experimentation that would not allow the kind of deception used at that time. In both experiments, the subjects experienced numerous after-effects including depression, anxiety, and tremendous guilt and they received psychological counselling afterwards.

In the case of the Zimbardo experiment, it is understandable why the prisoners would have suffered from the experience, but it is less obvious why the prison guards and the subjects in the Milgram experiment would. The Milgram subjects in particular did not actually cause any harm to anybody because the setup and the shocks were completely faked. Still, the realization of what they were capable of doing shocked them and caused them tremendous shame, guilt, and anxiety. The members of the Zimbardo experiment have held periodic reunions with Dr. Zimbardo over the years and he filmed a documentary detailing their experiences during and long after the famous experiment. Much more recently, Dr. Zimbardo investigated the abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib Detention Center in Iraq and concluded that some of the very same principles he illustrated almost forty years ago were responsible.

Obedience in Different Situations: