A prevailing view, that most participants in such crimes are just following orders, may let people off the hook a little too easily, new research suggests.
Just over 50 years ago, the psychologist Stanley Milgram embarked on what remain the most famous studies touching on the subject. Participants were assigned the role of “teacher” and were told to give shocks to someone described as a “learner.” The shocks became stronger with each wrong answer from the “learner.” As Milgram famously found, participants were willing to deliver what they thought were lethal shocks to a stranger—just because experimenters told them to.
Scientists have concluded based on such work that many people can’t help but obey the orders of those in authority, even when those orders are criminal.
But not all researchers agree this is the whole explanation. Some suggest there is a more active participation beyond mere obedience. In an unusual new study, researchers Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. and colleagues propose a new way of looking at Milgram’s findings.
Rather than obedience to authority, they propose, patterns of social identification might explain the observed behaviors. Thus conditions that encourage identification with the experimenter (and, by extension, the scientific community) might lead participants to follow the experimenters’ orders, while conditions that encouraged identification with the learner (and the general community) would lead participants to defy the unjust orders.
Willingness to engage in destructive behavior may be “a reflection not of simple obedience, but of active identification with the experimenter and his mission,” the researchers wrote in the study, published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Rather than replicate the Milgram studies in some version—something that could raise ethical complications—Reicher and colleagues opted for another experimental strategy. They took advantage of the fact that many variants of the Milgram studies have already been carried out since the original work. They re-analyzed these variants, checking for whether participants behaved differently depending on whether the study context encouraged identification with the experimenters, or with the wider community.
Reicher and colleagues did recruit human participants, but not to press sinister red buttons. The participants were meant to serve as hopefully impartial assessors of the previous studies. Two groups were recruited. An “expert group” included 32 academic social psychologists from two British universities and on Australian university. The “nonexpert” group included 96 first-year psychology students who had not yet learned about the Milgram studies.
All participants were read a short description of Milgram’s original study and they were then given details about 15 variants. For each variant, they were asked to indicate the extent to which that variant would lead participants to identify with the experimenter and the scientific community and the extent to which it would lead them to identify with the learner and the general community.
As expected, identification with the experimenter was found to be a very strong predictor of the level of obedience displayed, the study found, while identification with the learner was a strong predictor of disobedience. The new research “moves us away from a dominant viewpoint that has prevailed within and beyond the academic world for nearly half a century – a viewpoint suggesting that people engage in barbaric acts because they have little insight into what they are doing and conform slavishly to the will of authority,” the researchers wrote.
Looking at the findings this way has several advantages, they argue. First, it mirrors recent historical assessments suggesting functionaries in brutalizing regimes – like the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann – do much more than follow orders. And it accounts for why participants are more likely to follow orders under certain conditions than others, they said.
The findings, they added, suggest social identification gives participants a moral compass and motivates them to act as followers. This followership, the authors remark, is not thoughtless: “it is the endeavor of committed subjects.”
Courtesy of the Association for Psychological Science
and World Science staff
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