Decision Quality Blog

I’ve known about Stanley Milgram’s breakthrough work on obedience for some time. The classic study involved participants administering progressively greater electrical shocks to a learner at the instruction of a researcher. As the shocks increased in intensity, the learner became increasingly uncomfortable and vocal. At some point, and participants had been told what that point was, the level of shock would be damaging if not lethal. Some people stopped when the screaming started. Many didn’t. The truth was the learner was just acting. But the participants didn’t know that at the time. The experiment was about them, not the person strapped to the electrodes.

Recently two researchers went back and revisited this landmark experiment. As reported in the NYT . . .

The participants usually began with what they thought were 15-volt shocks, and worked upward in 15-volt increments, as the experimenter instructed. At 75 volts, the “learner” in the next room began grunting in apparent pain. At 150 volts he cried out: “Stop, let me out! I don’t want to do this anymore.”

At that point about a third of the participants refused to continue, found Dominic Packer, author of the new paper. “The previous expressions of pain were insufficient,” Dr. Packer said. But at 150 volts, he continued, those who disobeyed decided that the learner’s right to stop trumped the experimenter’s right to continue. Before the end of the experiments, at 450 volts, an additional 10 to 15 percent had dropped out.

This appreciation of another’s right is crucial in interrogation, Dr. Packer suggests. When prisoners’ rights are ambiguous, inhumane treatment can follow. Milgram’s work, in short, makes a statement about the importance of human rights, as well as obedience.

That last bit is the bell ringer and points to the hugely compromising dynamic many of our service members and intelligence people have been put in by our political leaders. More generally, I think it also points to the ease with which we objectify and demonize people we have no real contact with. If you’re not a person to me, I see you very differently than if you are.

In the other paper, due out in the journal American Psychologist, a professor at Santa Clara University replicates part of the Milgram studies — stopping at 150 volts, the critical juncture at which the subject cries out to stop — to see whether people today would still obey. Ethics committees bar researchers from pushing subjects through to an imaginary 450 volts, as Milgram did.

The answer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Jerry M. Burger, the author, interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. That is, the Milgram work also demonstrated individual differences in perceptions of accountability — of who’s on the hook for what.

Another interesting finding. If we perceive we’re accountable for what’s going on, we behave one way. If not, many of us behave differently. Not just differently, but potentially horribly.

And finally not this . . .

The Milgram data have unappreciated complexities of their own. In his new report, Dr. Burger argues that at least two other factors were at work when participants walked into the psychologist’s lab at Yale decades ago. Uncertainty, as it was an unfamiliar situation. And time pressure, as they had to make decisions quickly. Rushed and disoriented, they were likely more compliant than they would otherwise have been, Dr. Burger said. [emphasis added]

In short, the Milgram experiments may have shown physical, biological differences in moral decision making and obedience, as well as psychological ones. Some people can be as quick on the draw as Doc Holliday when they feel something’s not right. Others need a little time to do the right thing, thank you, and would rather not be considered sadistic prison guards just yet.

Those two dimensions of uncertainty and time pressure to produce results, to get something done, are ready reagents that expose our true convictions, or lack thereof, along with predictable human foibles when it comes to making decisions under stress and uncertainty. Thankfully, few of us will be exposed to the kind of stresses mimicked in the Milgram experiments. Unfortunately, many people acting on our behalf at the “sharp end of the spear” are exposed to those pressures all the time, but that’s a subject for another discussion. For the rest of us, take it as caution that stress and uncertainty have the capacity to expose both simple decision traps and parts of ourselves that may not serve as as we wish. The good news is you can do something about it.

Tags: StanleyMilgram, Obedience, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Dominic Packer, Jerry M. Burger, Thomas Blass