Obedience
Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure".
Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others.
Subjects were told to ignore the agonized screams of the learner, his desire to be untied and stop the experiment, and his pleas that his life was at risk and that he suffered from a heart condition.
This result was surprising to Milgram because he thought that "subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will".
[4] Milgram attempted to explain how ordinary people were capable of performing potentially lethal acts against other human beings by suggesting that participants may have entered into an agentic state, where they allowed the authority figure to take responsibility for their own actions.
Burger's method was identical to Milgram's except when the shocks reached 150 volts, participants decided whether or not they wanted to continue and then the experiment ended (base condition).
This methodology was considered more ethical because many of the adverse psychological effects seen in previous studies' participants occurred after moving past 150 volts.
Participants' comments from the previous study were coded for the number of times they mentioned "personal responsibility and the learner's well being".
In one of the Utrecht University studies on obedience, participants were instructed to make a confederate who was taking an employment test feel uncomfortable.
[10] Neuroscience has only recently begun to approach the question of obedience, bringing novel but complementary perspectives on how obeying or issuing commands impacts brain functioning, fostering conditions for moral transgressions.
Activity in brain regions associated with the interpersonal feeling of guilt was also reduced when participants obeyed orders compared to acting freely.
The rates of obedience were very similar to those found in the Milgram study, showing that participants' tendency to obey has not declined over time.
[18] In one of Blass' reviews on obedience, he found that participant's personalities can impact how they respond to authority,[18] as people that were high in authoritarian submission were more likely to obey.
[19] He replicated this finding in his own research, as in one of his experiments, he found that when watching portions of the original Milgram studies on film, participants placed less responsibility on those punishing the learner when they scored high on measures of authoritarianism.
Another study involving political science measured public opinion before and after a Supreme Court case debating whether or not states can legalize physician assisted suicide.
They found that participants' tendency to obey authorities was not as important to public opinion polling numbers as religious and moral beliefs.
Nurses, unaware they were taking part in an experiment, were ordered by unknown doctors to administer dangerous doses of a (fictional) drug to their patients.
[25] In some Christian weddings, obedience was formally included along with honor and love as part of the bride's (but not the bridegroom's) marriage vow.
When the Milgram experimenters were interviewing potential volunteers, the participant selection process itself revealed several factors that affected obedience, outside of the actual experiment.
[4][27] Despite the dilapidated state of the building, the researchers found that the presence of a Yale professor as stipulated in the advertisement affected the number of people who obeyed.
comments on Milgram's attention to detail in his experiment: The research was also conducted with amazing verve and subtlety—for example, Milgram ensured that the "experimenter" wear a grey lab coat rather than a white one, precisely because he did not want subjects to think that the "experimenter" was a medical doctor and thereby limit the implications of his findings to the power of physician authority.Despite the fact that prestige is often thought of as a separate factor, it is, in fact, merely a subset of power as a factor.
"[29] Besides this hypothetical agentic state, Milgram proposed the existence of other factors accounting for the subject's obedience: politeness, awkwardness of withdrawal, absorption in the technical aspects of the task, the tendency to attribute impersonal quality to forces that are essentially human, a belief that the experiment served a desirable end, the sequential nature of the action, and anxiety.
Hence, the underlying cause for the subjects' striking conduct could well be conceptual, and not the alleged 'capacity of man to abandon his humanity ... as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.
