The classic rhetorical question, “If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” Is meant to test the power of social influence, a topic I discussed in my last blog post. An edited version of that question, “If a person of great authority ordered you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?”, is focussed more on the idea of obedience.

Obedience refers to complying to a command, made typically by someone who is of high authority. This implies conformity without really believing in or supporting the behavior demanded. While self-preservation, the drive evaluated in the second question proposed above, is often strong enough to overcome our desire to obedient, you would be surprised by how much we are capable of sacrificing in order to satisfy this desire.

It is frightening to believe that all people, not just those who are perceived as bad or immoral, have a capacity for evil. This capability depends especially on our psychological need to be obedient. But from where is this need derived? Social psychologists attribute human obedience to normative and informational social influence, as well as self-justification.

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to explore the extent of human obedience when people are told to harm other people. Milgram created an experiment that is taught in almost every university’s social psychology class. HIs findings provided significant information about how the social situation affects the behavior affects human beings, while also calling into question the morality of psychological research methods.

Milgram has participants enter his lab under the impression that they would be participating in a study regarding learning and teaching methods. Participants were joined by confederates, people working with the psychological team. The participants and confederates were assigned either the role of teacher or student for the next situation. This assignment was not random, although the participants believed it was, with confederates being given the student role and participants the teacher role.

The participants and confederates were taken to separate rooms. Participants were shown a shock device and were told that the confederates in the other room were wired to this machine. They were instructed to ask confederates questions from a list. If the confederates answered correctly, no shock would be administered, but if the answer was incorrect, the participants were told to press a button and unleash an electric shock on the “students’. After each incorrect answer, the shock level would increase in increments, spanning from 15 volts to 450 volts.

In the other room, confederates increasingly answered questions incorrectly, as per instructions. As the electric shock voltage grew, confederates played pre-recorded audio snippets of them crying out in pain or asking to be let out of the study. These recordings became even more disturbing as the voltage grew. Eventually, the confederates stopped playing recordings, giving the participants the idea that they had gone unconscious.

Why would the participants continue to shock the confederates after feelings of pain were vocalized? It is important to mention that an experimenter was present in the room where the participants sat. This experimenter told the participants that it was imperative that they continue with the study, and that they could not stop. Protesting participants were met with those kinds of statements.

The participant’s behavior can be attributed to their need for obedience. Participants did not want to challenge the experimenter; they felt the need to continue administering electric shocks simply because the experimenter was telling them to do so.

The participants who reached the electric shock level after which the confederates feigned unconsciousness or death walked out of the studying knowing they were capable of killing a stranger, simply because someone else told them to do so. This inevitably caused psychological, even though they were informed that they had not actually harmed the confederates.

The findings of Milgram’s study make me re-evaluate my power to resist the authority of others, and hopefully, they do the same for you.