“Just Following Orders”: The Roots of Obedience — and Why Your Individuality is So Important
By: Yousef Hatlani
Tags: Psychology, Critical Thinking, Individuality, Obedience, Self Improvement

As

election season in the United States reaches critical mass, our emotions are piqued by an unrelenting surge of messages from media all around us. It marks the perfect occasion to revisit some crucial findings on human behavior that Stanley Milgram discovered during his obedience experiments in the 1960s, demonstrating why individuality and critical thinking are invaluable.

As a primer, the Milgram experiment tested how far people were willing to take orders from an authority figure — even if that meant inflicting pain on someone. A distinction should be made here to clarify that Milgram’s investigation was “not of the oppressed, who are coerced by brutal punishment into compliance, but of those who willingly comply because society gives them a role and they are motivated to live up to its requirements.” (Milgram, 1974, p. 175)

Participants went to a laboratory and were calmly directed by a scientist to deliver gradually higher electric shocks to a victim every time they answered a question incorrectly during a memory test. It wasn’t until the end of the process that the “victim” and “scientist” were revealed to be actors, and that no shocks were ever actually administered.

Milgram performed this test on hundreds of people, discovering that while most participants were apprehensive, they nevertheless complied with the scientist’s instructions to keep going. A discomforting amount reached the most lethal shock level of 450 volts and few actually got up to check on the victim, who was secluded in another room. Those who were obedient up until the very end reasoned with Milgram that they were “just following orders,” and — for one reason or another — did not think to disobey the scientist by breaking away from the experiment completely. Some even blamed the victim for not behaving accordingly.

Almost sixty years on, this is still some of the most revealing information we have on people’s capacity to think and act independently.

The Roots of Obedience

Stanley Milgram with the shock generator used in his experiments. Image: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The origins of this behavior can be traced back to birth: the first twenty years of our lives are spent in authoritative environments, beginning with family, moving on to the institutional settings of education and eventually work or public service. In each, we are reminded that disobedience brings punishment, compliance is rewarded and deference is the appropriate way to address an authority figure. With this relationship so embedded in our life experiences, attempts to actually confront authority can naturally trigger feelings of awkwardness and anxiety.

Binding factors come into play during such situations, locking us into an obedient mentality: whether you’re in a board room, the principal’s office, a gym or any relevant environment, the legitimacy of your surroundings will ultimately influence your train of thought. It is also common to feel pressured and display a level of competence in the work you’ve been assigned; many participants in Milgram’s experiment noted that to disobey the “scientist” would be to betray the commitment they initially made to take part in the study, a notion that disregards the safety of the “victim” in the test.

This same thought process also takes shape in group settings; it is human nature to change our behavior when trying to fit in and gain acceptance from others. As an evolutionary trait, organized social life helps guarantee survival and provides a sense of support. Fitting into a hierarchy, be it professionally or personally, often means having to make such behavioral compromises in order for the overall unit to function better. As a result, we suppress our conscience, keep our thoughts to ourselves and comply to help ease the tension.

There is a truly dangerous aspect to obedience: as a state of mind, it can block us from feeling any responsibility for our actions, falling instead on the shoulders of whoever is giving orders. The buffer of blaming someone else applies to even the smallest of interactions and can be carried out to the scale of influencing whole populations; a majority of people fail to think critically and will simply fall in line — even carrying out acts of destruction. It is a fatal flaw of humans that threatens our survival; submissive attitudes allow negative influences to prosper, leading to an acceptance of flawed ideas.

Milgram (1974) writes in his book Obedience to Authority:

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action. (p. 145)

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also posits in his book Flow that “people are the most flexible, the most changeable aspect of the environment we have to deal with,” and that “human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed.” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008, p. 166, 168)

To varying degrees, the ideologies Milgram speaks of reach us every day through the media we expose ourselves to — and because their true intentions are often oversimplified, audiences from every walk of life fall victim to disinformation, perpetuating cycles of groupthink through social media and word of mouth.

Why Your Individuality is So Important

Viktor Frankl contended that the meaning of life is unique to each individual. Image: Austria-Forum

As a first step to breaking this cycle, it is vital to think critically — not just about every headline you read or about every meme you see, but about everything in general. A level of skepticism can actually be very healthy, and with more research tools readily available than ever before, your greatest asset is the amount of time you allow yourself for interpretation.

By design, disinformation spreads quickly. Sharing a piece of information — whether it’s a news story, a tweet or a quote taken out of context — can either be a reflexive act or nurtured to become a disciplined process of judgment. Your split-second decision to choose between the two could stop you from sharing what might end up being outright falsehoods.

Even more essential than this, every human being is equipped with the most fundamental freedom there is: the right to choose how to respond to any given situation. In the same breath, we all possess thoughts that are beyond our ability to express them. For everyone who complied with Milgram’s experiment, there were those who took a great leap and chose to bridge that critical gap between thoughts and actions by decisively calling a stop to the test, sparing the victim and taking responsibility for their actions.



A passage from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (2014) spells this out resolutely:

Man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes — within the limits of endowment and environment — he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example…we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

(p. 125)

We are presented with opportunities to utilize this right on an individual level every single day — and if you live in the United States, your next opportunity to exercise it on a societal level will be by voting on November 3, 2020. This is an indispensable power not granted to everyone in the world, and it should never be taken for granted.

In his 1841 essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that “your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none.” (Emerson, 2000, p. 135) The depth of our character is often tested by our ability to rationalize dissents and disagreement, recognizing those key moments we know could have lasting ramifications without our intervention. The more readily we confront these opportunities, the more obvious they appear and the more confidence we gain in approaching them with grace to achieve the greatest outcome: maintaining our relationships with others even through differences.

Your personality undergoes a transformation during this process, achieving a new level of complexity by being exposed to different perspectives. Over time, these experiences bring your thoughts closer to actions, contributing to self-fulfillment and helping to better define your individuality. This independence becomes a signal for others to draw from, inspiring them to reflect and allow more time for critical thinking.

“What is it we are questing for?” Joseph Campbell contemplated in Pathways to Bliss. “It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.” (Campbell, 2004, p. 108)

References

Campbell, J., Kudler, D., & Joseph Campbell Foundation. (2004). Pathways to bliss: Mythology and personal transformation. Novato, Calif: New World Library.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Emerson, R. W., & Atkinson, B. (2000). The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Frankl, V. E., Pisano, H., Lasch, I., Kushner, H. S., & Winslade, W. J. (2014). Man’s search for meaning.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row.