Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

experiment was performed) to read a copy of the experimental procedures and estimate how many subjects would go all the way to the last (450-volt) shock. Invariably, the answers fell in the 1 to 2 percent range. A separate group of thirty-nine psychiatrists predicted that only about one person in a thousand would be willing to continue to the end. No one, then, was prepared for the behavior patterns that the experiment actually produced.

How can we explain those alarming patterns? Perhaps, as some have argued, it has to do with the fact that the subjects were all males who are known as a group for their aggressive tendencies, or that the subjects didn't recognize the potential harm that such high shock voltages could cause, or that the subjects were a freakish collection of moral cretins who enjoyed the chance to inflict misery. But there is good evidence against each of these possibilities. First, the subjects' sex was shown by a later experiment to be irrelevant to their willingness to give all the shocks to the victim; female Teachers were just as likely to do so as the males in Milgram's initial study.

The explanation that subjects weren't aware of the potential physical danger to the victim was also examined in a subsequent experiment and found to be wanting. In that version, when the victim was instructed to announce that he had a heart condition and to declare that his heart was being affected by the shock—'That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out'—the results were the same as before; 65 percent of the subjects carried out their duties faithfully through the maximum shock.

Finally, the explanation that Milgram's subjects were a twisted, sadistic bunch not at all representative of the average citizen has proven unsatisfactory as well. The people who answered Milgram's newspaper ad to participate in his 'memory' experiment represented a standard cross section of ages, occupations, and educational levels within our society. What's more, later on, a battery of personality scales showed these people to be quite normal psychologically, with not a hint of psychosis as a group. They were, in fact, just like you and me; or, as Milgram likes to term it, they are you and me. If he is right that his studies implicate us in their grisly findings, the unanswered question becomes an uncomfortably personal one: What could make us do such things?

Milgram is sure he knows the answer. It has to do, he says, with a deep-seated sense of duty to authority within us all. According to Milgram, the real culprit in the experiments was his subject's inability to defy the wishes of the boss of the study—the lab-coated researcher who urged and, if need be, directed the subjects to perform their duties, despite the emotional and physical mayhem they were causing.

The evidence supporting Milgram's obedience to authority explanation is strong. First, it is clear that, without the researcher's directives to continue, the subjects would have ended the experiment quickly. They hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim's agony. They implored the researcher to let them stop. When he refused, they went on, but in the process they trembled, they perspired, they shook, they stammered protests and additional pleas for the victim's release. Their fingernails dug into their own flesh; they bit their lips until they bled; they held their heads in their hands; some fell into fits of uncontrollable nervous laughter. As one outside observer to the experiment wrote:

I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: 'Oh, God, let's stop it.' And yet he continued to re₁spond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.

In addition to these observations, Milgram has provided even more convincing evidence for the obedience- to-authority interpretation of his subjects' behavior. In a later study, for instance, he had the researcher and the victim switch scripts so that the researcher told the Teacher to stop delivering shocks to the victim, while the victim insisted bravely that the Teacher continue. The result couldn't have been clearer; 100 percent of the subjects refused to give one additional shock when it was merely the fellow subject who demanded it. The identical finding appeared in another version of the experiment in which the researcher and fellow subject switched roles so that it was the researcher who was strapped into the chair and the fellow subject who ordered the Teacher to continue— over the protests of the researcher. Again, not one subject touched another shock lever.

The extreme degree to which subjects in Milgram's situation were attentive to the wishes of authority was documented in yet another variation of the basic study. In this case, Milgram presented the Teacher with two researchers, who issued contradictory orders; one ordered the Teacher to terminate the shocks when the victim cried out for release, while the other maintained that the experiment should go on. These conflicting instructions reliably produced what may have been the project's only humor: In tragicomic befuddlement and with eyes darting from one researcher to another, subjects would beseech the pair to agree on a single command they could follow: 'Wait, wait. Which is it going to be? One says stop, one says go. Which is it!?' When the researchers remained at loggerheads, the subjects tried frantically to determine who was the bigger boss. Failing this route to obedience with the authority, every subject finally followed his better instincts and ended the shocks. As in the other experimental variations, such a result would hardly be expected had the subjects' motivations involved some form of sadism or neurotic aggressiveness.

To Milgram's mind, evidence of a chilling phenomenon emerges repeatedly from his accumulated data: 'It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study.' There are sobering implications of this finding for those concerned about the ability of another form of authority—government—to extract frightening levels of obedience from ordinary citizens. Furthermore, the finding tells us something about the sheer strength of authority pressures in controlling our behavior. After witnessing Milgram's subjects squirming and sweating and suffering at their task, could anyone doubt the power of the force that held them there?

For those whose doubts remain, the story of S. Brian Willson might prove instructive. On September 1, 1987, to protest U.S. shipments of military equipment to Nicaragua, Mr. Willson and two other men stretched their bodies across the railroad tracks leading out of the Concord, California, Naval Weapons Station. The protesters were confident that their act would halt the scheduled train's progress that day, as they had notified Navy and railroad officials of their intent three days before. But the civilian crew, which had been given orders not to stop, never even slowed the train, despite being able to see the protesters six hundred feet ahead. Although two of the men managed to scramble out of harm's way, Mr. Willson was not quick enough to avoid being struck and having both legs severed below the knee. Because Navy medical corpsmen at the scene refused to treat him or allow him to be taken to the hospital in their ambulance, onlookers—including Mr. Willson's wife and son—were left to try to stanch the flow of blood for forty-five minutes until a private ambulance arrived.

Amazingly, Mr. Willson, who served four years in Vietnam, does not blame either the crewmen or the corpsmen for his misfortune; he points his finger, instead, at a system that constrained their actions through the pressure to obey: 'They were just doing what I did in 'Nam. They were following orders that are part of an insane policy. They're the fall guys.' Although the crew members shared Mr. Willson's assessment of them as victims, they did not share his magnanimity. In what is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the incident, the train crew filed suit against him, requesting punitive damages for the 'humiliation, mental anguish, and physical stress' they suffered because he hadn't allowed them to carry out their orders without cutting off his legs.

Whenever we are faced with so potent a motivator of human action, it is natural to expect that good reasons exist for the motivation. In the case of obedience to authority, even a brief consideration of human social organization offers justification aplenty. A multilayered and widely accepted system of authority confers an immense advantage upon a society. It allows the development of sophisticated structures for resource production, trade, defense, expansion, and social control that would otherwise be impossible. The other alternative, anarchy, is a state that is hardly known for its beneficial effects on cultural groups and one that the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes assures us would render life 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Consequently, we are trained from birth that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong. The essential message fills the parental lessons, the schoolhouse rhymes, stories, and songs of our childhood and is carried forward in the legal, military, and political systems we encounter as adults. Notions of submission and loyalty to legitimate rule are accorded much value in each.

Religious instruction contributes as well. The very first book of the Bible, for example, describes how failure to obey the ultimate authority produced the loss of paradise for Adam, Eve, and the rest of the human race. Should that particular metaphor prove too subtle, just a bit further into the Old Testament we can read—in what might be