Stanley Milgram: A Character Study in Social Context By: Abby Moran, 121665440 Instructor: Dr. Walsh; TA: Jessica Noble Course: PS 390 November 2, 2014 Stanley Milgram: A Short Biography In 1933, Stanley Milgram was born into a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, New York. That same year, Hitler came to power. While Milgram was safe from the wave of Nazism, he had family who were facing anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe. Milgram’s interest of study was obviously very shaped by his experience with the Holocaust. In Thomas Blass’ biography, he includes part of Milgram’s powerful Bar Mitzvah speech: “The knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews throughout war-torn Europe makes this also a solemn event and an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people”(Blass, 2004, p. 8). In the spring of 1954, Milgram applied for Harvard’s social relations graduate studies program, for he aspired to conduct his own original research. He was interested in national characteristics cross-cultural studies (Russell, 2011, p. 3). It must have been around this time that the seed was planted for Milgram’s obedience studies, as he scrutinized the value of conformity in German culture. During his time at Harvard, Milgram was impressed by the work of Solomon Asch, a psychologist who studied the group’s effect on the honesty of the answer via the Group Pressure/Conformity Experiment (Russell, 2011, p. 4). Asch’s famous experiment involved instructing a group of participants to answer simple questions evaluating lines. However, only one of the participants in each group was really ignorant of the study, and so, the response tendencies of the naïve-participants were observed under the effect of various response patterns made by the surrounding participants. For example, Asch found that when the surrounding six confederates provided an obvious incorrect answer, approximately thirty-two percent of the naïve participants also provided an incorrect answer. By comparing the line task responses made by the naïve participants in solitude compared to those made in the group setting, Asch was able to gather information on group influences on conformity. By 1956, Milgram found himself under Asch’s wing as his teaching assistant at Harvard (Russell, 2011, p. 4). Asch’s educational influence on Milgram is apparent in his PhD thesis at Harvard, which was based on the same premises as Asch’s group pressure experiment. Milgram examined the conforming tendencies observed tone-recognition responses provided by participants when they are overhearing others’ deviant responses. The most significant aspect of Milgram’s study was his added feature of gathering volunteers of different nationalities (Russell, 2011, p. 5). He intended to decipher any identifiable tendencies or differences in the responses that may be culturally dependent. Milgram’s thesis earned “glowing reviews, “ and ultimately resulted in him being offered educational positions at both Harvard and Yale (Russell, 2011, p. 6). He accepted Yale’s offer, where he dug his heels into the obedience studies, with the intention on making the Asch-based experiments more “humanly significant”(Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 127). He found this in having the participants engage in much more extreme and aggressive behavior than observed in his thesis experiments. In 1960, the Obedience to Authority (OTA) studies, featuring electric shock administration, began (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 127). Milgram’s OTA paradigm has become a part of Western culture; countless undergraduate programs involve at least some reference to his work. In Nestar Russell’s background review of the OTA experiments, he articulately summarizes Milgram’s achievements through the words of Lee Ross, who suggested that the experiments have become, “part of our society’s shared intellectual legacy—that small body of historical incidents, biblical parables, and classic literature that serious thinkers feel free to draw upon when they debate about human nature” (Ross, 1988, as cited in Nicholson, 2011, p. 239). A Summary of, Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority: Stanley Milgram’s essay, Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority (1965), is based on the OTA experiments, which began in 1960. The essay was published in a book called, “The Individual in a Social World,” which is a compilation of Milgram’s essays and experiments. This particular essay was written after Milgram had completed the pilot studies of his famous Obedience to Authority experiments. Milgram drew inferences from his findings pertaining to the participant’s psychological processes while they are required to, “resolve a conflict between two mutually incompatible demands from the social field” (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 138). The teacher may comply with the experimenter’s demands and shock the learner with escalating severity. Alternatively, he may defy the authoritative for the sake of the learner’s wellbeing. I will refer to the “teachers” interchangeably as the participants, the “learners” as the victims, and the “authority” as the experimenter. The participants were under the impression that the purpose of the study is to observe the effects of punishment on memory. The learners only posed as naïve participants who had been randomly assigned their experimental roles; in actuality, they were acting. That being said, the victims were not really undergoing forced electric shock, and the cries of agony were fake or recordings. The teachers quizzed the learners on simple word association tasks. When the learners purposely provided incorrect answers, the teachers were instructed shock the learners with increasing intensity. As the learner’s perceived agony intensified, the experimenter’s demands became more coercive. There are a few more facts about the experiment well worth mentioning. Firstly, the teachers were made aware of the severity of the electric shocks that they were administering. The highest shock level on the generator, at 450 volts, was clearly labeled, “severe shock” (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 139). Secondly, the teachers were each given a tester shock 45 volts at the beginning of the experiment. Thus, they were aware that they were administering shocks up to ten times more painful than what they experienced. Thirdly, the initial victim-out-cry recordings that the teachers would hear through the walls proved to be inadequate in eliciting any significant disobedient behavior. The need to dramatize the victim’s representation of agony indicated, in Milgram’s words, “that subjects would obey authority to a greater extend than we had supposed” (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 140). So, how is it that 62 percent of the participants, who were representative of ordinary people, fully obeyed the experimenters’ orders to the highest shock level (Milgram, 1992, p. 154)? Moreover, why did it take such extreme measures to induce their refusal to engage in such wicked behavior? Milgram was surprised to find that the participants who reporting feeling the most stress, as measured by their ranking of tension and nervousness levels experienced before and after the experiment, also tended to be more willing to obey. Conversely, those who reported lower stress levels were associated with higher levels of defiance(Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 149). Furthermore, Milgram reported common bizarre behavior patterns seen in the uncomfortable teachers who completed the experiment, such as inappropriate outbursts of laughter while administering the aggressive, high voltage shocks (Milgram, 1992, p. 149). This was interpreted as an awkwardly backwards expression of discomfort and rigidity. Such behavior indicated that human nature lacked a competent model for disobedience (Milgram, 1992, p. 149). Generally, obedience is perceived to be “good,” while defiance is “bad”. The participants’ contradictory behaviors intrigued Milgram to question why most participants’ actions seemed to be disconnected with their internal desires. That being said, Milgram identified the hugely important impact that the experimenters’ perceived status and expectations had on the participants’ behaviors(Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 151). Leadership, in many ways, is a function of the situation(Dimock, 1966, p. 4). In this case, the authoritative figures are respectable Yale affiliated scientists, whom the participants likely feel pressured to please. With this, Milgram infers that the participants are oriented to comply with the authoritative figure (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 145). Moreover, he described the importance of the authoritative figure’s physical presence in the room in order to maintain the teacher’s obedience (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 147). That being said, Milgram focused on manipulating two paramount parameters of the experiment: the proximity of the authoritative figure, and the proximity of the victim, both in relation to the participant. The latter was examined under the following four conditions: the Remote condition required the teacher’s to shock the victim from a different room, with almost no voice protests. The Voice Feedback condition also placed the teacher and learner in different rooms, but increasingly extreme complaints could clearly be heard through the wall. The Proximity condition again featured learner’s evident expression of agony, this time with the teacher and learner placed in the same room. Lastly, the Touch-Proximity condition was the same as the third, except that the teacher was required to afflict direct physical force upon the learner in order to administer the shock (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 141). Expressed in terms of the proportion of obedient to defiant subjects, the findings are that 34 percent of the subjects defied the experimenter in the Remote condition, 37.5 percent in Voice Feedback, 60 percent in Proximity, and 70 percent in touch-proximity(Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 141). Manipulations made to the closeness to authority revealed that obedience was three times higher when the experimenter was in the room giving orders than when he was providing the teacher with instruction via telephone (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 145). This indicated that people tend to be far less willing to disobey authority when dealing with that authority in person. The OTA experiments offered an insight into how humans deal with an unsettling situation where the disobedient option is also the virtuous one. “Perhaps our culture does not provide adequate models for disobedience”(Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 149). Milgram’s astonishing observations suggested a seemingly natural human inclination to respond to authority with obedience. Furthermore, compliance is an aspect of human nature that comes more naturally and easily than does individualistic, strong-willed, critical thinking. The Social Historical Context of the Mid-1960s: Milgram’s OTA experiments initiated at a time of uncertainty and tension across North America. People wanted answers to unsettling questions. Fear and anxiety swept the US at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s. These feelings arose from the perceived threat of Soviet infiltration, the secretive nature of Communists, Russia’s establishment of nuclear power, and finally, the war in Korea (Moran, 2012, p. 3). “The Smith Act Trial organized themes of secrecy, spies, and conspiracy together in order to bolster its assertion that the Communist party was an illegal scheme under Soviet control” (Moran, 2012, p. 2). These events, in combination with the uproar of McCarthyism, sparked the nation-wide hysteria in the 1950’s known as the Cold War (Schrecker, 2002). All the while, the world was reeling from the Nazi regime’s attempted Jewish extermination, and the horrifying discoveries surrounding the on-goings at WWII concentration camps that were unveiled post-war. How is it possible for humans to organize and commit such extreme and aggressive behavior? In the midst of all the paranoia, disgust, and confusion, Milgram’s OTA revelations provided some new understanding of some unsettling aspects of human nature. The social context at the time of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiments is extremely significant because of how universally relatable his theories were, while the world seemed to be in turmoil. The OTA experiments were conducted in 1963, and Obedience and Disobedience to Authority was published in 1965. Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi lieutenant colonel, was finally tried for his heinous acts during the Second World War at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trails in 1960. Eichmann’s apparent normality was extremely unsettling(Jetten & Mols, 2014). Eichmann was responsible for the transporting an immeasurable number of Jews to concentration camps and, subsequently, to their death (Maier-Katkin & Stoltzfus, 2013). In Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974), he references Hannah Arendt’s well-known and controversial phenomenon known as “the banality of evil.” This idea was initially documented in her book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and it describes how ordinary people engage in group evil. Her ideas were based around Eichmann’s indifferent claims that he was simply doing his job. Milgram stated, “Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare to imagine […] ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” (Milgram, 1974, p. 3). Milgram’s studies alone do not explain how the Holocaust occurred. His studies did, however, allow inferential observation of several aspects of group-committed atrocities, such as indicators of internal conflict seen in the teachers. For example, in one particular participant’s idiosyncratic session, he exhibited repeated and explicit protest. He angrily expressed his disagreement with initiating the requested shocks. Astoundingly, the participant still continues to shock the learner until he reaches the highest level of 450 volts. According to Milgram, “He was unable to invent a response that would free him from [the experimenter’s] authority,” (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 149). Additionally, Milgram identified the significance of the conflicting behaviors observed in several participants who sneakily administered lower shocks than instructed when the experimenter left the room, for example (Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, 1992, p. 147). In both of these examples, the participant seemed to force himself to comply and therefore his actions are not in line with his wishes. Some Nazi’s were undoubtedly anti-Semitic extremists who meant to eradicate the Jews. However, Milgram ideology can be used to explain the vast number of Nazi’s, who may have just been mindlessly following orders involved in a new political movement towards an Aryan utopia. As the regime became more powerful, the Nazi sheep were instructed to take more ruthless and radical action. Milgram emulated such escalating conditions in the laboratory setting. As the learner’s pain became more apparent, the experimenter became increasingly persistent. All the while, the authority verbally reinforces the teacher for their compliance and aggressive behavior. Milgram’s observations regarding the proximity of the victim to the teacher is considerable in Eichmann’s case. For 62 percent of the participants, total compliance was an easy track to fall on. Comparatively, Eichmann worked a desk job that simply required him to obey orders, and relay demands. Additionally, he never had to directly face the agony and suffering he was causing. Conclusively, Milgram supported Arendt’s banality of evil by showing how ordinary people, without any preexisting hostilities, became agents of violence so long as they complied to just “do their job”. Critical Reflections… In times of war, aggressive propaganda in combination with a general acclimatization to violence facilitates the development of effective torturers. In his 2005 article titled, The Policy Context of Torture: A Social Psychological Analysis, Herbert Kelman dug into greater detail about how people come to commit atrocities by means of obedience to authority. Torture, according to Kelman, is “a crime of obedience” (Kelman, 2005, p. 372). Since the obedient participants believed that they continued to shock the learners against their will, it was a means of torture. Kelman identified three main processes that expedite the formation of torture policy. Firstly, the purpose and justification of the torture is established (Kelman, 2005, p. 374). In the setting of the OTA experiment, the purpose, from the perception of the participant, was to partake in a scientific study meant to examine the effects of punishment on memory. Secondly, Kelman asserts that the authority must recruit agents of torture; and this exemplified via the small monetary compensation offered to the teachers for participating in the study (Milgram, 1992, p. 138). Thirdly, the targets of torture must be clearly defined. In the context of wartime torture, the “targets” are defined as national threats, or “enemies of the State” (Kelman, 2005, p. 375). Kelman’s third notion is intriguing in regards to the OTA revelations, as the experimenters did not have to turn the learners into explicit enemies in order to persuade the participants into torturing their victims. After all, the participants believed that their assigned roles (learner or teacher) were casted at random. However, the circumstances of the experiment seem to place the teachers on a “team” with the experimenters, as they communicated throughout the experiment. In contrast, the learner seemed to be alienated. Therefore, the illusion of “us-versus-them,” was sufficient enough to marginalize the “targets of the torture,” in the context of Milgram’s experiment. This universal process of forming in-groups and out-groups is seen repeatedly in situations involving conflict, war, and, most extremely, genocide. Furthermore, Kelman holds authoritative figures responsible for formulating policies and creating an atmosphere in order to “establish a framework within which officials intermediate levels of hierarchy translate general policy directives into specific acts of torture,” (Kelman, 2005, p. 373). Milgram’s OTA paradigm is associable with Kelman’s theory for how people commit torture in numerous ways. For example, the experimenters exemplified the ease in which an authoritative figure was able set an atmosphere where the participants felt immense pressure to conform. Kelman’s theory represents just one of countless examples of how the OTA paradigm, along with Milgram’s brilliant inferences regarding obedience and aggression, are continuously applicable to world issues. Not only are his findings universally applicable, but they also provide a useful understanding of some astounding aspects of human nature, such as, how ordinary people can engage in group evil. According to Jetton and Mols, the world of psychology has barely scratched the surface when it comes interpreting Milgram’s archives. They suggest that most views are ignorant of the richness of the OTA observations, because most are distracted by the obvious interpretation of the findings – that humans are very capable of harming others when positioned to “merely follow orders” (Jetten & Mols, 2014, p. 2). New information has been accessed through the Milgram archives at Yale, making his work even more compelling. More than fifty years after the actual OTA experimentation occurred, fresh interpretations are still being developed. Jetton and Mols suggest that psychologists be inspired to delve deeper into his work in search of answers to more complex aspects of human nature (Jetten & Mols, 2014, p. 2). Finally, in my personal opinion, Milgram’s OTA experiments, and his assertions made in such pieces as, Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience, provide invaluable insight. Conclusively, he shocked the world by revealing an ugly display of human tendency to conform. He offered the world a way to digest Arendt’s, “banality of evil,” and he broadened the span of psychology’s understanding of human nature. And so, fifty years on, “the obedience experiments continue to inspire and there is still much more than can be learned from engagement in his work”(Jetten & Mols, 2014, p. 1). Bibliography Blass, T. (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World: the Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York, New York, United States: Basic Books. Dimock, H. (1966). Groups: Leadership and Group Development. San Deigo, California, United States: University Associates Inc. . Jetten, J., & Mols, F. (2014). 50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments. The Journal of Social Issues , 70 (3), 587-602. Kelman, H. C. (2005). The Policy Context of Torture: A Social Psychological Analysis. In F. Richard, G. Irene, & R. J. Lifton (Eds.), Crimes of War: Iraq. (2006) (Vol. 87, pp. 371-378). New York, New York, United States: Nation Books. Maier-Katkin, D., & Stoltzfus, N. (2013 йил 10-06). Hannah Arendt On Trial. 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