Obedience to Authority: Milgram & Zimbardo
“Obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a vice” (Fromm 267). In “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem”, the author Erich Fromm implies that “to be a human an individual must be free to obey and disobey” (272). Being obedient requires the removal of freedom, which comes from expressing your thoughts, feelings and emotions, without any boundaries or pressures from other individuals. An obedient individual is submissive towards another’s’ will and does not have very much freedom. Obedience occurs and can be analyzed when there is a setting of power and expectations to follow authority and a shift in viewpoint. The Stanford Prison Experiment can be interpreted in terms of Milgram’s findings on submission to authority.
In “The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducts an experiment where individuals are forced to violate their conscience and to either obey or disobey the dissolute demands of an authority. The experiment tests the extent to which individuals will obey immoral commands when they are ordered to inflict pain on to learners. “The teacher is a genuinely naïve subject who has come to the laboratory for the experiment. The learner, or victim, is actually an actor who receives no shock at all” (Milgram 223). The experimenter orders the teacher to ask word pairs to the learner; for every word pair wrong, the learner gets shocked with increasing intensity. The individuals administering the shocks would do what was expected of them, “[obeying] the orders of the experimenter to the end, punishing victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the generator. After 450 volts were administered three times, the experimenter called a halt to the session” (224). The teachers did what they were told to do, even when the learners produced loud cries and screams; they simply obeyed the rules and performed their assigned tasks because it was expected of them. Milgram learned that, “the experimenter’s physical presence has a marked impact on his authority” (232). If the experimenter was present in the laboratory rather than on the phone, the teachers would refuse to do their assigned task less than if the experimenter were on the phone giving orders. In “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, Philip K. Zimbardo conducts an experiment where a group of males are selected to be prison guards or prisoners in a mock prison. The setting of the experiment was designed, as if it was a “real” prison. The prison guards were allowed to keep order in the prison by any means necessary; they obeyed the rules and performed their jobs as expected of them. They made the prisoners feel “powerless, arbitrarily controlled, dependent, frustrated, hopeless, anonymous, dehumanized and emasculated” (Zimbardo 256), simply because they were obeying rules. The authoritarian nature of the guards became serious when they “insulted the prisoners, threatened them, were physically aggressive, used instruments to keep the prisoners in line and referred to them in impersonal, anonymous, deprecating ways” (260). In order to fit into the setting the guards were in competition with each other to be stronger and more respected. They wanted to follow “the behavior of the good guards [which] seemed more motivated by a desire to be liked by everyone in the system than by a concern for the inmates’ welfare” (261). We learn that if the setting requires an individual to become an authoritarian, others will be submissive and obedient towards them. Also, the expectations to follow authority are highly regarded until a shift in viewpoint occurs within the individuals.
