Obedience to Milgram

Now that I've seen the Milgram experiment more times than I can count, I have a very different outlook on it. In particular, I feel very differently about the main message: that anyone can become a killer if placed under the proximate influence of an authority. It's an important result, but what's more important to me is the type of authority that has to be configured in order for the experiment to work.

Not only do different people relate to authority differently (and in ways that can't just be expressed on a continuum of "obedience," the same people can relate to different authorities differently. Don't confuse science with complete generalizability: The Milgram experiment doesn't produce "authority" and "obedience" in the abstract or in a vacuum... and it would probably be impossible to do so. The subjects of the experiment would have reacted quite differently if the order to kill had come from a Nazi/fascist authority instead of the culturally specific array of forces created by Milgram:

• Legal - In some ways, the most obvious type, and the one most closely resembling the Holocaust's enabling conditions. One of the most striking moments in the experiment video comes when one subject asks the experimenter if he'll assume full responsibility for the results of the experiment. (Of course, the experimenter says "yes," and the subject continues). The application of, say, "On the Jewish Question" is obvious--if people view public relationships as governed by legal (as opposed to human, or ethical) obligations, a malicious power need only assuage their legal fears before it can command them to act unethically.
  

• Capitalist - Saying that money's not the issue doesn't make money not the issue. Workers don't constantly exchange money with their employers, either, but they enter into a symbolic relationship ultimately underpinned by money. Payment for man-hours provides the employer with a store of capital used to extract work. The Milgram fliers spell it out: they will "pay $4.50 for an hour of your time." Members of a capitalist society get used to thinking about the components of this exchange as inevitable, and the forces of reciprocity bind tightly. Think about it this way: if the participants had fully internalized the implications of the experimenter's claim that "money's not the issue; you've already received your check," many of them would have just walked out the door.

• Scientific - I see two relevant types of scientific authority operating in the experiment video. First, the general appeal to the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Based on participant responses to the experimenter, this seems less important than other factors. Second, the scientific claim to knowledge of the equipment. Subjects extrapolate their technical ignorance about electricity to a general ignorance of the apparatus; they can then comfortably leave power (figurative and literal) in the hands of the experimenter. This supplements the institutional authority insulating, e.g., Nazi subordinates; subjects here can claim not only that they did not have control over what they were doing, but that they did not have true knowledge of what they were doing.
  
  

Note that the authoritative relationship operates bidirectionally; just as much as the experimenter exerts downward pressure on the subject to obey commands, the subject actively defers power upwards to avoid responsibility. In a situation without experimental controls, it's easy to see how these pressures could flow easily through (and perhaps even be amplified by) most any bureaucracy.

In particular, we should all think about the ways in which current society may have modified the above relationships to authority. I'd call the changes ambivalent (not categorically awful, so this is optimism for me). No doubt I'll talk about my opinions on those changes in later posts.

Question for comment: how would Milgram have designed this experiment today?