Analysis of Milgram’s study Milgram’s results were shocking to say the least (no pun intended). Why would average, everyday people agree to administer extreme electric shock to an innocent middle-aged man? Were the participants sadists (people who enjoy giving others pain)? Did Milgram manage somehow to recruit only “crazy participants”? The answer to these questions is of course “No. ” The participants were indeed average people who came from all walks of life. They were young, old, rich, poor, educated and uneducated. So what accounts for their obedience?
Milgram says the essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes and therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. When people behave like this, Milgram says they’re in the Agentic state. This is a state where people don’t see themselves as responsible for their actions; they believe their actions are controlled by an external force. They see themselves as puppets. This is opposed to an autonomous or independent state in which people see themselves as acting on their own.
If the current had actually been turned on and the learner had died, when the police arrived, and asked “Who killed this man? ” the participant would confidently have pointed to the experimenter and said “He did. ” That’s the power of the agentic state; people really don’t see themselves as responsible for their actions. Why are people able to so easily be transformed into the agentic state? Well, if you think about it, so much of socialization involves stressing obedience. Children are taught to be obedient and they’re punished for disobedience.
Once children move outside of their families and enter the school system, obedience is still stressed. In fact, can you think of an institution more repressive than the school system? You’re constantly being threatened with detention, suspension, expulsion and that silly permanent record (where is that permanent record anyway? ). Schools are like prisons, which is why I think my sister decided to put signs up all over her high school that said “Prisoners unite. ” Of course she was suspended for doing this, which just proves my point. Anyway, even when we leave school, obedience is still important.
We’re rewarded for following the rules at work and in society in general and we’re punished if we disobey, by getting fired, by getting hauled off to prison etc. With obedience being stressed so much in our lives, it’s no wonder that so many participants obeyed and shocked the learner at the highest level. In fact, the real question might be “How was anyone able to be disobedient? ” Let’s get back to the agentic state. The agentic state has several characteristics. When people are in the agentic state, they stop thinking for themselves.
As a result, they leave the assessment of the morality of the situation up to the authority. In other words, instead of considering whether what you’re doing is right or wrong, you tell yourself that it’s not your job to make this judgment; it’s the job of the authority to figure this out. This is why the participants can leave the study not feeling badly about themselves. When you’re in the agentic state, your actions have no impact on your self-image, as opposed to normal life where what you do reflects on how you feel about yourself.
In the agentic state, actions are seen as separate from the self since they are carried out by the commands of another. Evaluation of the self is irrelevant since actions do not stem from personal motives. People can still experience stress when they’re in the agentic state. How do they cope with this stress? In Milgram’s study, the participants coped with the stress by becoming Routinized. Routinization is also a characteristic of the agetic state. When you’re routinized, you become immersed in the technical procedures.
People become like robots, caught up in what they have to do so they don’t have to think about what they’re doing. In the obedience study, there’s a lot that the participants have to do. They have to read the word pairs, listen for the learner’s answer, tell the learner if the answer is correct or incorrect, announce the level of the shock and administer the shock. One way of dealing with the stress of hurting another person is to direct all of your attention to following the procedures. This makes the task somewhat easier.
This is a common behavior for people who are in situations like this. The man who dropped the first atomic bomb for example, was asked how he felt just before dropping the bomb. He replied that he felt nothing because he wasn’t thinking about the implications of dropping the bomb. He was concerned with flying the plane correctly, preparing the bomb, thinking about which buttons to push etc. This is no accident. Such routinization (being obsessed with the technical routine that’s necessary in the situation) makes it easier to carry out an order that ordinarily would be very upsetting.
Milgram manipulated the proximity or the closeness of the victim to see if it would have any effect on the level of obedience. In the Voice feedback condition, the condition in the film, the participants only heard the victim. In this condition, 65% of the participants shocked the learner at the highest level. In the Proximity condition, the learner was in the same room as the participant and was thus visible as well as audible. Obedience here was 40%. In the Touch-proximity condition, the learner received a shock when he put his hand on a shock plate.
When the learner refused to do so, the participants were told to force his hand onto the shock plate. 30% of the participants did so. Based on these findings, we know that it’s more difficult to hurt someone when they’re visible and audible. In an age of nuclear war and technological warfare, we can expect the situation to get worse. Soldiers will not see their victims and thus will have less empathy because there will be no pain cues from their victims. What can we do about the problem of obedience? Obedience is ingrained in us as children as a virtue.
Indeed, no orderly society could exist without obedience. When children ask parents “Why? ” and parents answer “Because I said so,” they are unwittingly teaching children that authority is to be respected and obeyed without question. Should we then be surprised when participants shock the learner at the highest level? Blind obedience is the logical consequence of such child rearing. We cannot teach people to question every order, but we should teach people to make obedience a thoughtful process and not one of blind acceptance.
