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Fourth, there is the absence of conspicuously anomalous factors
It is the appearance of authority and not actual authority to which the subject responds.
A second condition triggering the shift to the agentic state is the act of defining the person as part of the authority system in question.
The psychological consequence of voluntary entry is that it creates a sense of commitment and obligation which will subsequently play a part in binding the subject to his role.
In this sense, there is an internalized basis for his obedience, not merely an external one.
Because the experimenter issues orders in a context he is presumed to know something about, his power is increased.
The most far-reaching consequence of the agentic shift is that a man feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear, but acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.
Consider an individual who, in everyday life, is gentle and kind. Even in moments of anger he does not strike out against those who have frustrated him. Feeling that he must spank a mischievous child, he finds the task distasteful; indeed, the very musculature in his arms becomes paralyzed, and he abandons the task. Yet, when taken into military service he is ordered to drop bombs on people, and he does so. The act does not originate in his own motive system and thus is not checked by the inhibitory forces of his internal psychological system. In growing up, the normal individual has learned
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Though many subjects make the intellectual decision that they should not give any more shocks to the learner, they are frequently unable to transform this conviction into action.
As the subject delivers more and more painful shocks, he must seek to justify to himself what he has done; one form of justification is to go to the end. For if he breaks off, he must say to himself: “Everything I have done to this point is bad, and I now acknowledge it by breaking off.” But, if he goes on, he is reassured about his past performance. Earlier actions give rise to discomforts, which are neutralized by later ones.
Although to the outsider the act of refusing to shock stems from moral considerations, the action is experienced by the subject as renouncing an obligation to the experimenter, and such repudiation is not undertaken lightly.
One of its chief premises is that once a definition of the situation has been projected and agreed upon by participants, there shall be no challenge to it. Indeed, disruption of the accepted definition by one participant has the character of moral transgression. Under no circumstance is open conflict about the definition of the situation compatible with polite social exchange.
Since to refuse to obey the experimenter is to reject his claim to competence and authority in this situation, a severe social impropriety is necessarily involved.
It is a curious thing that a measure of compassion on the part of the subject, an unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience.
On a purely quantitative basis, it is more wicked to kill ten thousand by hurling an artillery shell into a town, than to kill one man by pommeling him with a stone, yet the latter is by far the more psychologically difficult act. Distance, time, and physical barriers neutralize the moral sense. There are virtually no psychological inhibitions against coastal bombardment or dropping napalm from a plane twenty thousand feet overhead. As for the man who sits in front of a button that will release Armageddon, depressing it has about the same emotional force as calling for an elevator. While
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When interviewed, these subjects stress that they “asserted their humanity” by administering the briefest shock possible. Handling strain in this manner was easier than defiance. It permits the maximum expression of individual benignity within the constraints of an oppressive system.
These subjects are willing to undermine the experiment but not to cause an open break with authority. They attempt to help the learner without public disobedience.
Yet “doing something,” even if of only token significance, helps preserve his self-image as a benign man.
Responsibility may be cast off in other ways: it may be shifted to the victim, who is seen as bringing on his own punishment. The victim is blamed for having volunteered for the experiment, and more viciously, for his stupidity and obstinacy. Here we move from the shifting of responsibility to the gratuitous deprecation of the victim. The psychological mechanism is transparent: if the victim is an unworthy person, one need not be concerned about inflicting pain on him.
Inner doubt, externalization of doubt, dissent, threat, disobedience: it is a difficult path, which only a minority of subjects are able to pursue to its conclusion.
The act of disobedience requires a mobilization of inner resources, and their transformation beyond inner preoccupation, beyond merely polite verbal exchange, into a domain of action. But the psychic cost is considerable.
Moreover, when the experiments were repeated in Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa, and Australia, each using somewhat different methods of recruitment and subject populations having characteristics different from those of our subjects, the level of obedience was invariably somewhat higher than found in the investigation reported in this book. Thus Mantell, in Munich, found 85 per cent of his subjects obedient.
I am forever astonished that when lecturing on the obedience experiments in colleges across the country, I faced young men who were aghast at the behavior of experimental subjects and proclaimed they would never behave in such a way, but who, in a matter of months, were brought into the military and performed without compunction actions that made shocking the victim seem pallid. In this respect, they are no better and no worse than human beings of any other era who lend themselves to the purposes of authority and become instruments in its destructive processes.
It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority.
