In trying to understand the Milgram obedience experiments, the most important thing, in my opinion, is not to be dazzled by what they purport to show. The surface narrative – still loyally recounted in popular renditions every time the name Stanley Milgram is uttered – is that ordinary people can effortlessly be transformed into heartless torturers, that beneath our civilised veneers lurk potential concentration camp guards. In the next breath there are, invariably, earnest warnings about the Nazis and the Holocaust.
In fact, the truth is simultaneously more mundane and more disturbing.
What Milgram actually said was that we easily allow ourselves to be turned into agents for those above us in hierarchical organisations, doing what they want rather than what we ourselves would do. “Relationship,” as he put it, “overwhelms content”. That content can involve inflicting pain and death but – and this is rarely remarked upon – it can also involve content that is neutral, even benevolent or merely one link in a chain whose ultimate purpose is destructive or damaging. The specific action might appear innocuous but when placed together with other innocent looking parts of the whole, the ‘end product’ might be immensely harmful.
The crucial element is the relationship. Clearly the Milgram experiment (s) would not have achieved lasting fame had he asked volunteers if they wouldn’t mind passing a stapler (‘Psychology professor reveals we are all stapler-passers under the surface!’). Though it would have been interesting to know if anyone would have refused.
Commonplace obedience
This little noticed element in obedience to authority in fact produced the highest obedience rates. When Milgram’s subjects were merely asked to read out the word-pairs while a confederate of the experimenter actually pressed the buzzer supposedly inflicting electric shocks (the experiment was presented as a test of the effect of punishment on memory), obedience levels went through the roof. They registered 92.5%, the highest in the entire series of experiments.
Most replications of Milgram in the 1960s and ‘70s produced broadly similar results. One study didn’t however. That was by Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in Australia in 1974. They reported obedience as low as 40% (and 16% for female subjects). This was the “notable exception” alluded to in Part One. However, when Kilham’s and Mann’s subjects became mere ‘runners’ – transmitting the experimenter’s instructions to a person playing the role of the teacher/shocker – disobedience was transformed into obedience. It hit 68% for men and 40% for women.
This is how contemporary obedience researchers, Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, describe this variation of the Kilham and Mann study:
As it turned out, people whose task was simply to transmit successive instructions to press the generator’s switches were even more pliant than those who – as in Milgram’s original experiment – were supposed to be the direct (physical) culprits responsible for causing physical pain to another person. This demonstrates that the role of being a cog in the bureaucratic machine facilitates the sense that one is neither the instigator of anything evil, nor directly causing any harm. As can be seen, in this particular type of situation, it is particularly easy to generate submissiveness and obedience. (From The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, pp 39-40)
The “particular type of situation” which lends itself so effortlessly to kindling submissiveness and obedience, is as emblematic of the corporation – which is in essence a private bureaucracy – as it is of the state machine. This is difficult to see in part because of the vehement ideology of freedom that accompanies corporate capitalism. But it is also obscured by the image, assiduously developed over the last 40 years or so, of the individual as a self-interested aggrandizer, always on the look-out for the best online deals, demanding faultless service, perpetually seeking fitness and attractiveness, constantly honing their CV. We may be irredeemably selfish but under a ‘free market’ system, we answer only to ourselves and our own desires.
However this was never true and still isn’t. As noted by the mid-20th century economic historian Karl Polanyi, if we were purely self-interested negotiators always seeking the highest price for selling the commodity of our own labour, as theoretically we should do under the ‘laws’ of the market economy, we would be “almost continually on strike”. This obviously isn’t the case and is not solely due to coercion and the power of the law and the police. The added ingredient is the power of obedience.
The vast majority of us willingly enter – or we think we do – Milgram’s agentic state, where we temporarily become instruments for the wishes of people above us in the hierarchy (as they are instruments for people above them). The crucial element, as Milgram observed, is the sense of voluntary choice. This creates a sense of obligation, allied to a feeling of being absolved of any real responsibility, which is a powerful and dangerous brew.
The element of our economy which is always stressed by the media and the powerful is our freedom as consumers. But this, as the book elaborates, is at best half the story. We also spend much of our lives within – or bound to – hierarchical organisations which operate under the expectation of unquestioning obedience.
As above, so below
It would be a mistake to think this cast of mind is restricted to the lower half of the economy, though it may be more explicit there. Most of us are agents for others. Since the 1970s, for example, ‘the agency theory of the firm’ has grown in popularity. This asserts that a company’s senior managers (chief exec, head of finance etc., often on salaries which place them in the 0.01%) are mere ‘agents’ of its ‘principals’, the shareholders, and should be expected to do their bidding. Whether these managers are in fact genuine agents for the company’s owners is open to question. At the higher echelons of the economy, people often have the power and wealth to pursue their own interests. But what is interesting is that they’re expected to be٭.
If anything obedience has grown in intensity since Milgram’s time, though not in the way that might be first thought. It occupies an unrecognised, though essential, space in the economy. Thanks to burgeoning information technology, ‘scientific management’ can control and keep tabs on employees’ behaviour in ways never dreamed of by its 20th century pioneers. In efforts to increase productivity and minimize ‘loafing’, workers are regularly spied on and tracked by their own smartphones, with data compiled about their activities. Online wanderings are subject to screen capture and keystroke monitoring. In some cases, a worker’s every action is planned out by headsets or hand-held devices, with punishment for deviation.
As one writer observes, this is not just about maximising profitability but “a vision of obedience and acquiescence”.
Gratefully oppressed
What makes these developments especially sinister is that they are accompanied by a powerful feeling that, beyond extreme infractions, this is the way things should be. In a market economy, where we freely choose which little dictatorship to rent ourselves out to, it is only natural that we obey the instructions of superiors.
In The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, Doliński and Grzyb give numerous examples of employees, or people assuming the role of employees in psychological experiments, obeying the instructions of superiors to carry out ethically dubious actions. For instance, racially selecting new employees or marketing an unsafe drug. Interestingly, the crucial factor does not seem to be an inherent desire to maximise profits, but fulfilling the wishes of senior figures in the organization of which these ‘employees’ are a part.
In my opinion, this is a form of obedience unique to the corporate capitalism societies we inhabit. There is an often fervent identification with the interests and aims of employers but one that can be seamlessly transferred to a competitor. This is serial obedience – in contrast to older types of obedience, around a nation or a religion for example, which tend to be quite fixed.
This feeling of habitual obedience is stiffened by a pervasive aura of disposability – the fear that if we don’t live up to expectations there is always someone else, maybe a robot, who can replace us. In this mindset, there is nothing wrong with obedience. Quite the opposite, it is questioning obedience that is pathological.
Evolution’s children
The natural objection to this thesis is that obedience is not imposed on us, but evident throughout history – so much so that it might be thought of as part of human nature. In The Disobedient Society I refute Milgram’s contention (which echoes historical giants like Darwin) that obedience is an “evolutionary adaptation”. Actually, the evidence suggests that early humanity was able to knowingly flit between hierarchical and egalitarian social relations. Features such elite rule, social ranking or territoriality might be put into effect at certain times of the year and then dissolved. This indicates an element of choice in obedience which debars it from being a genetic flaw, or depending on your view, an innate advantage.
I refer also to Murray Bookchin’s distinction between first and second nature. Evolution, in the form of first nature, endows humans with the capacity to develop extra-biological tools and to consciously intervene in the natural world through a sophisticated collective organisation. However, the nature of this collective organisation is not determined by first nature. It lies in the realm of second nature – the domain of experimentation which can take many forms and is not governed by the ‘laws’ of natural selection.
The belief that obedience is immovable really relies on a different contention, however. That with the fragmentation of tasks within the complex organisations of the modern world, a degree of obedience is essential. We can never return to the simple freedom of earlier stages of human development, where a person might undertake an action and see it through to completion without the input of others. In short, if we want civilisation, we have to have obedience.
I don’t believe, however, that obedience is synonymous with the division of labour. Rather it is a kind of reflex, an unthinking giving away of authority and ethical responsibility to others. Obedience has a habitual character – it is a form of behaviour it is easy to slip into without noticing.
But the habit can be broken, just as a person who is lightly dozing can be jolted into wakefulness. Despite its tenacious hold, the origins of obedience are not evolutionary. And disobedience, does not, in spite of its reputation, repudiate complex organisation and discipline. Murray Bookchin coined the phrase “episodic sovereignty” – in reference to the Indian Crow societies of North America – to indicate how the yielding of individual initiative can be temporary and limited to rational and well-defined ends. Permanent institutions based on the expectation of command and obedience are not inevitable.
Basic disobedience
Not inevitable, but certainly well-entrenched, however. I would suggest that if the grip of obedience is to be loosened, radical steps need to be taken. One is a basic income set at a level that a person can live well on without the need to become an “agent” for the hierarchical organisations that pepper and essentially control society. This would instil a sense of confidence and security, a willingness to breach conformist norms and the self-assurance to resist the demands of ‘the economy’. The cowed and malleable workforce of today would be transcended and more genuine forms of democracy might follow.
Secondly the perpetual motion machine of capitalism needs to be halted. At its molecular level capitalism entails the re-investment of profits which leads (usually) to more profits which have to be reinvested again, and so on ad infinitum. This leads to an irresistible imperative to meet existing consumer demand, and create new needs to satisfy this ever-growing “wall of money”. Thus the signature institutions of capitalist society embody obedience – hierarchical organisation with employees obeying precise instructions from above – as simply the most efficient means to achieve the task in hand. If society is ever to advance beyond command and obedience, this background fixation needs to change.
I am not suggesting that obedience did not exist before capitalism or that it may not infuse the kind of society that will exist after capitalism. But Milgram’s insistence on the essentially voluntary nature of obedience makes him, sixty years after his original obedience experiments, presciently relevant.
٭ The problem of a corporation’s executives not actually being genuine agents for its owners was thought to have been circumvented by paying them partly in stock options. This, it was believed, would align their interests with those of the shareholders, in that both would want a high share price. However this ‘solution’ also managed to subvert a core principle of the market economy. Theoretically, a company share price should reflect whether investors think it will make healthy profits – and thus pay healthy dividends – in the future. However, paying executives partly in stock options encouraged the practice of share buy backs, whereby a company buys its own shares to jack up the overall price. This practice was legalised in Britain in 1981 and in the US the following year. Share buys backs are now a huge ‘industry’, ironically diverting funds which may have gone into actual industry.
