Page 65 - The Social Animal

Conformity 47

fully replicating the original Milgram procedure, they tried it a dif-
ferent way. In the new procedure, the experimenter asked people to
obey them by making a series of increasingly negative remarks about
an applicant’s performance on a test that would determine whether
he or she would be hired for a job. Thus, the participants were con-
vinced that they were harming the person—but the harm was such
that it would not be manifested until some future time, when the
participants would not be present to witness the consequences of
their obedience. As one might expect, obedience in these situations
was much higher than in their direct replication of the Milgram ex-
periment; in this version, more than 90 percent of the participants
continued to obey to the very end of the series.

Disobedience in the Milgram Experiments As you know, sev-
eral people in the Milgram experiments chose to defy the experi-
menter and refused to continue with the experiment—in spite of the
prodding of the experimenter. Human history, likewise, contains
many inspiring examples of such courage. For example, there are
“freedom museums” in Norway, Denmark, and other European
countries that celebrate the efforts of a heroic few to resist the occu-
pation of the Nazis or to attempt to help Jews escape the ravages of
the Holocaust. But these acts of humanity and bravery, however en-
couraging, should not blind us to the pervasiveness of our tendency
to obey authority. Many of us tour such museums and admire the
displays, certain that we, too, would exhibit such courage. We harbor
a myth of our personal invulnerability to obedience pressures. When
participants were asked to predict their own performance in the Mil-
gram study, their values and self-conceptions caused 100 percent of
them to predict that they would discontinue the shocks at or below
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the moderate level. But we have seen how the forces of the actual
situation can override those values and self-conceptions. One year,
when, as usual, I asked my social-psychology students whether they
might continue delivering shocks until the end of the scale, only one
hand slowly rose; everyone else in the class was confident that he or
she would defy the experimenter’s instructions. But the student who
raised his hand was a Vietnam veteran who was in a position to
know; he had experienced the impact of similar pressures, and he
painfully and tragically came to recognize his own vulnerability in
certain situations. Indeed, not only do we find it difficult to resist