Obedience to authority is an aspect present in all societies throughout known history. For the entirety of this paper, obedience to authority will refer to any act a member of society performs that he or she was told to do by a position of higher authority. This paper will focus on the idea that members of society will follow commands that may go against their moral beliefs on the sole account that the commands come from a place of higher authority.
This statement has been tested multiple times beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment in 1963, in which he set up a scenario that convinced people they were harming an individual they had met only minutes before through electrical shocks. The participants thought that they were doing this for science, and most pressed on past their moral limit just because an actor in a smock instructed them to continue. Obeying orders from a place of higher social status has played a part in every civilization to exist.
This became a widely discussed and evaluated social/psychological idea when Stanley Milgram, a scientist whose parents were in the holocaust, performed an experiment testing individuals’ moral limits of inflicting pain to strangers versus their instinct to obey authority. Milgram’s experiment shocked many scientists in his field when the results found that more than 50% of participants pushed past their moral compass and continued to harm the stranger. When the participants were questioned about their motives to press on in the experiment, the main conclusion was only that the actor in the smock was telling them to do so.
The participants also reported that they had an overwhelming compulsion to believe that harming the stranger was for the betterment and advancement of science. The experiment was designed to give the participants the real feeling as though they were harming the stranger in the other room, when in reality there was no danger to any person. This was not the case though, as stated in Harry Perlstadt’s “Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: Its Origins, Controversies, and Replications” there was significant harm to many of the participants in control of the electric shock.
Subjects could have suffered harm during the actual conduct of the experiment and/ or e) experienced short- or long-term harm as a result of their participation. ” (Perlstadt 62) The damage that Perstadt is referring to is not physical, he explains that many researchers who have looked over Milgram’s experiment believe that the participants could be harmed “if not through the stress of the experiment itself, then through the “inflicted insight” into their own personalities. ” (Perlstadt 62) This idea is understandable to say the least.
A large percentage of the world likes to believe that they are good people. At the end of this experiment the participants find out that although they did not actually harm anyone, put into the situation, they would have just because a figure of authority commanded them to do so. The idea that being completely obedient to authority may be harmful to one’s psychological health forces a new look on the entire idea as a whole. Erich Fromm mentioned in “On Disobedience” that “… it is not unlikely that it will be, terminated by an act of obedience. (Fromm)
This refers to human kind, and the destructive commands some people are given. Even though the person may feel it is wrong, and may even experience extreme psychological stress, they may still obey the order based on where it came from. After scientists read Milgram’s research all they did was ask more questions. One of the most prominent questions was “Why? ” The answer has been guessed by many well-known scientists. For Example, (Kelman and Hamilton 1989) speculated that it all comes down to legitimacy.
People in a social hierarchy will obey a leaders commands up until the point where they no longer see them as legitimate demands. Kelman and Hamilton stated that legitimacy is decided at three different levels: (i) the legitimacy of where the commands are coming from; (ii) the legitimacy of the authority itself and the forms it assumes (i. e. bureaucratic authority, institutional authority; professional authority, etc. ); (iii) the legitimacy of the demands that the authority issues to the members of the group. Passini 98)
Within each social group the person leading has power over the group based on the legitimacy of these three levels. Passini goes on to state: ‘When influence is totally perceived of as being legitimate, people give the authority the right to make demands and to regulate the behaviour of its underlings. In this way, the authority relationship is a ‘voluntary’ (in the sense of not necessarily coercive)… ” (Passini 98) His idea that following the influence of authority must be “voluntary” or “coercive” is much too simplified.
Social influence can be established through coercion, once that takes place and the leaders role has been established people will continue to follow said leader and their orders based on the precedent that they already have in the past. Passini goes on to explain that people have a higher chance of carrying out the orders of authority if they can clearly tell that the decision was based off of the principles of justice and equality. (Passini 98) Although this is true Passini did not continue this thought to speak about the alternative, when people obey even when it does not clearly seem to be “right.
For example, Milgram’s experiment. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that physically harming someone for lack of memory skills is not equal, especially after the participant is lead to believe that the subject is unconscious, but still continues to administer shocks. According to Passini this request to continue by the “scientist” would have been denied and the experiment would have stopped there. The participants didn’t stop because they were breaking the three levels of legitimacy. Instead they were basing their belief to listen to the orders off of the legitimacy of the previous commands.
An interesting point made by (Turner 2005) is that legitimacy of different types of commands will differ based on social norms. Meaning, there is no way to create a chart of which commands to follow based off of morality because across each civilization there are different opinions of what is right and wrong. Every situation of a leader establishing legitimacy will be unique based on the specific context and group. What this statement does not help to explain is, if a leader must work independently in a group in order to become a legitimate source of commands, then why are there members of each society that fail to follow the commands.
Michael Ent explains the psychological aspect to why some people obey all commands from authority and some do not. Ent explains that every person has five basic moral values, the two that will be focused on will be obedience to authority and avoidance to cause harm to others. Ent explains that when two moral values clash against each other, such as in Milgram’s experiment, the deciding factor is guilt proneness. (231) Guilt proneness is the psychological scale in each person as to how negative they will feel after doing something that society looks down on, even if no one but the person who did it knows.
Each individual has a different level of guilt proneness, people with a high value of it will most likely choose to disobey the authority figure as to not cause harm to another individual. While someone who does not feel a high level of guilt will carry through with the commands on account that they will disregard any negative feelings coming from their actions. There are a multitude of reasons as to why people in society openly obey orders received from authority, also many as to why they wouldn’t.
Understanding these concepts is essential to humankind based on the fact that if we could control these factors we could make decisions based solely on what is right and wrong, and not who tells a subject what to do. Obedience to authority has a vast variety of pros and cons. Whether it be from the psychological stress that the people being ordered are put under, or a structured society that runs smooth because of the people willing to follow any commands. Obedience to authority has been a part of every society since the beginning of time, whether it continues in our future depends on each individual and how they view the concept.