Respect for authority figures is vital to the maintenance of society. But how far are people willing to go to follow the orders of those in charge? Would they steal someone's child? Would they "spike" someone's drink? Would they willingly push a lever to electrically shock someone to the point of possible death?
In one of the classic series of studies in social psychology (or all of psychology for that matter), Stanley Milgram of Yale University wanted to know how far people would follow the orders of authority figures. More broadly, he wanted to understand how the Holocaust happened. His belief was that the vast majority of people who committed these horrendous atrocities were not initially insane or psychopathic. They were quite normal, but had just taken following orders to another-horrific-level.
Milgram told his participants (Yale students) that they would need to electrically shock a person in another room every time they missed a question. As the person missed more and more questions, the voltage would increase, until it could even possibly kill them. Astonishingly, he found that more than 60% of participants were willing to shock someone to the point where they believed it could kill them. And of all of this over someone that they had never met, and in reality, didn't have much authority over them. Still, people did not question. They just followed orders.
Whenever I teach this study, I sense a mixture of horror and disbelief, even outrage in my students. But initially at least, none of them are willing to say that they would behave similarly to the participants in Milgram's studies (in public or in their papers). "That was so long ago" is one excuse they often muster up.
This brings me to an interesting episode of ABC's hidden camera show, "What would you do?" One segment had a man with a badge (actually purchased online!) ask people in daily situations to do seemingly horrible stuff. In one version, a woman stole another woman's baby, largely because a man with a badge told her to. In another version, a woman spiked another woman's drink at a farmer's market. And in yet another version, someone stole another's wallet.
None of these people would steal a baby or a wallet in their normal, daily life. But when an apparent authority figure enters into the picture, people OFTEN become willing to do horrible things.
Readers at this point likely still think, "I would never do that." But the truth is, many more of us would than we would like to admit to ourselves. It is one of the great lessons of decades of social psychology research that people hate to acknowledge: The social situation often exerts an incredibly powerful influence on our free will. We deny this (i.e. read up on the fundamental attribution error), but it is certainly true. Humans can do things they never thought they would do.
I am sure most of the Nazis denied this before the Holocaust.
