What role does authority play? - Chapter 6

How did Milgram's experiment showcase the power of authority?

A widely known experiment by Stanley Milgram (1974) showed how strong the power of authority is in determining our behavior. In these experiments, participants were invited to take part in a test of memory capacity and the impact of punishment. However, this was only a cover story for the true investigation of compliance towards authority. The subjects had to test another person’s ability to recall a list of words and had to punish them if they made a mistake (i.e. recalling a wrong word or no recall of a word at all). The experimental design required the participants to sit in one room, together with the principal investigator. The subjects who had to recall the list of words were placed in a different room and connected to electrodes. By means of a series of 30 switches, the participants were able to punish the other subjects with electric shocks in case they gave a wrong answer. With each subsequent false answer, shocks increased by 15 Volts to a maximum of 450 Volts. The question Milgram wanted to answer was: how far will people go in inflicting harm to an innocent person when this is their job? The results were shocking: 2/3 of the participants pulled every switch, causing deadly shocks of 450 Volts near the end of the experiment. Furthermore, almost 100% did not stop to fulfill the task they had been assigned to when they heard the other subject screaming and kicking from the other room, begging him to stop.

It has to be mentioned that there certainly was no harm inflicted on the learner. The screams and responses were provided by an actor who was never attached to any electrical circuit. Yet, the presentations seemed real, as some of the behavioral aspects of the participants show. Almost all of them begged the principal investigator to stop the experiment, they started shaking and stammering. But when the investigator calmly but determinately called for the continuation of the experiment, they complied.

Before the experiment, Milgram asked his fellow colleagues and students at Yale University to give an estimate of how many of his subjects would pull the last switch: they unanimously gave answers in the range of one to two percent. Surprised by the overwhelming results, several explanations were offered for the high rate of compliance. First of all, some argued that participants in the study were all male, therefore being more prone to aggressive behavior. However, later studies showed the same pattern with female subjects. Others maintained that the participants were not aware of the danger they put the other subjects in. Again, another study disproved this argument: when the victim cried “Please stop, I have heart problems! My heart stops!”, still 65% went all the way to the 450 Volt shock. Furthermore, the sample of people Milgram took were representative of a cross section of several factors such as age, occupation, and level of education. Subsequently applied scales showed no hint for a deviation from normal personality traits. Consequently, the results were applicable to everyone in our society. Milgram argued that the shockingly high level of compliance was based on a deeply innate sense of duty to authority.

To support this hypothesis, he instructed the investigator to tell the participant to stop delivering shocks, while the victim further insisted on continuing the experiment. Now that the authority figure commanded to stop, every participant discontinued immediately. When exposed to two investigators who gave contradicting orders (i.e. stop vs. continue), participants desperately tried to figure out who had more authority, and ultimately abandoning the experiment.

What are the pros and cons of obedience to authority?

Certainly, authority is not maladaptive by nature. It allows for the structuring of society, the quick and effective distribution of resources, trade, defense, expansion, and social control. The opposing alternative would be anarchy, which is hardly beneficial in general.

Parents and teachers for example are authority figures. Obeying their “commands” is adaptive since they know more about life than the children they supervise. The same is true for the adult stage in which acting according to rules established by other authority figures (e.g. politicians, kings, etc.) is often beneficial due to these peoples’ greater access to power and information.

Looking at the area of medicine, disadvantages of the blind compliance to authority is illustrated. Since we value our health, physicians are a group of generally respected authority figures. Furthermore, the area is well structured and holds a clear hierarchy. As a result, judgments of a physician are seldom questioned by medical staff lower in the hierarchy. Thus, if a doctor makes a faulty diagnosis, nobody except a doctor of higher rank will dare to question it. Consequently, statistics have revealed that patients in hospitals on average are exposed to one medication error per day. How far this compliance goes is illustrated by the famous and bizarre case of “rectal earache”: When prescribing eardrops to a patient with hearing problems on the right ear, the physician in charge abbreviated the instructions for the nurses as “place in r.ear”. Not questioning the directions, the nurses applied the drops to the man’s anus. Although there are more of such cases, people have a general feeling of having to believe doctors’ judgments, which is why TV advertisements often let actors play the roles of physicians when praising a product.

Other interesting studies on behavior towards authority figures have investigated the Larry King show, in which the host interviews a variety of people. When these were higher in social status than King (e.g. former President Clinton), he changed his voice to match the one of his interview partner, whereas lower ranked individuals (e.g. Julie Andrews) changed their voices to match King’s.

What is the Impact of symbols?

Several studies revealed that when determining the degree of authority of others, people are likely to be fooled by symbols that are connected to authority. Instead of examining the substance, our senses are obscured by titles, the way individuals dress, and other potential traps.

The impact of titles on our judgment probably stems from the fact that normally, years of devotion to research or related work is needed to be awarded a certain degree. However, TV testimonials are commonly given by actors who adopt titles to persuade customers, and con artists apply the same strategy as well.

What is more, as P.R. Wilson (1968) showed in a series of studies, prestigious titles seem to distort our judgment of the awarded person’s height. He used five conditions: in each he introduced a visitor from another university (Cambridge) to his students. Conditions differed in the description of the visitor’s title. They ranged from student, demonstrator, lecturer, senior lecturer, to professor. After the lecture, students were asked to give an estimate of the visitor’s height. With each step on the ladder of social status, the subjects rated him as 0.5 inch taller on average. Similarly, politicians are perceived as taller after they won an election (Higham & Carment, 1992). The fact that height seems mentally related to our perception of status should come to no surprise if we have a look at evolutionary principles. Generally, the larger animal is more powerful and wins when confronted with a rival. In order to avoid too much physical harm, nature developed such body-increasing techniques as arching the back and bristling of the feathers or fur. For the same reason, con artists frequently make use of lifts in their shoes, even when they are already of (above) average height.

For some researchers, disturbing phenomena like the rectal earache stimulated their need for further investigation. They wanted to eliminate the possibility that these bizarre instances were isolated cases and at the same time examine the impact of authority in the context of a treatment error that was definitely more severe: the gross over-prescription of an unauthorized drug (Astrogen) to a patient in a hospital. Furthermore, they were interested in the question of whether physical presence of the authority figure was necessary to get the participants (in this case hospital nurses) to comply with the request. They did so by exchanging the presence of a physician with an unfamiliar voice on a telephone which claimed to be a doctor and demanded the highly dangerous dosage of the drug. Apart from the obvious danger, the nurses should have been cautious also because treatments advised over the phone were forbidden by hospital policies. In addition, the sign on the medication container clearly stated a maximum daily dosage that was way below the one requested by the voice on the phone. Surprisingly, 95% percent of the nurses obeyed the command of a person they had never met in person. Of course, they were stopped by the investigators before any drug was administered to a patient.

Another symbol of authority that can trick us into falsely assigning authority to individuals is clothing. Take for example a study by Bushmann (1988) in which the researcher asked pedestrians to help out a man standing a few feet away looking for change to put in the parking meter. After this, the requester left around the corner and was therefore out of sight. In one condition he was normally dressed and slightly less than 50% of the people he approached gave a dime to the man looking for change.

However, when the requester was dressed in a security guard’s uniform, almost 100% of the pedestrians complied. Similar results were attained with a business suit. This garment traditionally conveys authority and power, which unconsciously influences our perception of those who wear it. One group of researchers (Lefkowitz, Blake, & Mouton, 1955) observed how many pedestrians would follow a man who crossed the street without waiting the traffic light to turn green. In one condition, this man wore a business suit, in the other he was dressed in a work shirt and trousers. In the first condition, 3.5 more pedestrians violated the law by following the man in the suit. Some exploiters have combined these two powerful clothing symbols, the uniform and the business suit, to develop a strategy called bank examiner scheme. Most often, older people fall prey to this strategy. In a first step, a man dressed in a suit approaches people at their door. He claims to be a professional bank examiner and that he found some irregularities while checking the prospective victim’s books. Furthermore, he states that he has found the problem to be a corrupt employee of the bank and that the victim needs to withdraw all the money from the account so that the examiner can check his hypothesis. The influence of the suit is often so strong that people regularly do what the alleged examiner says. In a subsequent step, a confederate dressed in a bank guard’s uniform delivers the news that everything is alright and that the irregularities were of a different, harmless nature. The examiner thanks the guard and asks him to be so kind and bring the money back to the bank, since it is already closed and to save the (clueless) victim the trouble of doing it him- or herself. Certainly, the money never reaches the owner’s account.

Other symbols that convey a sense of authority are trappings such as jewelry, expensive cars, and special categories of clothing such as fine garments that carry and serve an ornamental aura or purpose. It has been shown that when they have to wait behind an expensive car, drivers tend to wait significantly longer before they honk compared to older automobiles (Doob & Gross, 1968). Furthermore, when students were asked about their behavior in such a situation, especially male motorists underestimated the time it would take them to honk at the expensive luxury car. This aspect can be found in every study on authority compliance discussed in this chapter: participants generally had a distorted view on how they thought they would react in the specific situations.

What are some of the defenses that can be used against the exploitation of authority?

The most important thing in this context of defending against negative effects of authority compliance is to remove one crucial element: surprise. As it was shown previously, people tend to incorrectly predict their responses in a given situation due to an underestimation of the power of authority. It is therefore advised to be more aware of this power and to bear in mind how easy it can influence us and how easily symbols of authority can be faked. However, in the tradition of all principles of influence: we should not attempt to resist authority altogether, as it often serves an adaptive purpose.

Two possible questions can be asked to increase awareness. First of all, we should determine if the alleged authority figure really is an expert by looking at his or her credentials. Second of all, we should ask ourselves if the expertise of the person is relevant in the given situation (i.e. is a man in a business suit really an expert for crossing the street?).

In addition to these questions it is wise to remember a tactic that most professionals will use to assure us of their credibility and truthfulness: they will often employ slight arguments against their own interests. Since this strategy is highly effective, the positive aspects generally outweigh the negative ones.