Obedience to Authority summary

Shocked by the genocide and horrors of the Nazi regime, the author, in an attempt to discover how people could do such things, conducted a series of experiments.

His initial experiment was simple, yet effective. While it might seem difficult to construct an experiment that successfully simulates the pressures under which people obediently hurt other human beings, the author nonetheless found a way.

One would expect that, distressed by the learner’s agonized screams, the teachers would have refused to continue shocking the learner, despite the experimenter’s commands. What actually happened, however, is a much more troubling story.

The incidence of obedience was much higher than that of disobedience. The author and other psychiatrists expected obedience only up to a certain shock level, and were astonished to discover just how many teachers obeyed until the learner went silent, as if dead.

Observing the subjects in his experiment, the author noticed that they entered a state of mind which he termed the agentic state; in this state, subjects shifted responsibility for their actions onto some external entity – in this case, the experimenter.

A certain pattern of behavior accompanied this shift.

Intrigued by his findings, the author wanted to see whether people would blindly follow any command, or if obedience was directly related to perceived authority status. So, he modified his experiment to find out.

In the new variation, commands no longer came from the experimenter, but from a person without credible authority.

In the experiment, the question of whether aggression was at the root of obedience was quite natural. Did subjects obey because they harbored some innate sadistic tendencies that they could now act on with impunity? The answer was a clear no. In fact, the opposite appeared to be the case.

If the subjects saw an opportunity, they tried to disobey the commands of the experimenter. Indeed, if the experimenter seemed not to be watching, many subjects avoided increasing the voltage.

The degree of authority that subjects ascribed to the experimenters was an important factor in their willingness to obey commands. Equally important was the directness of the subjects’ involvement in the process of shocking. So the author modified his experiment once again, this time to see how proximity would affect obedience.

In one variation of his experiment, the author told subjects that they had to administer shocks by bringing the learner’s hand into contact with a shock plate. Not only did the teachers have to shock the learner; they had to physically force his hand onto the shock plate.

As you’ve learned, the majority of participants participated in cruel behavior at the behest of the experimenter. But what about the ones who flat out disobeyed? What caused them to resist?

Subjects were put under immense emotional and intellectual strain during the experiment – so much, in fact, that a few decided to break free.