Too much obedience makes you do stupid things

Too Much Obedience Makes You Do Stupid Things

In the 1950s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments, popularly known as Milgram Experiment today. It was a series of social psychology experiments that measured the willingness of participants —men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education —to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.

Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an experiment in which they had to administer electric shocks to a subject. The subject was a trained actor faking pain and agony upon receiving shocks, and the electric shocks were actually fake. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of men would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly.

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh, God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.”

— Stanley Milgram

The experiments began after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann was one of the major organisers of the Jewish genocide.

Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular contemporary question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.

Authority bias is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and be more influenced by that opinion.

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You’ve been trained since birth to believe that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong, and hence this bias comes naturally to you. It’s hidden underneath your good nature.

This message of being obedient had filled the parental, societal, and the school lessons of your childhood. It’s even carried forward in all the systems you encounter as adults now.

“Early on, these people (parents, teachers) knew more than we did, and we found that taking their advice proved beneficial —partly because of their greater wisdom and partly because they controlled our rewards and punishments. As adults, the same benefits persist for the same reasons, though the authority figures are now employers, judges, and government leaders. Because their positions speak of greater access to information and power, it makes sense to comply with the wishes of properly constituted authorities. It makes so much sense, in fact, that we often do so when it makes no sense at all.”

— Robert B. Cialdini, Influence.

The very first book of the Bible describes how failure to obey the ultimate authority resulted in the loss of paradise for Adam, Eve, and the rest of the human race. This is also what motivational writers, business pundits, startup advisors, CEOs, economists, consultants, and stock market gurus would want to have you believe.