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Blindsight

Milgram's Authority

By Martin HeavisidesPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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I wonder how many people with reflexive responses (whether of approval or disapproval) to Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment have read the book he generated from its results, Obedience to Authority. It’s a curious document. He vastly overimagines the degree to which authority and obedience are ingrained in human interactions. To demonstrate that people have provisional authority in some situations who don’t in normal circumstances, he points out that a shoe clerk can order you to stand in your sock feet, a barber to present your throat to his razor, a movie usher to take the seat she (usually) shows you with the flashlight she carries for guidance in the dark, and a bank teller to surrender your money. The last is the only one of these that bears any real colour of truth, and most of the means by which banks extract money from their ordinary customers are imposed by the invisible authority of custom, not that of tellers whom we’re likelier to regard as servants than masters (if we don’t regard them as equals momentarily attending to our needs).

One approving critic of Stanley Milgram, Anthony Storr, was so taken with these examples (and the dark implications of a universal web of authority they portended) that he seriously posited riots breaking out in cinemas without the helpful guidance of ushers to our seats. Anyone who’s lived in a city where ushers are not common except at high ticket events knows that even isolated fistfights are rare in movie theatres without them on account of two patrons dumbly contending over a preferred seat (without an usher to settle the dispute through her sovereign will). I can’t remember the time a full-scale riot broke out over the notorious inability of moviegoers to find their own seats without help. I also can’t recall a barber ever ordering me to present my throat to his razor, but I know how quickly I’d exit the shop if one did. In fact all of these examples of limited and temporary authority have one thing in common: they don’t involve authority and obedience at all, they are friendly and more or less equitable exchanges. The whole element of compulsion is superadded to make them serve as examples.

Or, it may be, because carrying out experiments focused on authority and obedience has coloured Milgram’s thinking to such an extent that he sees instances of obedience to authority in every human relationship, including the huge majority of them in which cooperation for mutual interest is what’s actually going on.

How reliable are Milgram’s conclusions based on the famous experiment he carried out, if they left him with no capacity to distinguish authoritarian from straightforwardly cooperative transactions between more-or-less equals? Milgram claims that laboratory results which isolate particular elements of study can be extrapolated to society at large, but do the results of the Milgram experiment really apply to anything but situations in the real world as artificially constructed as the experiment itself? (No small matter if they do; there are enough situations constructed in that way in society at large; authoritarian personalities delight in them and want them to expand into every area of existence. But if in fact the results of the Milgram experiment are conditioned by its premises, the logical response is not depression at how widespread a tendency to shock people on instruction from someone in a lab coat or a military uniform, but resistance to a model of compulsion (with however limited or implied an element of coercion) as the core experience of human life. (I hardly think it accidental that university trained social psychologists happily cooperated in the torture of prisoners in both Gulf wars. Whether Milgram would have I can’t say; he did greatly overestimate the degree to which obedience to authority dominates human life, but he had the grace at least to be appalled by the ‘fact’.)

Experiments like Milgram’s have been banned in laboratories, only to resurface in popular entertainment on shows like Survivor and Big Brother. The results of these hothouse experiments seem to confirm the most pessimistic conclusions about human cupidity (although crosscutting levels of mutual deception figure in them more than they do in a simple lab experiment like Milgram’s), but it’s worth noting that they are explicitly designed in ways intended to bring out the worst in their contestants. Milgram says he had no preconceptions when he began his experiment (or if anything, that he expected much more resistance to authority by his subjects), but he designed an experiment within which people couldn’t show the best that was in them. (Two people among all those he tested, buddies (so the element of cooperation as a counterbalance to authority comes into play), refused to participate in the study when it was explained to them. Those who did participate entered a maze in which their options continually narrowed; did the experiment demonstrate their essential nature, or the essential hunger for compulsion in the makers and performers of it? Were the experimenters mere neutral tools, or did they (consciously or otherwise) advance an agenda of their own?)

It's certain that Milgram unconsciously replicated the behaviour of his testees in his summings up of results. He writes of how subjects deflected the guilt of their own actions to the lab coated authorities who persistently urged them to go ahead (over the increasing screams of the subjects they were apparently administering increasingly large shocks to, who were of course actors). People who went so far as to apparently kill test subjects regarded the technicians who urged them on as responsible, and Milgram absolved both himself and his associates (acting on his orders, possibly angling for postgrad appointments) from any responsibility for the actions they called for. Milgram thinks that isn’t the same thing at all, but insofar as he seems accurately to understand the mechanism by which responsibility is denied, he exactly replicates it himself. Test subjects tended to describe what they’d done indirectly and by euphemism, and when Milgram talks of people continuing to administer electric shock to the point of apparent grievous bodily harm and in some instances death, he employs the same dodges in describing his own complicity. He quotes at length a transcript showing a session of shocks that ends, after a particularly bloodcurdling scene, with silence in the other room, and has no trouble with assigning responsibility for this apparent willingness to shock another human being to death; none of which attaches to himself or the technicians who carry out this bit of theatre. They merely issue neutral instructions; testees who carry out those instructions are the ones solely responsible. Authority does seem to entail, at both ends, a diminished sense of personal agency.

[Tips are enabled with my submissions I understand, though they are certainly not mandatory. I want people to enjoy my work first and foremost, but if you enjoy it enough to want to encourage its writer, and have the wherewithal, feel free.]

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