Obedience as a Psychological Concept

Obedience is a type of social influence that entails carrying out an activity on the directions of a superior. It is distinct from compliance (which is adjusting your behavior at someone else's request) and conformity (which involves altering your behavior in order to go along with the rest of the group).

Instead, obedience entails changing your behavior because you've been taught to by someone in authority.

In three important ways, obedience differs from conformity:

• Obedience is based on a command, while conformity is based on a request.
• Conformity is going along with those of same rank, whereas obedience is obeying someone of higher status.
• Conformity is based on the urge to be socially acceptable, while obedience is based on social power.

Experiments on Obedience by Milgram

During the 1950s, psychologist Stanley Milgram became fascinated by Solomon Asch's conformity experiments. Milgram wanted to see how far people would go to comply with group pressure after seeing Asch's work.

Milgram's interest in obedience was sparked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who planned and oversaw the wholesale deportation of Jews during World War II.

Throughout the trial, Eichmann claimed that he was only carrying out orders and that he had no remorse for his role in the mass murders since he had only been doing what his superiors asked and had had no part in the decision to kill the hostages.

Milgram's goal was to find out if "Germans are different." However, he quickly learned that the vast majority of individuals are remarkably submissive to authority. 3 Following the horrors of the Holocaust, some persons, such as Eichmann, justified their participation in the crimes by claiming that they were simply following orders.

Milgram wanted to determine if people would truly harm another person if they were told to by someone in authority. How strong is the persuasion to obey?

Milgram's experiments required participants to be placed in a room and instructed to deliver electrical shocks to a "learner" in another room. Unbeknownst to the participant, the person who was meant to be getting the shocks was actually a participant in the experiment and was simply acting out reactions to fictitious shocks.

Milgram discovered that under the experimenter's orders, 65 percent of subjects were willing to inflict the maximal degree of shocks.

The Prison Experiment of Zimbardo

Milgram's controversial findings sparked a surge of interest in obedience psychology. Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist, staged an investigation into the study of prisoners and prison life in the early 1970s.

In the basement of Stanford University's psychology department, he built up a mock prison and assigned his volunteers to play the roles of either convicts or guards, with Zimbardo himself serving as the warden.

Even though the study was supposed to run two weeks, it had to be stopped after only six days. Why did the researchers call it a day on the experiment? The guards used authoritarian measures to gain the convicts' allegiance since the players had become so invested in their roles.

The guards even subjected the detainees to psychological abuse, intimidation, and physical torture in some circumstances.

The Stanford Prison Experiment's findings are frequently used to highlight how easily people are influenced by the characteristics of the roles and settings in which they are cast, but Zimbardo also suggested that environmental conditions play a role in people's willingness to obey authority.

Action-Oriented Obedience

Milgram's experiments paved the way for future research on obedience, and the topic swiftly grew in popularity among social psychologists. But, when psychologists talk about compliance, what exactly do they mean?

Definitions, Illustrations, and Remarks

"Studies have been carried out with people from other countries, children, and other methodological changes. The same basic conclusion is consistently obtained: many people readily accept the authority of an authoritative figure, even if it means putting another person in danger.

The nurse-physician connection is one fascinating implementation of this principle. Several studies have found that nurses would often carry out a physician's directions, even if there is cause to assume that the patient will suffer harm.(Breckler, Olson, & Wiggins, 2006)

"Milgram's findings have now been replicated by other researchers. Students in high school were shown to be considerably more inclined to follow directions. Milgram's approach has also achieved high rates of obedience in cross-cultural study in other Western cultures. Milgram's findings, unfortunately, do not appear to be a fluke." 2013 (Pastorino & Doyle-Portillo).

"Are American culture's conformity and obedience unique? Certainly not. The Asch and Milgram studies have been replicated in a number of societies, with results that are broadly comparable to those obtained in the United States. As a result, the phenomena of conformity and obedience appear to be culturally inextricable.

Many of the studies have found even higher levels of compliance than Milgram's American samples. For samples from Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Holland, for example, compliance rates of over 80% have been observed." (Weiten, 2010)