Milgram experiment
Do you know Milgram experiment? It’s a famous social psychological experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram that demonstrated human’s great tendency of obedience to authority figures. If you are not familiar with the experiment, I recommend you to read the Wikipedia page. Here is my short version of explanation. But, it might’ve been misinterpreted by mistake, so I really recommend you to figure out the details by yourself.
- In the experiment, there are three roles; the Experimenter who is an authoritative role, the Teacher who is an experiment subject, the Learner who is an actor or confederate;
- The teacher and the learner are separated into different rooms.
- The teacher is supposed to give the learner some quiz and the learner is supposed to answer them;
- Whenever the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer an electroshock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.
- Before beginning the experiment, the teacher was given a sample electric shock to experience how much painful it would be to the learner.
- Actually, however, there is no shock. The learner, who is an actor, just acts like the shock is real.
- The actor bangs on the wall, screams, demands to be free, complains about his heart condition and performs other acting to make the subject believe the pains are real.
- The more strong the shock gets, the bigger the screams or other messages become in order to indicate the pain is going up to so much serious level.
- The experimenter encourages the subject to continue the experiment if he seems hesitating or worried.
Note that the actual experiment was more complicated than the above simplified procedure.
In the first experiment conducted in 1961, many participants continued giving shocks in spite of hearing a series of screams indicating so much pain and the demanding to be free from the victims. And 65 percent of participants administered the 450-volt shock which was set as the highest voltage (seriously dangerous if it was for real) for the experiment. More of similar experiments have been conducted since Milgram’s first experiment. Some experiment even used a real “cute” puppy with a real electric shock (harmless, though). The results were similar;
Some people may think the experiment shows how humans can be as brutal as they can go. But it’s not the point of the experiment in my opinion. It tries to show how far humans can go obedient to various authority figures (e.g., your boss, experts, police officers, etc). And the result of the experiment indicates human nature to obey the authority is even more stronger than we would imagine. My assumption is, it has been deeply rooted at our core.
Instinct of obedience at our deep core
Some people reveal themselves that they are more obedient to authority than other people. I personally met a few of those people in my life. I could see those people clearly were feeling uneasy about my occasional behaviors such as questioning my boss’s decisions or ideas. I can agree that all of us need to respect our boss’s orders to some degree. But questioning some of their decisions is harmful so should it be discouraged? Some people seemingly think that way. They hardly show behaviors similar to questioning authority themselves and emit some signals that they don’t like it when they see such behaviors of others.
But I have no intention of blaming them at all. Some of such people are necessary for the sake of a team or organization anyway. If your team only consists of those who just like to question everything, your team might be put under a situation such as “too many discussions, little progresses”. Also someone may guess that those more inherently obedient people would happily give the highest shock voltage. I think that is a kind of bias we should avoid. Also I don’t know that kind of group is a majority or minority in our society. What I have interest in here is how the tendency of obedience to authority figures affects more regular and average people.
Most of people are not so clear how much of tendency they have in terms of obeying authority persons. But Milgram experiment showed so many people were obedient to the person in charge of the experiment even though they had freedom and right to quit continuing it. The experiment reported that many participants displayed varying degrees of tension and stress such as sweating, trembling, stuttering, groaning, weeping, etc. Clearly, we can see they received significant amount of stress indicating so much inner conflict. Nevertheless, generally speaking, behavior of following and obeying instructions from the authority figure comes first, and behaviors related to morality and sympathy and something similar came next or were suppressed.
That means whatever causes to make us obey authority people are so much strong and powerful. We know that similar behaviors are observable from other animals which have some sort of hierarchy or society, for instance, most of primates other than human. I think this behavior would’ve been very helpful in terms of evolution and survival of species. Hunter-gatherers, our ancestors, were under great threats and dangers more often than now, and probably they often confronted many hostile situations where quick decision makings and actions were vital and critical. In those circumstances, just following orders from the group leaders and obeying them would’ve been much more effective for their survival. Considering our long history of having hierarchical societies and social interactions, it’s not so unnatural even if we assume that the obedience behavior is related to something at our genetic level or some deeply hardwired functions at our core level.
Instinct of obedience and decision makings
However, we don’t live in the hunter-gatherer’s age. no need to hurry like our ancestors used to. In today’s age of information, we can collect and manage enough information and knowledge to help us make proper and optimal decisions. Still, some decisions are required to make quickly. But various technologies are here and there to assist us. Unless some external environmental factors, over which we don’t have so much control, make us quickly decide something in a hurry, we generally are able to control and optimize our decision making systems. Generally speaking, you may think organizations or individuals can make better decisions than ever because of information and knowledge flooded everywhere and good fast evolving technologies.
But as stated in my earlier blog post, unless we carefully design our decision making system, some cognitive biases slip in, as a result, we may make nonoptimal decisions. Likewise, the inner instinct to obey someone in higher power or expertise might negatively affect our decisions.
Think about your everyday decision makings; They mostly may be going smoothly. However, sometimes you need to decide something or draw a conclusion under some sort of time pressure or emergency. Even if your organization has good knowledge base backed by efficient system, that doesn’t mean every employee has a good skill of retrieving the right information at the right time for a proper decision making. Your skill level of managing knowledge and retrieving information may not be that good. That means more often than not you may not be provided enough resources required for a good decision making. That’s where your hardwired mechanisms such as ambient effect or Milgram effect comes in.
Milgram experiment shows us that our instinct of obedience to authority is so mush powerful. In the experiment, we see those participants had discretion to make their own decision. But in fact, they didn’t use that discretion. That’s indicating it’s really doubtful if you can make your own decision under strong influences of Milgram effect.
Strip search phone call scam
Many scammers are cleverly leveraging Milgram effect. One notable incident is The Mount Washington scam. Suppose that you are a manager in a restaurant and take a phone call from a man claiming he is a police officer. He says one of your workers are suspected of theft and asks you to search the worker. Of course, he gives you spurious reasons about why he can’t be there himself (e.g., all officers are busy at the moment with other bigger crimes) Do you think you would never fall for it? Similar scams were made nearly 10 times over 10 years prior to The Mount Washington scam incident. That means so many people fell for it. If you think you wouldn’t fall for it, what is that reason?
In the case of the Mount Washington scam, the assistant manager, believing that the caller was a real police officer, conducted a strip search of a part time job girl, which is clearly illegal regardless of being conducted on behalf of police investigation. Another employee committed an even more serious crime against the same victim under the scammer’s authoritative influences. In this case, similar to the Milgram experiment, the instinct of obedience or whatever you call it, simply overpowered human’s ability to make right decisions.
Of course, poorly designed scams would be easy to detect and many won’t be deceived. But most of scams are carefully and cleverly designed and make use of various small tricks which are mostly focused on depriving us of many options to carefully analyze our surrounding circumstances and related information. For instance, the scammer may say so; “We don’t have enough time. If you don’t do it, all of us’ll be in a trouble”. The scammer won’t give us enough time and room with which we can fully analyze the situation and consider other options. Basically, they constantly try to compromise our decision making ability and make Milgram effect more and more influential.
Not to speak of scams, the similar situation may happen regularly more than you would imagine in you and your organization. All kinds of small emergency are happening from time to time. Even if you are so perfect to do your job correctly, sometimes you are asked to quickly clean up other people’s mess. In all of emergency, we more often than not have insufficient resources (time, knowledge, data, advice, etc.) for a good decision making. Also, people would get panicked more or less, and feel some stress which might lead to loosing more of our own ability to help us make good decisions. All of these conditions are friendly to Milgram effect.
Milgram effect threat for our day to day decisions.
Suppose that your organization is a social web vender and one day, An employee found that the network security had been compromised and some of customer data had been stolen! At this emergency, top brains of your company are assembled to discuss what to do. Some argue that opening up the fact of security breach is essential. They say that informing the customers of the fact and make them take necessary countermeasures as soon as possible would be correct in terms of morality and maintaining trust from the customers. But what about share prices of the company? It might be a lot bigger concern than morality for some people. Finally, the CEO comes to a conclusion that they need to hide the fact; He says “Our corporation USUALLY put first our customer’s value and profit. But this is a rare emergency. Sometimes we need to respond to an exceptional situation with an exceptional solution. We have no other choice.”. Doesn’t that sound similar to Milgram experiment?
I know this imaginary decision making scenario might look funny to you. Something like that may not happen in the real world. Milgram effect is not the only factor leading to nonoptimal decisions. Also there may be positive factors leading to optimal decisions. So real world decision makings would be a lot more complicated. But I wanted to just roughly illustrate how Milgram effect might work during our decision making process especially in the case of emergency or crisis. When your CEO says something like “We have no other choice”, what would be your response especially when you feel something is wrong about his decision? In this kind of situation, Milgram experiment tells us that most of us will simply obey the authority even if we feel that’s not right.
“You (or we) have no other choice” talk from an authority figure actually might be a lot powerful more than you would imagine. I was once told the same talk from an employee of a real-estate company. At the end of my house rental contract with them, I decided to move without extending the contract and informed them of my leaving. But unexpectedly, they started to claim I should pay an additional rent based on the contract agreement, which didn’t make sense to me. When the agent told me that, over the phone, “you have no other choice but to pay”, I felt my blood pressure suddenly going up. I clearly came uncomfortable and even panicked. I stuttered a lot. Nevertheless, somehow I could resist and denied agreement to pay and determined to dig out myself about their claim. After some research, I found that their spurious claim had no strong legal basis. In fact, my contract agreement had several unclear issues. And I figured they cleverly leveraged that vagueness. Also I felt direct conversations with these guys would not be a good idea so I chose an e-mail as the only communication means. They requested me to talk with them but I refused and insisted on e-mail communications which later could be used as a valid legal proof. Through an e-mail, I requested them to provide me any clear legal basis for their claim. Then, no more of bullshit claim! They dropped it. I could safely leave without paying extra money.
We usually never think people like the real-estate agents have so much power or authority. Depending on situations, however, similar experts talking to you suddenly might become authority figures and try to manipulate and exploit you. Be careful! In my opinion, this is more serious threat to us than scams especially when we dispute on some issues we are not so familiar with. My previous case with real-estate guys was somewhere between a scam and valid legal issue. Even if you think you are Milgram effect scam proof, how you can cleverly deal with this kind of unclear dispute might be questionable. You will occasionally have subtle issues and disputes with other people who know more than you. Usually we will encounter those disputes or quarrels more often than scams. Every malicious person with higher expertise than you could become a potential authority figure and you highly likely might be a victim of Miglram effect. If you encounter one, deep research for the issue by yourself and avoiding direct talking with them might be helpful as I did. And if possible, asking help or advice from another friendly experts might be a safer solution.
So what we do?
Dealing with Milgram effect is not easy. I can’t suggest any perfect solution here. But I think it’s important to understand how it may affect our daily discussions or decision makings. If you have skills of quickly accessing right information all the time, it would definitely help you. And equipping yourself with general knowledge would help you on a long term basis.