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Many of the people studied in
the experiment were in some sense against what they did to
the learner, and many protested even while they obeyed. But
between thoughts, words, and the critical step of disobeying
a malevolent authority lies another ingredient, the capacity
for transforming beliefs and values into action. Some
subjects were totally convinced of the wrongness of what
they were doing but could not bring themselves to make an
open break with authority. Some derived satisfaction from
their thoughts and felt that -- within themselves, at least
-- they had been on the side of the angels. What they failed
to realize is that subjective feelings are largely
irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are
not transformed into action. Political control is effected
through action. The attitudes of the guards at a
concentration camp are of no consequence when in fact they
are allowing the slaughter of innocent men to take place
before them. Similarly, so-called “intellectual resistance”
in occupied Europe -- in which persons by a twist of thought
felt that they had defied the invader -- was merely
indulgence in a consoling psychological mechanism. Tyrannies
are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the
courage to act out their beliefs. Time and again in the
experiment people disvalued what they were doing but could
not muster the inner resources to translate their values
into action.
A variation of the basic
experiment depicts a dilemma more common than the one
outlined above: the subject was not ordered to push the
trigger that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a
subsidiary act (administering the word-pair test) before
another subject actually delivered the shock. In this
situation, 37 of 40 adults from the New Haven area continued
to the highest shock level on the generator. Predictably,
subjects excused their behavior by saying that the
responsibility belonged to the man who actually pulled the
switch. This may illustrate a dangerously typical situation
in complex society: it is psychologically easy to ignore
responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a
chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences
of the action. Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the
concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he
had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same
time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into
the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the
grounds that he was only following orders from above. Thus
there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one man
decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its
consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for
the act has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common
characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.
The problem of obedience,
therefore, is not wholly psychological. The form and shape
of society and the way it is developing have much to do with
it. There was a time, perhaps, when men were able to give a
fully human response to any situation because they were
fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there
was a division of labor among men, things changed. Beyond a
certain point, the breaking up of society into people
carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from
the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to
see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is
thus unable to act without some kind of over-all direction.
He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his
own actions.
***
Any feature that reduces the
psychological closeness between the subject’s action and the
consequence of that action also reduces the level of strain.
Any means of breaking down or diluting the experienced
meaning of the act -- I am hurting a man -- makes the action
easier to perform. Thus, creating physical distance between
the subject and victim, and dampening the painful cries of
the victim, reduces strain. The shock generator itself
constitutes an important buffer, a precise and impressive
instrument that creates a sharp discontinuity between the
ease required to depress one of its thirty switches and the
strength of impact on the victim. The depression of a switch
is precise, scientific, and impersonal. If our subjects had
to strike the victim with their fists, they would be more
reluctant to do so. Nothing is more dangerous to human
survival than malevolent authority combined with the
dehumanizing effects of buffers. There is a contrast here
between what is logical and what is psychological. On a
purely quantitative basis, it is more wicked to kill ten
thousand by hurling an artillery shell into a town, than to
kill one man by pommeling him with a stone, yet the latter
is by far the more psychologically difficult act. Distance,
time, and physical barriers neutralize the moral sense.
There are virtually no psychological inhibitions against
coastal bombardment or dropping napalm from a plane twenty
thousand feet overhead. As for the man who sits in front of
a button that will release Armageddon, depressing it has
about the same emotional force as calling for an elevator.
While technology has augmented man’s will by allowing him
the means for the remote destruction of others, evolution
has not had a chance to build inhibitors against these
remote forms of aggression to parallel those powerful
inhibitors that are so plentiful and abundant in
face-to-face confrontations.
-- "Obedience to Authority,"
by Stanley Milgram |
