Roles, Power, and Influence . . .
Milgram, Zimbardo, and Derren Brown

milgram1

Does our inate response to authority shut off our ethical sense or responsible behavior?  There are a lot of studies on this very question and the bulk of them point to a rather disapointing and resounding yes.  It seems people are often pretty much sheep or more aptly lemmings.

Once again, crossposting from the Hypnosis Technique Exchange . . . on Marknosis (see that group for the original threads), there has been some discussion about roles being very powerful as social influence constructs to the point that when people are placed in certain roles, they respond automatically and will carry out actions they know to be questionable or would not normally do otherwise.

The key study mentioned on the thread was the Milgram Experiment study conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University circa 1963 in which test subjects were presented with a situation where they were part of a volunteer pair to assess the effects of pain on learning (not the real study but merely the operational guise) so that one would read a series or words and the other would repeat a sequence and get electric shocks if the wrong word was said. Each time a mistake was made, the next shock would be more powerful with a board of switches going all the way up to a lethal degree. In actuality, the person “receiving” the shocks was not an experimental test subject but a confederate with no actual shocks delivered although the test subjects thought they were causing the other person pain.

The experimenters assumed that most people would stop the procedure out of empathy and moral outrage despite being told to continue by their lab-coat wearing "scientists" . . . the actual results were very different as Milgram found that 65% of the teacher role subjects administered what they thought was a lethal dose of 450 volts to the learners and none of them stopped before reaching 300 volts. When the parameters of the experiment were changed so that the teacher had increased contact with the learners such as having to physically place the learner’s hand on the device to receive the shock, then compliance went down to 30% and when the teacher could himself select the level of shock then lethality went down to only 2%, showing that response to authority is very powerful – see here for more numbers..

Even though subjects “knew” they were “hurting” the other person, most continued. See the experimental construct. In the Marknosis thread, the point has been made that the Milgram study (the study began in 1961 and continued for a few years with the results being written up in 1971, the typical year for the money shot stuff from the study is circa 1963 or so) demonstrates that people have little defense to roles and that links in their compliance to behaviors.

The idea of "roles" is one way to look at it . . . transactional analysis and "roles people play" sort of thing . . . but Milgram considered it to be primarily about response to authority as the teachers administered lower levels in the same roles when behavior was not dictated by authority. The results are also accurately described in Robert Cialdini’s terms as the Law of Power as one of the so-called Laws of Influence (social influence or the psychology of persuasion). People tend to automatically comply to suggestions or directions made by those they assume to hold legitimate power, sometimes in ways that are inappropriate for the circumstances – such as the Tokyo doctor who convinced women to strip and crawl around on his office floor . . . naked on all floors . . . while he snapped photos with his digital camera or the guy who went door to door telling women he was a doctor out giving free breast exams. One of my graduate students (a man over 50 who is very "intelligent" who is also the principle of a very well known high school in Taipei) once handed over his wallet and passport to a stranger as he got off a London train merely because the guy presented himself as being with the "Transportation Authority" needing to check my student’s identification and travelling papers "stay here and I will be back in a moment" (the guy walked off with the student’s IDs and money). Power or perceived power can be very very powerful. People can be convinced to do some mighty stupid things . . . stupid when given the benefit of hindsight, that is, as at the time the compliance seems perfectly reasonable and is almost automatic.

The Nazi stuff given in a previous post on this subject is partly power and partly role but it is also some other stuff coming into play Consistency and Conformity being two big ones (albeit Power, as correctly identified within the role sets, is a biggie). Milgram was specifically interested in response to authority because of the Nazi crimes – of course, we need only look at current behaviors regarding the abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war to see very sobering echoes. A very relevant study related to this behavior is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in 1971. Here, student volunteers – typically healthy and stable middle class white guys – were randomly divided into groups of prisoners and guards to see how imprisonment affects behaviors. The study was funded by the United States Navy in an effort to figure out what was going on with all the conflict and abuse in its own prisons and those of the Marine Corps (see US military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba for current examples of the same sort of thing – the Nazis did NOT have a monopoly on prison abuse, heck, think of Andersonville for even more historical precedent). The experiment had to be ended early because it got way out of hand (some of the photos of what the guards were doing to prisoners in the experiment have chilling echoes of what guards in Iraq were doing to prisoners).

In his television special, The Heist, one of our favorite mentalist magician tranceguys, Derren Brown and company recreated the Milgram experiment with his group of unsuspecting "seminar participants" . . . this was after the "NLPish" seminar where he seemed to do the conditioning of aggression to the color green and music and a bunch of stuff like that (a LOT of old fashioned Dual Reality stuff going on there). He was ostensibly weeding out folks with less pliable moral character for his final armored car robbery bit. It was very interesting watching folks who were obviously concerned about the pain levels of the experimental "subject" who still flipped the switches all the way to the lethal level just because the guy in the white coat said they had to "continue the experiment" . . . Brown came out with the same results that the original variation of the Milgram Experiment had which is not surprising as the study has been recreated for decades in many places with the same scary results . . . in one study in Germany, 85% of the subjects administered a lethal dose of electricity . . . of course, Brown is interested in entertainment and in presenting psychological forces or what appear to be psychological forces in an entertaining way . . . but The Heist is particularly interesting in how it is set up . . . the bit with the confidence- building empowerment exercise of having folks go to a convenience store and shop lift some candy was also interesting.

Relevant online bits on Brown . . .

Of course, all this does NOT mean we are all doomed . . . once one is aware of the pheonomenon, we can learn to observe our behaviors and to step away from automatic uncritical response.

I hope this has been helpful.

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