Impact of Authority on Behavior Essay Paper

social psychology: Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Both experiments were conducted, at least partially, to help explain why seemingly normal people became Nazi collaborators in the World War II era. The experiments help demonstrate how individual authority over another allows individuals to exercise their own proclivities for cruelty and how being under the direction of authority figures causes people to engage in behavior that they find distasteful or cruel. The paper also examines Jane Elliot’s Brown Eye / Blue Eye experiment and what it says about the establishment of hierarchies.

Milgram and Zimbardo

After the end of World War II, as more and more information became available not just about the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but also about how seemingly normal individuals acted as collaborators to aid the Nazis in their pursuits, psychologists and sociologists became fascinated with how seemingly normal people could be do things that the average person found morally repugnant. The natural response was to recoil in horror from what people had done and suggest that it was impossible that normal people would behave in this way. In fact, some people even initially looked for some type of biological or sociological deficiency, which would have explained Nazi collaboration, a racist response that mirrored anti-Semitic beliefs in Nazi Germany in many ways. However, others who had studied human behavior did not believe that the Nazi collaborators had reacted in ways that stepped outside of the scope of human behavior. On the contrary, they pointed out that Nazi Germany may have had horrific conditions and the Holocaust may have been a large-scale atrocity, but that it was hardly unprecedented in human history. The Holocaust was actually only one of several holocausts that had targeted Jews in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Moreover, Americans, horrified at the atrocities committed in concentration camps did not have to look abroad to see the potential negative impact of the legalized subjugation and abuse of a group of people; slavery and Jim Crow both demonstrated that even otherwise moral people were willing to act in an immoral and harmful manner if given approval to do so. The fact that it had occurred did not explain why these evil practices had occurred, and two researchers, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo decided to conduct experiments targeting why evil occurs.

Milgram’s experiments did not target evil, per se, but was carefully tailored to investigate the impact of authority on an individual’s willingness to harm other people. It began with 40 male subjects ranging in age from 20 to 50 and asked them to inflict shocks on other research participants who answered questions incorrectly. No shocks were actually administered, and the “shocked” subjects were actually knowing participants in the experiment (BigHistory NL, 2013). Each time the participants provided an incorrect answer, the subjects were instructed to shock them, and the shocks escalated in intensity (2010). In the clip provided by YouTube username Markho, Stanley Milgram discusses people acting without any restraints on their behavior when instructed to do so by an authority figure. However, this characterization appears to be an oversimplification of how the subjects responded to the experiment. The subjects were clearly uncomfortable with administering the shocks, demonstrated a significant amount of distress, and questioned the researcher’s authority to administer the shocks.

Zimbardo’s prison experiment also examined authority, but from a different perspective. It examined the role that having authority played in one’s treatment of others. Philip Zimbardo believed that establishing a hierarchy that ranked some people over others, even if the people knew that there was no logical or reasonable basis for the hierarchy, was sufficient to elicit some negative behaviors from others (Mr1001Nights, 2008). To test this theory, he set up a fake prison at Stanford University, assigning some research subjects to be prison guards and others to be prisoners. Unlike Milgram, Zimbardo did not instruct the prison guards to treat the prisoners poorly; instead, he watched to see how establishing a hierarchical system of power would impact how people treated others (Another Boring Week, 2014). The extremes of the behavior of the guards towards the prisoners were so significant that Zimbardo actually stopped the experiment early.

While both experiments helped demonstrate that seemingly normal people will behave in an egregious and cruel manner and touched upon the nature of authority, they did not study the same thing. Milgram was looking at whether or not people would refuse to comply with an authority figure’s instructions that they do something to harm others. In contrast, Zimbardo’s experiment looked at how humans would behave towards other humans if placed in a situation where there was a power differential. The two are related, but distinct issues, which, taken together, do help explain the Nazi collaborators.

After all, Milgram’s study on how and why people respond to authority figures only explains collaborators once the Nazis were in power. Before the Nazis came to power, they would not have represented authority. Instead, Nazis had to build a steady base of authority. This was done through the use of scapegoating of minority groups, such as the Jews. Zimbardo’s study helps explain why, once people are told that they are superior to another group of people, they feel comfortable dehumanizing and abusing those people.

However, a third psychological experiment, not directly discussed in this assignment, has relevance for why people believe in arbitrary distinctions like race, in the first place. Jane Elliot’s Blue Eye Brown Eye experiment divided up school children into two groups and said that one group of children was superior to the other group of children (Ludwing Media, 2012). It did not take long for the “superior” group of children to begin bullying behavior towards the “inferior” group or for the “inferior” group of children to begin acting less deserving of good behavior. What this research suggests is that human beings may be searching for ways to establish hierarchies. If so, then Zimbardo’s research suggests that people will use or attempt to use those hierarchies to establish authority, and Milgram’s research suggests that once authority is established, even people who were not initially part of the hierarchy building will engage in antisocial behavior to reinforce those hierarchies because submitting to authority is considered prosocial even in an antisocial context.

References

Another Boring Week. (2013, January 4). Feature Film- The Stanford Prison Experiment.

Retrieved November 30, 2014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_LKzEqlPto

Big History NL. (2013, March 19). Milgram Experiment. Retrieved November 30, 2014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOYLCy5PVgM

Ludwing Media. (2012, November 19). Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes Racism Experiment

(Children Session)- Jane Elliot. Retrieved November 30, 3014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeK759FF84s

Markho. (2010, September 25). Milgram Obedience Study. Retrieved November 30, 2014

from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W147ybOdgpE

Mr1001nights. (2008, September 7). Zimbardo Shows How Most Evil Comes from Hierarchy.

Retrieved November 30, 2014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jYx8nwjFQ

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