Obedience to authority and its discontents

‘With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation into performing harsh acts.’ (Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority)

As indicated in the epigraph above, Stanley Milgram’s famous, and somewhat infamous, social psychology experiments concerning ‘obedience to authority’ reveal a sad and sorry human tendency. Indeed Milgram was initially appalled, if also fascinated, by the frequency with which his subjects would obey the order to apparently inflict ever-increasing levels of electric shock to the ‘learners’ they were instructed to ‘teach’. The capacity to resist authority by taking personal responsibility for one’s actions and their effects was far more compromised than he had anticipated. Milgram’s research, conducted in the United States in the early 1960s, revealed that most people would obey an authority figure when instructed to administer severe electric shocks as punishment for a failure to learn; up to the 450-volt level on the imposing shock generator they were required to operate. This brute fact of routine obedience is the way the Milgram study is usually reported. What this obscures is the recurrent attempts by many of the research subjects to reclaim responsibility as the experiment’s awful scenario unfolded. By revisiting the Milgram studies, this essay aims to catch and reflect upon the drama of subjectivities in process as they negotiate responsibility in often partial, fragile and still-born, but sometimes resolute ways; always under the shadow of the chilling, often deadening, call to obey.