Even though I don’t want you to start swinging from the rafters during my classes, I do want you to appreciate the dangers as well as the advantages of obedience. That’s why I’m publishing this presentation on Milgram’s experiment. I find his study chilling, both because of its results and because he dreamed it up in the first place. But the message of the experiment, however suspect its ethics, is one that should be made clear to every soldier, every teacher, every person in authority, every person whose deference to an authority figure, a dictator or a maniac could lead to human suffering. In short, to every person on earth.
Milgram’s study arose partially from the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, where the Nazi war criminals frequently said that they had only been following orders in the death camps. They did not say, “I did the wrong thing,” but instead, “I did what I was told”.
I do not believe that everyone in the world is capable of the kinds of actions that the Nazis carried out. There were many other historical factors at work in the development of Hitler’s dictatorship and the implementation of the Nazis’ genocidal policies. But all the same, Milgram examined that suspect, horrifying defence, “I did what I was told”, and discovered that ordinary Americans – and people of other nationalities – were often more prepared than he would have thought to be senselessly cruel to innocent strangers.
A source of hope and consolation, perhaps, is that Milgram found one factor in particular that reduced this numbing willingness to obey the authority figure. Read the presentation below to find out what this factor was.
Afterword: At this link is a short video and a transcript of an interview with several Australians who were involved in an experiment similar to Milgram’s in the 1970s at La Trobe University. The long-term effects on the participants are explored in a compassionate way. Their mental suffering, even decades afterwards, highlights the cruelty of the study and the ethical principles it breached.