Obedience and Ethics Flashcards
What was the defense of ordinary people for the who were in the Nazi and committed Genocide?
The defense:
- “[I] had to follow orders… what I was ordered to do, unfortunately I had to carry out”
Argued that he was only a “transmitter:”
- “I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.”
- He had abdicated his conscience to the Führerprinzip (“leader principle”), whereby “the leader’s world is above all written
What is Arendet’s thesis for the “banality of evil”?
great evils in the history committed not by fanatics or psychopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state — who thought what they were doing was “normal”
What is Milgram’s experiment?
Controversial study of authority, obedience and defiance but perhaps it would have been less controversial if the results were more comforting
Subjects recruited to be part of an experiment on “learning”
Played the role as a “teacher,” who was to punish a learner (always an experimenter, but appeared to be another subject)
The “teacher” was told to shock the “learner” when the learner gave an incorrect response
Punishment by electric shocks, starting at the bottom voltage, moving up one level for each mistake
The experimenter insisted that subject continue the experiment at all times
What was the purpose of Milgram’s experiment?
Purpose 1:
to see under what conditions people will carry out commands of an authority figure — and when will they refuse to obey
Purpose 2:
to see what proportion of subjects would be “obedient” - go all the way to the highest voltage levels
Purpose 3:
to test whether people’s predictions of what subjects would do were accurate
both Yale undergraduates and psychiatrists made predictions
How is the “learner” being conditioned during the experiment?
The “learner” is hooked up to what appears to be a shock generating machine with 30 switches labelled from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: severe shock”
The “teachers were given a shock of 45 volts to convince them that all the shocks were real
The “learner’s” response to the questions is scripted (and played back on a tape recorder)
At 150 volts the “learner” is heard asking that the experiment stop
What are the results to Milgram’s experiment?
Subjects seemed to believe what they were doing
Showed strong signs of stress and tension while administering higher levels of shocks e.g. nervous laughter
Many subjects expressed discomfort, and asked to stop the experiment — the experimenter insisted that they continued
Everyone proceeded up to 300 volts, at which point the “learner” was heard kicking the wall
26 out of 40 subjects went all the way to 450 volts (“Severe shocks”)
Undergraduates had predicted that only 1.2% of subjects would administer the highest shock-levels
Psychiatrists predicted that no one would go beyond 150 volts
No difference between men and women
What is the transition from obedience to authority?
Culture
Culture socializes individuals to obey certain authority figures such as police offers, teachers, and parents (Burger, 2009)
Expertise
Perceived expertise of the experimenter contributed to the participants’ decisions to follow the instructions
Self-perception
Agreeing to small requests, such as pressing the low-voltage switches, may mean participants came to see themselves as the kind of people who follow the experimenter’s instructions
What are the conditions that would decrease obedience?
Proximity of the “learner”
- obedience decreased if the learner was in the same room as the teacher
- obedience decreased if the teacher had to physically place the learner’s hand on a shock plate
Proximity of the authority figure
- obedience decreased when the experimenter
>left the room and gave the instructions by telephone
>was never seen and instructions were left on a tape recorder
>was in another room or was not present the “teachers” falsely reported how much shock they were giving the “learner”
>when other “teachers” (who were confederates of the experimenter) sat with the teacher and disobeyed instructions, 90% of the real subjects disobeyed as well
Prestige of the experiment
- the initial studies took place at Yale University with the experimenter dressed in a white lab coat
- obedience decreased when the study was moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut and conducted by the fictional “Research Associates of Bridgeport”
What is the Stanford Prison Experiment?
Volunteers randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners
Objective:
to observe the interaction between the groups (and their members) in the absence of an obvious authority
What went wrong with the Stanford Prison Experiment?
Planned to run for two weeks
– Guards adopted roles with such brutality that the study was halted after six days
within the first six days, 5 of the original 9 prisoners had been released as a result of humiliation, degradation and abuse suffered at the hands of the guards
– prisoners were “zombie-like in yielding to the whims of the ever-escalating guard-power” (Zimbardo 2007)
– ‘zombie-like’ prisoners and brutal guards were normal students
What are the conformity to social roles?
- Zimbardo’s argument — acts of guard aggression were “a ‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniforms of a ‘guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role” (Haney et al., 1973)
- Not responsiding to orders or authority
- Student assigned to be guards were not instructed to be cruel but ‘conformed to their own notions of how to keep order in a prison’ (Stanley, 2006)
What the difference between Milgram and Zimbardo?
In contrast to Milgram’s conclusions about an ‘agentic state’, people do not necessarily need strong leaders to induce cruelty in them
