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Obedience, Conformity and the Limits of the Self (extract)

BIn 1951, the Polish-American psychologist Solomon Asch devised a deceptively simple task. A group of participants was shown a line printed on a card, followed by three comparison lines of different lengths, and asked aloud, one by one, which comparison line matched the original in length. The task was trivially easy: on their own, participants chose the correct line more than 99 per cent of the time. Unknown to the real participant, however, every other person in the room was an actor instructed in advance to give the same, obviously wrong, answer on certain trials. Seated near the end of the row, the genuine participant heard several confident wrong answers before giving their own. Across the critical trials, participants conformed to the incorrect majority answer around 37 per cent of the time, and roughly three-quarters conformed at least once during the experiment. Interviews afterwards revealed that few participants privately believed the wrong answer; most conformed publicly while remaining convinced, privately, that they had seen correctly.

CA decade later, Stanley Milgram, a former student of Asch's, designed an experiment at Yale University that pushed the question of social influence into far darker territory. Participants were told they were taking part in a study of memory and learning, and were assigned the role of 'teacher', tasked with reading word pairs to a 'learner' seated in an adjoining room and delivering an electric shock every time an answer was wrong. The shock generator in front of them was labelled in 15-volt increments, from 'Slight Shock' at one end to 'Danger: Severe Shock' and finally an ominous 'XXX' at 450 volts. The learner, in fact an actor who received no real shocks, followed a scripted pattern of protests, cries of pain, and eventually silence as the voltage rose. Whenever a teacher hesitated, an experimenter in a grey lab coat delivered a fixed series of verbal prods, culminating in 'you have no other choice, you must go on.' In the best-known version of the study, 65 per cent of participants continued administering shocks all the way to the maximum 450 volts, despite visible distress.

EMilgram did not stop at a single version of the experiment. Over the following two years, he ran more than twenty variations, altering the physical distance between teacher and learner, the setting, and the presence of others. When the learner was in the same room as the teacher, obedience fell sharply; when the teacher had to physically place the learner's hand on a shock plate, it fell further still. When two additional actors, posing as fellow teachers, refused to continue and withdrew from the study, obedience collapsed to around 10 per cent. Decades later, in 2009, the psychologist Jerry Burger conducted a partial replication with strict safeguards, stopping the procedure at 150 volts, the point at which the original learner first voiced distress. He found obedience rates strikingly similar to those Milgram had recorded almost fifty years earlier, suggesting the underlying pattern was not simply a product of its era.