IELTS Academic Reading — Passage 1

AFor over sixty years, psychologists have asked how much of what we call individual choice is actually shaped by the people around us. Two studies conducted in the United States between the 1950s and the 1960s did more than any others to shape the answer, and both remain among the most widely cited experiments in the social sciences. The first examined how far people would bend a simple perceptual judgement to match the mistaken view of a group of strangers. The second went further, asking whether ordinary people would inflict apparent physical harm on another person simply because an authority figure told them to. Together, the two studies drew a disturbing map of how easily private judgement gives way to social pressure, and they set off a debate about research ethics that is still shaping how psychology is practised today.

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 a confederate 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 a confederate 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.

DMilgram's results were as controversial as they were influential. Many participants left the laboratory visibly shaken, and some later reported lasting discomfort at having discovered what they were capable of under instruction. Critics argued that the deception involved, and the psychological distress it caused, could not be justified by the scientific value of the findings, however important. The debate contributed directly to the development of formal ethical review: institutional review boards and research ethics committees, now a standard requirement at universities and hospitals, grew in large part out of the controversy surrounding studies like Milgram's and the later Stanford Prison Experiment. Modern ethical codes, including those published by the American Psychological Association and the British Psychological Society, now require informed consent, the right to withdraw at any point, and a full debriefing explaining any deception used. A study conducted exactly as Milgram's was in 1961 would not be approved by an ethics committee today.

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 confederates, 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.

FThe relevance of this research reaches well beyond the laboratory. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, reporting on the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1961 — the same year Milgram began his experiments — coined the phrase 'the banality of evil' to describe how ordinary, unremarkable people could participate in atrocity while telling themselves they were simply following orders. Organisational psychologists now draw on Milgram's and Asch's findings to explain why employees stay silent about wrongdoing they witness at work, and why whistle-blowers remain rare even where the wrongdoing is serious. More recently, researchers have asked whether the same pressures operate online, where a visible crowd of silent bystanders in a chat room or comment thread can be enough to discourage any one person from speaking up. Understanding why obedience and conformity occur, it turns out, is not a historical curiosity but a continuing requirement for anyone designing institutions, workplaces, or online communities meant to resist them.