Ensuring Obedience
“... Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[1].
1. Introduction
Core beliefs, those central belief systems held as the foundation upon which a person lives her life,
can be surreptitiously altered. With surprising ease.
On this page however, I discuss a handful of simple experiments which show how easily a person or a group of people can be manipulated without the bother of altering their belief systems for them.
2. Automatic obedience
Some interesting experiments where done under in 1962. Subjects were presented with a stack of 2000 pages of random numbers and instructed to add each two adjacent numbers while a man in a white lab coat absented himself from the room. There was no financial or other inducement, other than that the lab-coat wearer had been introduced as someone important, an authority figure. Over 90% of the test subjects continued the meaningless task on their own for up to five hours straight, until the researcher finally returned to the room [2,3].
Others who followed with many variations of this experiment over the years concluded that it authority alone was sufficient motivation for most people to do almost any assigned task for long periods of time, without question.
3. Amorality
A number of well known experiments extended this, finding that subjects would obey authority figures to such an extent that they would even inflict torture for no reason other than the say-so of as authority figure.
In one such study [4] a stern experimenter asked subjects to introduce ever more painful electric shocks (which were in fact non-existent) to a ’learner’, who unknown to the subject was acting out prearranged behaviour in response to the ’shocks’. As the experiment proceeded, the learner acted more and more negatively to the apparently intensifying shocks, eventually screaming and begging that the experiment stop. Subjects usually became very uncomfortable and asked the experimenter if this was supposed to occur. Upon being told to continue with the shocks until the the learner’s performance on the tasks was sufficiently acceptable, most subjects continued to press the button that they believed inflicted painful shocks, regardless of the apparent voltage and the pleas of the learner. Most continued in fact past the point where the induced voltage would have had the situation been real, been fatal to the learner.
This basic experiment and its many variations has since been performed hundreds of times by different researchers in different cultures and countries [5,6,7,8]. The results are consistently the same - even though learners screamed in agony at the ever more intense shocks just under 70% of the subjects, at the insistence of the stern authority figure, administered what would have been as far as they knew, potentially lethal shocks [9].
There are some differences in findings depending upon culture. In Germany for example fully 85% of the experimental subjects were quite willing to administer apparently lethal shocks [9,10]. These perturbations in extent however are irrelevant to the overall result that a high majority of subjects in western cultures, were willing to subject strangers to what they believed to be torture. Of course few do so without qualm [6,7]. Yet usually when the experimenter offers to accept all responsibility, or that the shocks are ’good’ for the learner, the subjects continue, albeit reluctantly in most cases, to press the button even to the point at which were the situation real, death would have occurred [ibid, 8].
In other words, obedience took precedence over the fundamental moral leaning of the subjects about not hurting, let alone torturing, another human being.
"The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation." [11]
4. Sadism
The rather famous Stanford Prison Experiment is particularly interesting. In it randomly selected volunteers are assigned the job of ’prisoners’ or ’guards’ in a mock prison. No other guidance was given to the subjects. Yet to the surprise (and horror) of the experimenters, things soon got out of hand. Guards began to perform sadistic acts on surprisingly submissive prisoners [12]. To such an extent that the experimenters had to stop things before serious damage to the volunteer ’prisoners’ occurred.
Some have criticised this and similar experiments on statistical and other grounds [13,14], yet few would disagree that they indicate an ease of acquiescence to unethical actions when holding power over others. Certainly the criminology and psychology literature contain many similar examples which with varying degrees of success, confirm this conclusion [12, 14, 15].
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion” [16]
5. Deindividuation
The term ’deindividuation’ refers to the abrogating of individual responsibility to authority (individual or group), in essence of renouncing responsibility for one’s actions and becoming part of a herd. For example deindividuation theory has been applied to the training of soldiers and police [17] in an effort to ensure obedience instead of individual moral or ethical consideration.
It and similar concepts (cognitive dissonance, etc.) have been used to try to understand why acculturated moral and ethical restraints can so easily be abandoned under the direction of authority.
How is it one might ask, that monsters such as Sese Seko Mobuto, Than Shwe, Hitler, Idi Amin, Enver Pasha, Kim Jong, Ion Antonescu, and other equally debased psychopaths, are so easily supported in their obvious war crimes and crimes against humanity by the general public? And moreover that such support is held up as an expression of the highest form of patriotism.
6. The Third Wave
"Tell a lie a hundred times and it becomes the truth!" — Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister [18]
Students in Ron Jones’ California 1967 high school social studies class were curious about the German public’s responsibilities regarding the rise of the Third Reich. How they wondered, could the Germans have allowed torture, invasion of other countries, secret restrictive no-travel lists, universal spying, warentless home invasion, elimination of social programs, destruction of the country’s infrastructure, reduced taxes for the rich, debasement of the county’s constitution, unjust tax laws, and so on... without almost no complaint? How could the Germans have allowed the replacement of their democracy by a police state with nary a whimper? Mr. Jones decided to show his students how this happened [19].
When his class arrived one morning, they found that Mr. Jones had cleaned everything extraneous from the classroom, and arranged the desks in perfectly straight rows. He had dimmed the lights, and had Wagner playing over the loudspeakers as the students arrived. As the students settled in, he told them he was going to give them the keys to power and success, but in return they had to become more disciplined. “Strength Through Discipline” was to be their watchword. Students were given speed drills to improve their ability to go from the hallway to sitting straight, feet flat on the floor, silent, and at attention at their desks. Grades were based upon participation.
The next day when Jones entered the classroom, he found his students sitting straight, silent, facing the front. He went to the board and wrote “Strength Through Community”, and began extolling the need for everyone to be a cog, a part, of a greater whole. He created a signal - right hand toward the right shoulder - and named it ’The Third Wave’. Students soon began to use the Third Wave in the hallways and in other classes. Within a few days, Jones’ class was overflowing with new students eager to learn the ways of “Strength Through Discipline” and “Strength Through Community”.
Then Jones introduced the next pillar - “Strength Through Action”. Every student was given tasks to complete. Some were to make Third Wave banners, others were to memorize the names and addresses of every Third Wave member, still others were to make Third Wave armbands, and so on. All students, regardless of task, were told that the three ’Strengths’ must be spread to non-members - Jones’ students where told to make converts to the cause.
Very soon several hundred students had joined. Third Wave banners were everywhere. Members wore armbands. They saluted each other with the Third Wave salute. Several male students began to act as Jones’ bodyguard as the walked around, their special armbands signifying their role in protecting the “Leader”. Their armbands were black.
Then things got interesting.
All members of the Third Wave carried Third Wave identity cards with them at all times. But some of these Jones had secretly marked with an X. Anyone with an X on their identity cards was told by Jones to watch for members who transgressed against the three pillars. Or against the many rules which had now come into play, such as which paths around the school Third Wave members could walk upon, and whom they were allowed to associate with.
Very soon, Jones was being informed of plots against him. Students turned in their best friends. Everyone watched everyone. Loyalty to the “Leader” was everything, and anyone evidencing even a slight disinclination to obey was immediately turned in. Jones used the snitches and spy network to seize control of the lines of communication for himself. As part of this activity he created a “secret police” group of Third Wave enforcers from members who had formerly been the ’tough’ kids at the school.
Those who were accused of transgressions were made to read lists of what they had done wrong (real or imaginary) in front of other Third Wave members. If found guilty by the majority of members, they were sent into exile (the school library) and ostracised from the main group. Students not only convicted their peers on the bases of (often false) allegations, but additionally too Jones’ word for it when he accused a student of something or other. The Leaders’ word was law.
Of course a small underground movement began, but it was completely ineffective. This was in part because of the spy network which had spontaneously arise, and in part because Jones kept changing the rules and routines. Students were either for the Third Wave or against it, there was no middle ground. Most were for it.
As word of what was going on spread to the parents and the community at large, Jones kept expecting that his experiment would be stopped. But it was not. A few concerned parents called him, but Jones simply told them it was a class exercise, and no one looked any further. He had a free hand.
He had a few members of the underground escorted by Third Wave security forces into exile in the library. Then he gathered his followers. He told them that the Third Wave was not a class exercise. It was not a game. He said that they were a local cell of a select student movement that was spreading throughout the country. That there were other cells in every state. He told them that there were more than a thousand other Third Wave student groups who at noon in a few days would announce themselves to the public, sponsoring a Third Wave presidential candidate who would usher in a “new sense of order, community, pride and action” in the country. The announcement was to be made on television.
On the day of the announcement, Third Wave students flooded into the assembly hall, backs straight, silent, eyes riveted on the television. Jones saluted, dimmed the lights, turned on the TV, and left the hall. The TV set remained blank. There was silence in the hall. After a while, Jones returned, and told the students that there was in fact, no nationwide Third Wave moment, no president-in-waiting... it was all part of this experiment to teach them how easily the German people, the Italians, and they themselves could be led. How easy it was to go from a democracy to a police state. How simple it was for a psychopath to take control and destroy ethical values. Jones told them:
"You and I are no better or worse than the citizens of the Third Reich. We would have worked in the defence plants. We will watch our neighbours be taken away, and do nothing. We’re just like those Germans. We would give our freedom up for the chance of being special." [ibid]
The entire experiment had taken only one week - it had taken seven days to turn a group of normal high school students into a well organized group believers in the Third Wave. Into a group of nascent fascists.
"Situations exert much more influence over human behaviour than people acknowledge," — Philip Zimbardo, researcher on the rise of sadism during the famous prison experiments which he and others conducted at Stanford [20]
The implications are obvious.
