Obedience to Authority: the Milgram Experiment Revisited

January 4, 2009 in attachment parenting, education

Day 312. Survivors found: 6

“What luck for rulers that men do not think.”
- Adolf Hitler

The genial folks over at the American Psychological Association released this on their website last month–you can find the full article in this month’s American Psychologist journal.

REPLICATING MILGRAM: RESEARCHER FINDS MOST WILL ADMINISTER SHOCKS TO OTHERS WHEN PRODDED BY ‘AUTHORITY FIGURE’

Obedience Rates Essentially Unchanged in More than 40 Years; No Differences Between Men and Women

WASHINGTON—Nearly 50 years after one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a social psychologist has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by an authority figure.
Jerry M. Burger, PhD, replicated one of the famous obedience experiments of the late Stanley Milgram, PhD, and found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women.

Burger’s findings are reported in the January issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association. The issue includes a special section reflecting on Milgram’s work 24 years after his death on Dec. 20, 1984, and analyzing Burger’s study.

“People learning about Milgram’s work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram’s experiments still operate today.”

Stanley Milgram was an assistant professor at Yale University in 1961 when he conducted the first in a series of experiments in which subjects – thinking they were testing the effect of punishment on learning – administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An authority figure conducting the experiment prodded the first person, who was assigned the role of “teacher” to continue shocking the other person, who was playing the role of “learner.” In reality, both the authority figure and the learner were in on the real intent of the experiment, and the imposing-looking shock generator machine was a fake.

Milgram found that, after hearing the learner’s first cries of pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks; of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator’s end, at 450 volts. In Burger’s replication, 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped as they continued past 150 volts – a difference that was not statistically significant.

The rest of the article mostly contains the requisite academic hair-splitting over the revisiting of this experiment.

I don’t need to point this out to fellow survivors, but for all the others reading this (and you outnumber us by far), the Milgram experiment provides some refreshing counterpoint to all the “attachment” inanity that measures our mental health and capacity for love by our inclination (forced or otherwise) to mindless obedience.

Guess that’s why attachment therapists force us kids out of school.

“Most of the time when my kids first come, they don’t go to school. They’re not allowed to.”
- Nancy Thomas, Bonding & Attachment Workshop

“Mother is to remove her child from school and register her child for home school status with the local school system.”
- Heather Forbes, DSM in Action (2002), p. 161

“I called the school, and I said, ‘Send Matthew home.’ … [H]e was like in third grade. It was a little bit of a walk… I said, ‘Well, he didn’t fold his laundry.’ ‘Excuse me. You are interrupting math to fold his laundry?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care what he does for you. If he doesn’t do it right for me, he can do squat for you, and it doesn’t matter… He does not need to be a sneaky mathematician. Send the boy home.’ So the school now knew what they were dealing with.”
- Deborah Hage, “The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” (1999)

After all, the less you learn, the less you think.

“Forget school. If they never read, who cares.”
- Ronald Federici, “Treating Multi-Impaired Attachment Disorders” (2004)

“There are lots of things you can do without an education. [Our] corral out there is full of manure … And we have manure therapy.”
- Nancy Thomas, Bonding & Attachment Workshop

The less you think, the less you question.

“When given directions it is unacceptable for the child to ask ‘why?’ or ‘what?; NEVER answer these questions.”
- Nancy Thomas, When Love is Not Enough (1997), p. 37

“…And the third moral is that if you’re warm and safe, even though you may be up to your eyeballs in poop, you should keep your mouth shut.”
- Neil Feinberg, “Healing Broken Hearts” (2004)

The less you question, the less you act autonomously.

“The child develops … the capacity to relinquish control, be compliant and be obedient.”
- Neil Feinberg, “An In-Depth Clinical Case Study & Review of Treatment Protocol” (1999)

“Tell him he’s going to stay longer and you’re never going to relinquish rights. You’re just going to keep him, declare him disabled and keep him home until he’s 50.”
- Ronald Federici, “…Treating Multi-Impaired Attachment Disorders” (2004)

The less you act autonomously, the less you disobey.

“A child who is securely attached … is primarily cooperative and obedient and rarely angry.”
- Conrad Boeding, The Love Disorder (1998), p. 95

“…[T]here’s a lot of the “Yes, mom,” and there’s a lot of doing things fast and snappy, right the first time, mom and dad’s way. And basically, if you think about it, this is obedience training.”
- Neil Feinberg, “Healing Broken Hearts” (2004)

The less you disobey, the more power they wield.

“Well, pal, let’s get started. I’m up here on top of you and you’re on the bottom and you’re being held with your permission by 6 people so who is boss right now?”
- Foster Cline, Quoted in High Risk (1987), p. 217

“Things that we use a lot are Pavlovian Classical Conditioning.”
- Ronald Federici, “…Treating Multi-Impaired Attachment Disorders” (2004)

“Rage Reduction Therapy has been criticized as being close to brainwashing. But Foster Cline … answers such critics with, ‘Some of these kids need their brains washed.’”
- Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey, High Risk: Children Without a Conscience (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 205

The more power they wield, well…

“We want to mean business without being mean. Okay? That’s what Attila did. Attila meant business, but he wasn’t mean. Because he had to take this ragtag group of Huns from all parts of Asia who wanted to rape and pillage, and he needed them to rape and pillage in the same direction.”
- Deborah Hage, “The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” (1999)