NO. 5 Authority

Extracted from: Robert Cialdini – Influence. 6 Weapons of Influence.

In July 1961 Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, began conducting an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

This was one year after the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust in the second world war.

Milgram asked himself:

“Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974).

To answer his question, Milgram set up one of the most famous experiments in psychology. He selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

the MIlgram experiment was set up to test how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. He was especially interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into commiting atrocious acts, like the Germans in WWII

The learner (Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, who was a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram) and unbeknown tost to the teachers, an actor.

They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a grey lab coat, played by an actor.

Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.

The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.

The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).

The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.

There were four prompts and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.

Prod 1: Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.

No actual shocks were administered and the actor simulated the increasing agony as the Electric shock volts were “increased”. For example, as the voltage of the fake shocks increased, the learner began making audible protests, such as banging repaetedly on the wall tha separated him from the teacher. When the highest voltage was reached, the learner fell silent.

Results:

Milgarms’s study found that 65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

These findings were so sensational that in order to validate his findings, Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation to see how this affected obedience.

Conclusion:

Milgram found that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:

'The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.
I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.
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.'

Milgrams' Agency Theory

Milgram (1974) explained the behaviour of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behaviour when they are in a social situation:

The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
The agentic state – people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they act as agents for another person’s will.

Milgram suggested that two things must be in place for a person to enter the agentic state:

The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate.
The person being ordered about is believes that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens.

Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.

For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey. In contrast, many participants who were refusing to go on eventually did so if the experimenter said that he would take responsibility.

So, it seems that when we are in front of someone whose status suggests that they are an authority, we have great difficulty in questioning that authority and being able to think independently. This shouldn’t really surprise us; we are trained from birth that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong. Religious instruction contributes as well. Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden of Eden because they didn’t obey an instruction. Abraham was willing to plunge a dagger through the heart of his son because God ordered it.

Obedience to authority is so ingrained in our thinking that we often comply when it may make no sense to do so. Part of the reason may be that this relieves us of the responsibility for the consequences and, as is often the case, it relieves us of the effort of thinking.

A similar finding was identified in hospitals where physicians and consultants hold power over common-sense (sometimes). In a specific example, reported by Cohen and Davis, a physician ordered ear drops for a patient suffering pain and infection in their ear. He wrote on the prescription for the drops; “place in R ear”, so the nurse duly administered the prescription into the patient’s anus.

It’s easy to see how compliance professionals, advertisers and con artists can take advantage of this. Products are often endorsed by actors who may have played the part of a doctor (as in the case of Sanka Coffee Brand featuring actor Robert Young who played Marcus Welby M.D. on TV. We are unthinkingly vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to its substance.

This is why con artist may use a title, or letters after their name a uniform or particular style of attire.

In an experiment in Australia a man was introduced to a class of students as a visitor from Cambridge University in the UK. However, his status at Cambridge was presented vaiously as a student, a lecturer, a senior lecturer and a professor. After his visit to each classroom, the students were asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height. A professor was seen on average as two and a half inches taller than as a student. We see status and size as connected.

Clothes

When someone wears a white lab coat, priestly black, army green, or police blue we normally apply deference simply because they are wearing the uniform of their authority. In an experiment carried out by social psychologist Leonard Bickman a young man dressed as a security guard and dressed in normal clothes asked passers by to comply with odd requests (pick up a paper bag, stand on the other side of a bus stop…). Bickman found that many more people complied with the request when the young man was dressed as a security guard than when he was dressed in everyday clothes.

It is easy to see how our deference to authority, identified by title or attire, can translate, in the hands of a compliance professional into manipulation - and indeed this is how many doorstep scams happen. We are highly susceptible to all the trappings of association and symbolism, particularly when it comes to things which symbolise authority. You are more likely to take advice from someone dressed in a white lab coat than from someone wearing shorts and flip-flops (although they may be the same person).

Generally, though, authority figures know what they’re talking about. Physicians, judges, corporate executives and the like have typically gained their positions because of superior knowledge and judgement. So, as a rule, we are right to listen to authority. The difficulty is that when compliance professionals, such as advertisers, know this, they are able to use this tenet to their advantage. When combined with liking, association and reciprocation, falling into their traps is extremely difficult to avoid.

Who, after all, is more believable than a demonstrated “expert” of “proven” “sincerity”?

6 Weapons of Influence:

Reciprocation,

Commitment and Consistency,

Social Proof,

Liking,

Authority

Scarcity