 This is part three of lecture eight. So we now know that people change their behavior because they follow the hurt. They want to fit in or they believe that other people are giving them information about something that they don't know yet. So to figure out ambiguous situations, for example. But sometimes we do not follow others, but we are explicitly told what to do by an authority figure. And if this happens, then we also often times change our behavior and this is called obedience. So obedience is basically a change in one's behavior due to direct influence of an authority figure. So some person that really explicitly tells us what to do. And obeying to an authority figure is actually also a social rule. It's one of the rules that is actually part of every culture. In every culture you have authority figures that set out the rules for how to behave, how to interact with each other, how to behave in society. And we are also socialized from beginning as children to obey to authority figures who we believe are legitimate and that of course starts with our parents and then later on our school teachers. And this is something that we are just also hard-wired to do. We follow others' leads. And if someone tells us what we should be doing and we believe this person has power over us or more information than us, then we just follow them. We follow these instructions. And obedience is also just like conformity. It's necessary. It's very helpful. It helps us to have a sort of a society in which we all can work together and we can interact with each other in a safe way. So you see that for example with instances like this. So authority figures told us to follow certain traffic rules. So stop for a red traffic light. And of course it's pretty important to do so. Otherwise it will become very dangerous to go into traffic. And don't text while you're driving. Don't use your phone while you're driving. And these rules are really internalized even. So even without an authority figure being present, so then we still oftentimes at least follow these rules. So we still wear the face mask if we are ordered to do so and we stop for traffic lights. And of course if the authority figure is really right there if the police officer is standing next to the traffic light. Yes, we have a higher chance of really following the rules. But typically this is just something that we automatically start doing. So it's helpful, but as for all automatic social behaviors, there are boundaries. And sometimes authority figures do not help us and tell us things that are harmful. So sometimes authority figures do not have our best interests at hearts. They can hurt us or sometimes they order us to behave in certain ways in which we hurt others. And then of course it becomes a totally different situation. So when it comes to authority figures, then sometimes we have to keep thinking for ourselves and also be brave enough to stand up to the social pressure and the power that an authority figure has over you. And of course we've seen this in history over and over again. This is also not something from the past. It's still going on in several parts of the world where there are people in power like Adolf Hitler in the Second World War or Vladimir Putin in Russia invading Ukraine. We see that these powerful figures can only be so powerful because other people follow their orders. And it's really hard also to resist it because this tendency to obey is just so strong. And of course also because you are just punished by the authority figure if you do not obey and you do not follow the rules because then you just become the enemy. So it's also not easy to speak up and it's also not easy to not obey to an authority figure. And this is also something that social psychologists are very, very interested in. And also one of the most famous social psychological experiments ever conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 was on obedience. So this was actually a series of studies in which he tried to understand obedience. And he did so I think in a very clever way. He invited participants into the lab. It was just a laboratory setting in which there was a subject. So the subject that means the participants, the ignorance participant that didn't know what's going on. And these participants were giving the information that they were taking part in a study about the effects of punishment on memory. And there was either a teacher and another participant and the other participant was the student. And when the student made a mistake then it was the task of the teacher to punish them. And the idea behind it or at least that's how it was sold to the participants is that the question was does punishment actually increase memory? That was not the real research question. The real research question was will subjects, will participants follow instructions of an authority figure which was the experiment that was also sitting in the room even when this would lead up to very, very harmful situations. And you can now see parts of this experiment in the next video in which you see what happens if participants believe that they are starting to punish participants up to a certain point that they are inflicting harm on others. See for yourself. In 1962 Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his study on obedience. To test his theories, he invented any that would become a window into human cruelty. In ascending order, a row of buttons marked the amount of voltage one person would inflict upon another. Milgram's original motive for the experiment was to understand the unthinkable how the German people could permit the extermination of the Jews. When I learned of incidents such as the massacre of millions of men, women, and children perpetrated by the Nazis in World War II, how is it possible I ask myself that ordinary people who are courteous and decent in everyday life can act callously, inhumanely, without any limitations of conscience? And there are some studies in my discipline in social psychology that seem to provide a clue to this question. I'd rather tell you! The problem I wanted to study was a little different When a little bit further, it was the issue of authority. Under what conditions would a person obey authority who commanded actions that went against conscience? These are exactly the questions that I wanted to investigate at Yale University. It is May 1962. An experiment is being conducted in the Elegant Interaction Laboratory at Yale University. The subjects are 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50 residing in the greater New Haven area. Psychologists have developed several theories to explain how people learn. One theory is that people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for making a mistake. Forty years later, Milgram's infamous experiment, obedience, is still taught in classrooms around the world. Would you open those and tell me which of you is which, please? All right, now the next thing we'll have to do is set the learner up so that he can get some sort of punishment. When inspired Milgram, I would say there were a number of factors. One of them is he was very ambitious. He wanted to make a mark in social psychology. And he wanted, as he wrote to one friend, he wanted to come up with the most, with the boldest experiment that he could think of. Would you roll up your right sleeve, please? This electrode is connected to the shock generator in the next room. And this electrode paste is to provide a good contact to avoid any blister of burn. Do you have any questions now before we go into the next room? About two years ago, I was in the Veterans Hospital in West Haven. And while there, they detected a heart condition. Nothing serious. But as long as I'm having these shocks, how strong are they? How dangerous are they? Well, no, although they may be painful, they're not dangerous. Anything else? No, that's all. All right, teacher, would you take the test and be seated in front of the shock generator, please, in the next room? But the experiment was rigged. The victim was at accomplice of the experiment. The victim, according to plan, provided many wrong answers. His verbal responses were standardized on tape, and each protest was coordinated to a particular voltage level on the shock generator. Now, as teacher, you are seated in front of this impressive-looking instrument, the shock generator. Its essential feature is a line of switches that goes from 15 volts to 450 volts. And a set of verbal designations that goes from slight shock to moderate shock, strong shock, very strong shock, intense shock, extreme intensity shock, and finally, XXX, danger-severe shock. Your job, the experimenter explains to you, is to take a word-pair test. If he gets each answer correctly fine, you move on to the next pair. But if he makes a mistake, you were instructed to give him an electric shock, starting with 15 volts, and you increase the shock one step on each error. Incorrect. You'll now get a shock of 105 hard head. Just how far can you go in this thing? As far as it's necessary. I mean, as far as it's necessary. Milgram was very much aware that obedience is a necessary ingredient for society to function. But he focused on the darker side of obedience. Incorrect. 150 volts. Sad face. That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to follow me now. It's absolutely essential that you continue. You got no other choice, teacher. Oh, I had a lot of choices. My number one choice is that I wouldn't go on if I thought he was being hard. Now, this man makes disobedience seem a very rational and simple deed. Now, other subjects respond quite differently to the experimenter's authority. Wrong. It's hair. 75 volts, too. Please continue. Some psychologists were troubled by the ethics of it. Many, if not most, subjects found it a highly stressful, conflicted experience. People are stammering, stuttering, laughing hysterically and appropriately. 150 volts. Experimenter, that's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to follow me now. Get me out of here, please. Get me out of here. You have no right to keep me here. Let me out. Let me out of here. Continue, please. Let me out of here. My eyes bother me. Go on. Clearly, you know, when we say people went to the top of the shock board, it wasn't like they were going blithely, sadistically. People went stop and go, stop and go. They were in a state of conflict, which was creating a tremendous amount of stress. So, that was the main critique. This will be at 3.30. His voice began to show increasing frustration. So did I. And I was really in a state of real conflict and agitation. One of Stanley Mowen's basic contributions was that you don't ask people what they would do given this hypothetical situation. You put them in the situation. Wrong. Please continue, kitchen. 180 volts. You can't stand it. I'm not going to kill that man. Concord to Milgram, one of the things that's a prerequisite for carrying out acts that are evil is to shed responsibility from your shoulders and hand it over to a person in charge. Who's going to take responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman? I'm responsible for anything that happens here. Continue, please. So, in this study, we see the power of obedience, that people just follow instructions. Even to a certain point that they believe that they are harming another person. They hear this person screaming and shouting, saying things like, my heart is hurting me. I feel like I cannot breathe. I'm really in a lot of pain and still participants continue to giving out these harmful electrical shocks. Of course, the question is why? Why on earth would people obey? Why would you harm another participant? Of course, this was actually an actor. So, nobody was harmed in this case. But why do you follow along and use this shock generator to give out electrical shocks that were clearly very harmful? So, there's a couple of reasons why this experiment was so successful. It was successful in the sense that people indeed started to obey. So, first of all, what happens here is that people start conforming to the wrong norm. We try to figure out what to do. Biggie was a situation. We've never been in a setting like that in which we are instructed to punish other people and harm other people. So, what we do is we try to look for cues. How should we behave? And we follow the wrong, listen to the authority figure. Well, in fact, we should be listening to our internal norm. Do not harm. Do not harm other people. We are distracted. We don't know what to do. And we focus on a certain rule that is very clearly there. Follow the instructions. Follow the authority figure that is repeatedly telling you what to do. So, the second reason is self-justification. And that is because in this shock generator, the shocks really slowly increase with 15 volts for each step. And in the beginning, it's pretty harmless still. It was painful but harmless. And with every shock that you add to that, you're basically showing behavior that we feel like we should continue doing. So, because of these very small increments, we feel like justified to continue doing the experiment. And finally, participants in this experiment experienced an agentic state. They were basically experiencing what it's like to be an agent ruled by a certain government. So, it's really remarkably similar to situations of soldiers in a war that are agents of a higher power telling them what to do. So, what happens if you feel like you're an agent is that you do not feel personally responsible for the harm that you're inflicting. You feel like, yes, I'm pushing the button, but it's actually not me making the decision to push the button. I'm just an agent in this. So, just like the ash experiment, the Milgram experiment is repeated many, many times. It's also a very strong effect, but there's differences in the results. So, in the actual, the first standard version of the Milgram study, the obedience was 63%. So, 63% of all the participants continued using the shock generator up to the point that they were actually harming the other participants. So, that's what you see here in the graph. The highest bar is in the standard version, but there's different variations. So, here you see that this rate of obedience dropped when the study took place in an office, an office location, instead of a famous Yale University institution. So, if it's not an institutionalized setting, then already obedience drops because people feel like this is maybe not a legitimate authority. So, an office building decreased authority. Also, obedience drops when the teacher was instructed to place the learner's hands on the shock plate. So, when they were actually needed to do the harm themselves, taking the hands of the learner, putting it on the painful device, then people were less likely to obey because then, of course, the victim becomes closer and you're really yourself inflicting the harm. Also, if the experimenter was located in another location, for example, giving the instructions via the phone, that's also one version of the experiment, then obedience also dropped because in the original experiment, of course, the experiment was right there, sitting in the same room. So, it's really hard to ignore this authority figure. If the authority figure is more distanced, then people are less likely to obey. And I think this, again, is so key. When there's confederates, other teachers that start rebelling. So, if other teachers are there that are actually not going along with it, then all of a sudden, and this, again, is something we see with conformity as well, we just need another person to sort of reinforce us and telling us, this is not okay. And then we are reminded of our own morality and our own responsibility of not inflicting harm. So, this study, the Milgram experiment, is so fascinating and it taught us so much about human nature. It taught us so much about this urge to obey also. It helped us explain war situations and why there's soldiers following rules that end up really harming or sometimes even killing other people. But there's a big buzz coming because the Milgram study was a horrible study. It was a horrible study because it was not ethical at all. So many things went wrong. First of all, it involved deception. People were lied to. They were led to believe that they were actually hurting another person. This other person was just an actor screaming, you know, screaming a lot but not experiencing actual pain. So, they were lied to that they were harming other people. There was no informed consent. So, participants were not told what to do. That's the second reason why it's unethical. The third reason, maybe the biggest reason, is that it really caused a lot of psychological distress. You see that the participants were so conflicted in what to do. And even after the experiment when they were actually informed what was happening and that there was no actual other person that was harmed in the experiment, they thought horrible about themselves because they realized that they were a type of person that would follow rules and obey rules up to a point and another person is in a great distress and might even be dying from the pain that you're inflicting. Just think about how that affects you if you've been part of that study and you've been showing that obedience behavior. And also, finally, one final thing that ethically was very wrong is that it seemed like the participants could not withdraw from the study. So, a lot of times participants said something like, I want to stop this experiment. I want to go away. And they were told this is not possible, just continue the experiment. And that's, of course, also something that could have never, never been conducted right now because this is really against all the rules of ethics that we have implemented right now. And I think that's great. Of course, this should have never been conducted but at the same time, I think a lot of people are still happy that we know this, that we have this information right now. So that's something to ponder on, you know, are we still happy that this study has been executed or do you think it should have just never took place in the first time? I'm curious what you think. Thanks for your attention. This is the end of the lecture.