• Obedience: A Definition and Types
• Obedience occurs when a person alters his/her behavior in response to a command from a person in authority
• Authority figure has the power to bring about the change
• Obedience is a necessary and desirable phenomenon
• Without obedience to authority society could not function
• Hobbes suggested that humans were basically out for self interest and only through "social compacts" could we live together
• Most obedience benefits society (Constructive obedience)
• Destructive obedience is obedience that harms individuals and society as a whole
• History provides many examples of destructive obedience:
• The final solution of the "Jewish problem" by the Nazis
• The My Lai massacre during the Viet Nam war
• People's temple mass suicide
• The slaughter of 1 million Armenians in Turkey in the early 1900s
• Recurring Themes in Destructive Obedience
• Milgram (1974)
• People carrying out a job are dominated by an administrative, rather than a moral, outlook
• Distinction is made between destroying others and expression of personal feelings (explicit v. implicit attitudes)
• Values like loyalty, duty, and discipline are adopted as high moral imperatives
• Modification of language (euphemisms) so that destructive acts don't conflict with moral concepts (e.g., murder becomes "neutralizing" or a "final solution")
• Looking for authorization from above for acts of destructive obedience



• Destructive acts are justified by some higher goal (e.g., racial purity)
• Destructive acts are not talked about
• No philosophical dilemmas about destructive acts. Career aspirations take precedence
• When the relationship between authority and subordinates remains intact, psychological adjustments are made to ease the strain of carrying out destructive acts
• Milgram's Model of Obedience
• Subjects who obey are acting as agents of authority.
• The enter the agentic state
• Attention is drawn away from the victim and toward the authority figure
• Two factors contribute to the agentic state:
• Binding factors
• Initial acts of obedience bind the agent to the authority figure
• Obedience acts reinforce each other. Each time the agent obeys he/she must justify the act
• Becoming an agent of authority allows the agent to externalize responsibility for the act
• Antecedent conditions
• Personality characteristics that predispose on to obedience
• Authoritarian submission: Personality trait that involves a submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group
• Agents of authority carefully screened (e.g., SS and torturers)
• Socialization into the role of obeyer
• Three Processes Underlying Obedience
• (Kelman & Hamilton (1990)
• Authorization
• Normal moral guidelines are abandoned in favor of those of the authority figure
• Once authority figure sanctions acts of obedience they are automatically justified
• Routinization
• Obedience becomes a habit or a routine part of everyday life
• Example: Franz Stangl (Commandant of Treblinka)
• Dehumanization
• Portraying and thinking of victims of destructive obedience as being subhuman
• Disobedience I
• Milgram's Model
• Disobedience will occur when role strain arises
• Role strain occurs when a person becomes uncomfortable with obedience behavior
• Sources of role strain:
• Cries of pain from the victim
• Violation of personal moral values
• Potential retaliation from the victim
• Conflict between needs of victim and needs of the victim and authority
• Harming others may be inconsistent with self-image
• If role strain is not successfully handled, disobedience is likely
• Disobedience II
• (Kelman & Hamilton, 1990)
• Two preconditions for disobedience:
• Cognitive precondition
• While obeying a person may not think of disobedience as an option
• For disobedience to occur, one must think of disobedience as a viable option
• Motivational precondition
• Individual in obedience situation must be willing to go against existing norms and accept the consequences of disobedience