1. Why do people obey?

2. Starter
Watch the video on Zimbardo’s prison experiment:
Click here

3. Learning objective...
To understand why people are obedient to authority, according to Milgram (1974).
Success criteria...
Watch a video of a prison experiment and explain why people are obedient to the authority figure.
Read, highlight and complete pages of your booklet about why individuals obey authority.
Criticise Milgram’s work on obedience to authority, using real life events.
Challenge Demonstrate an understanding of obedience to authority by producing a model answer to an exam question.

4. Everyone involved in the experiment, including Philip Zimbardo, who acted as prison superintendent, became immersed in the experience and found themselves acting out their roles with a high level of commitment and emotional involvement

5. Bickman (1974) A legitimate authority figure
In this study three male experimenters gave orders to 153 randomly selected pedestrians in Brooklyn, New York. The experimenters were dressed in one of three ways: a sports coat and tie, a milkman’s uniform, or guard’s uniform that made them look like a police officer. The experimenter gave 1 of 3 orders:
Pointing to a bag on the street, “Pick up this bag for me.”
Nodding in the direction of a confederate “This fellow is over parked at the meter but doesn’t have any change. Give him a dime.”
Approaching the participant at a bus stop, “Don’t you know you have to stand on the other side of the pole? This signs says ‘No standing’”.
 Bickman found that participants were most likely to obey the experimenter dressed as a guard than the milkman or civilian. This supports one of the variations of Milgram’s findings, that obedience can be related to the amount of perceived authority.

6. Reasons why people obey
Gradual Commitment (foot in the door)
Robert Lifton (1986) found evidence of gradual commitment among Nazi doctors, who were first required to carry out sterilisations of those considered mentally defective, and then to carry out more and more extreme experiments in death camps such as Auschwitz.
Insights from Milgram’s research can help us understand some of the abusive behaviour of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. For example, the prisoner abuses observed in Abu Ghraib were also gradual in nature, coupled with the presence of compliant peers and an apparently unconcerned authority figure.

7. Reasons why people obey
Agentic Shift
Mandel suggests that it is inappropriate to explain the findings from Milgram’s study and real life atrocities in the same way.
Holocaust perpetrators carried out their duties over years, yet Milgram’s participants were involved for just half an hour.
There is also a difference in their perception of harm doing, with Holocaust perpetrators knowing they were causing harm, whereas Milgram’s participants were assured there would be no permanent damage.

8. Reasons why people obey
Buffers
This is not always the case in real life.
Browning’s analysis of the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 (a group of Nazi’s) found that for these men, close physical proximity to their victims made no difference to their ability to carry out their orders to shoot innocent Jews at close quarters.

9. Reasons why people obey
Justifying Obedience
The soldiers in Abu Ghraib justified their behaviour by using national security as an important factor

10. http://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=f a7QZWfivtc
Video
be.com/watch?v=f a7QZWfivtc

11. Practice questions
When you are a passenger on a train, you are much more likely to move to another seat if the ticket collector tells you to move than if another passenger tells you to do so. Use your knowledge of why people obey to explain this behaviour. (4)
Outline two explanations of why people obey. (4)