Social identification, not obedience, is the motive for unspeakable acts
two different groups of participants. The expert group included thirty-two academic social psychologists from two British universities and on Australian university. The nonexpert group included ninety-six first-year psychology students who had not yet learned about the Milgram studies.
All participants were read a short description of Milgram’s baseline study and they were then given details about fifteen variants of the study. For each variant, they were asked to indicate the extent to which that variant would lead participants to identify with the experimenter and the scientific community and the extent to which it would lead them to identify with the learner and the general community.
The results of the study confirmed the researchers’ hypotheses. Identification with the experimenter was a very strong positive predictor of the level of obedience displayed in each variant. On the other hand, identification with the learner was a strong negative predictor of the level of obedience. The relative identification score (identification with experimenter minus identification with learner) was also a very strong predictor of the level of obedience.
The release notes that according to the authors, these new findings suggest that we need to rethink obedience as the standard explanation for why people engage in cruel and brutal behavior. This new research “moves us away from a dominant viewpoint that has prevailed within and beyond the academic world for nearly half a century — a viewpoint suggesting that people engage in barbaric acts because they have little insight into what they are doing and conform slavishly to the will of authority,” they write.
These new findings suggest that social identification provides participants with a moral compass and motivates them to act as followers. This followership, as the authors point out, is not thoughtless — “it is the endeavor of committed subjects.”
Looking at the findings this way has several advantages, Reicher, Haslam, and Smith argue. First, it mirrors recent historical assessments suggesting that functionaries in brutalizing regimes — like the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann — do much more than merely follow orders. It simultaneously accounts for why participants are more likely to follow orders under certain conditions than others.
The researchers acknowledge that the methodology used in this research is somewhat unorthodox — the most direct way to examine the question of social identification would involve recreating the Milgram paradigm and varying different aspects of the paradigm to manipulate social identification with both experimenter and learner. This kind of research, however, involves considerable ethical challenges. The purpose of the article, the authors say, is to provide a strong theoretical case for such research, “so that work to address the critical question of why (and not just whether) people still prove willing to participate in brutalizing acts can move forward.”
— Read more in Stephen D. Reicher et al., “Working Toward the Experimenter Reconceptualizing Obedience Within the Milgram Paradigm as Identification-Based Followership,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 4 (July 2012): 315-24 (doi: 10.1177/1745691612448482)
