Are you obedient? Spoiler… you probably are!

In 1963 Stanley Milgram published an article called “Behavioural Study of Obedience” based on a pretty interesting experiment he conducted at Yale University. What he did, was to call upon the unsuspecting citizens of New Haven to participate in a study about the effects of punishment on memory and learning. 40 men were selected, between the ages of 20 and 50, from various backgrounds and professions.

The real scope of the study however, was to measure “destructive obedience”, meaning where is the point when each of us gives up on our inherent disposition to “do no harm”, and blindly obey the legitimate authority in a situation. In the aftermath of the second world war, this was a question common to the social scientists of the time.

So they introduced the participants one-by-one to another participant, a very mild mannered accountant (who was of course a built-in person), and they would draw for the roles of teacher and learner. The draw was of course rigged, so the unsuspecting participants always drew the role of the teacher. So they took the poor student, strapped him to an “electric chair” in the next room, invisible to the eye of the teacher. The teacher was seated in front of a shock generator, with switches ranging between 15 and 450V, labeled with designations from “slight shock” to “danger: severe shock”. Whenever the student gave a wrong answer, the teacher had to increase the shock administered with a 15V increment. The person leading the experiment reassured the teacher, that although the shocks might be painful, they will not cause lasting harm to the student.

The experiment leader sat down beside the teacher, and the experiment begun. Increasing the shock led to the student making slight hissing noises, so far nothing dramatic. However, the teachers even in this phase were already showing signs of distress and were leaning more toward stopping the experiment, rather than continuing. The experiment lead however kept instructing them to continue. At the level of 300V (labeled as “intense shock”), the student was already yelling, banging on the dividing wall between the two rooms (of course, the student was just acting), refusing to keep the experiment going. At this point, you could see the teacher sigh with relief, that they can stop the torture.

But they were wrong. The leader of the experiment kept demanding, that they continue, telling them, that the nature of the study does not allow to stop. The banging on the wall started fading, with each increment of the electric shock. Even if the teachers expressed their concern about the student’s wellbeing, the experimenter told them: “go on, it is my responsibility if something happens”. So they did, and 65% of the teachers increased the shocks to the maximum limit of 450V. And so they found, that not only regular people don’t resist command from authority figures, but they are actually quite obediently following it.

So what does this tell us about ourselves? Despite learning since our childhood not to hurt others, somehow when faced with authority we seem to be quite obedient. There were many critiques to this experiment, but being repeated across many regions and varying the gender proportions, the results showed similar outcomes: when a person with assigned authority is in command, we are quite ready to comply, and even in setting where we would have the chance to report it as “not right” anonymously, we don’t do it.

So Milgram drew the conclusion, that in a social setting what he called “the norm of obedience to authority” is getting activated, which pretty much overrides our individual norm of “do no harm”. For this, all we need to do is consider the power as legitimate. What does that mean? It means, that we, as a group, appointed that person to lead, so his power comes from his status, and not necessarily from who that person is. Being a prestigious university, people just vested the experiment leader with power.

But Milgram also formulated some conditions that need to be fulfilled to activate the norm of obedience: the authority has to be legitimate, also they have to take over the responsibility for the actions, and the norm of obedience needs to be activated. The latter means, that the authority needs to be present (best if also physically), they need to represent the status of the authority (in this case a white lab coat) and keep reinforcing the rule by repetition. You can maintain the obedience after the initial buy-in by repeating the greater good we are all working for (remember, in Milgram’s experiment the scope was to improve memory and learning).

So how does this translate to an office setting? You get a person, with a title, chosen by the organisation to serve the greater good of the company. Call it a director, team lead, senior expert, technical go-to-guru, etc. They don’t have to be authoritarian, they just have to keep you convinced that they are taking over the burden of the consequences. So when you hear a manager say: “Look, the decision is made, I’ll handle any blowback, you just need to get the job done”, they are performing quite an interesting psychological manoeuvre. While Milgram knew, that the screaming guy in the adjacent room was just acting, question is, are you aware of the real world consequences of your decisions. Because it might be incredibly seductive to believe, that they are taking over responsibility for the outcome of the task. And this is the point, where against our best engineering judgement, we might sign off on things we are privately disagreeing with.

So let’s assume you push back. Nobody will make a clear statement saying “just falsify the dataset” or “sign off on a failed report”. The more common language is: “the deadline is firm”, “the team is depending on you”, “this is critical for customer trust”, etc… The purpose is the same: it frames defiance as a disruption of the social order, keeping just enough pressure on to maintain the norm of obedience even when the direction is questioned.

And the last, as we say: Repetitio est mater studiorum. The repetition and reinforcement of the rule might show up in the form of more and more rigid frameworks. We sometimes move from biweekly sprints to weekly to daily. Is it really necessary or are we just wasting time and doing nothing more than reinforcing the rules of obedience. Project updates, deadline reminders, charts and dashboards are all reminders of “speed of delivery”, “design consistency” and “timely delivery” which are maybe sometimes placed above “safety first”. And it’s subtle. It’s a slowly creeping escalation of the need to be obedient. At first, you might just polish up some data, then skip a minor quality check, and by the time you realise, you are so far down the rabbit hole, that objecting would mean, that you have to admit that the last 10 steps you took were wrong.

Even knowing that this is just an old and ethically questionable experiment, it still leaves a final, uncomfortable thought. Obedience rarely arrives with a shout. Most often, it slips in quietly, one small compromise at a time. Make sure that the calculated risks you are taking are thought through, and not just a handoff of responsibility.