AP® Psychology · Unit 4 · Topic 4.3
Obedience
Obedience is following a direct command from someone seen as a legitimate authority, even against your own conscience. Milgram's shock experiments showed most ordinary people will obey orders that seem to hurt another person.
Stanley Milgram wanted to know why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust, so he built an experiment to test obedience in a lab. A participant, playing "teacher," sat at a shock generator with switches labeled from 15 volts up to 450 volts, the last marked "XXX." An experimenter in a lab coat sat nearby. Behind a wall, a "learner" (actually an actor) answered memory questions and, when wrong, received an apparent shock. As voltage rose, the learner grunted, screamed, pounded the wall, then went silent. If the teacher hesitated, the experimenter used a scripted series of prods: "Please continue," then "The experiment requires you to continue," then "You have no other choice, you must go on." About 65 percent of participants went all the way to 450 volts.
Obedience is not the same as conformity. Conformity means matching your behavior to a group's norms or expectations, usually without being told to directly. Obedience means complying with a direct command from someone holding power or authority over you. A participant obeying the experimenter is responding to a vertical relationship, not peer pressure.
Milgram also varied the setup. When the authority figure gave orders by phone instead of standing in the room, obedience dropped sharply, distance weakened his command's pull. When the learner was in the same room, or the teacher had to physically hold the learner's hand onto a shock plate, obedience dropped too, closeness to the victim's suffering made it harder to continue. When Milgram moved the study off Yale's campus into a plain office building, obedience fell, since the setting lost its borrowed prestige. These variations connect obedience to the broader unit theme: behavior here is shaped by situational pressure, not fixed personality, echoing how attribution and conformity studies also show how much situations steer us.
Key terms
- Obedience
- Complying with a direct command from someone perceived as a legitimate authority figure.
- Conformity
- Adjusting your behavior or beliefs to match a group's norms, typically without a direct order.
- Legitimate authority
- A person or institution perceived as having rightful power to give orders, increasing compliance with their commands.
- Diffusion of responsibility
- The tendency to feel less personally accountable for an action when an authority figure directs it.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through the obedience experiment setup from the shock generator to the prods.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't obedience the same thing as conformity?
- How it worksHow does obedience drop as the authority moves further away and the victim moves closer?
- Going furtherWhat changes about the results when the experiment is run away from a prestigious university?
Check yourself
End of topic.