Questions: Obedience to Authority and Legitimacy

Question 1

Before Milgram ran his experiments, he surveyed psychiatrists who predicted that fewer than 1–2% of participants would administer the maximum shock. In fact, approximately 65% did. This discrepancy is best explained by:

• A. Milgram selectively recruited participants who were unusually deferential to authority
• B. People systematically underestimate situational power when predicting behavior, defaulting instead to dispositional explanations
• C. The psychiatrists were using an outdated model of human personality
• D. Most people secretly hold authoritarian values that only emerge under experimental conditions

Answer: (B)

The gap between prediction and reality is one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. The psychiatrists — like most people — assumed behavior is governed by stable personality traits (the 'fundamental attribution error' at scale). They predicted that ordinary moral people would refuse. Milgram's finding showed that obedience is primarily a situational response to authority structure, not a reflection of individual sadism or pathology. The psychiatrists weren't wrong about their subjects' values — they were wrong about the power of the situation to override those values.

Question 2

When Milgram moved his experiment from Yale University to a nondescript commercial office building, obedience rates dropped significantly. This result most directly demonstrates that:

• A. Participants at Yale were less morally reflective than participants in the commercial setting
• B. Physical proximity to the learner was greater in the office building
• C. Institutional legitimacy — the perceived authority conferred by a prestigious institution — is a key component of the authority structure that enables obedience
• D. The experimenter wore different clothing in the two settings, reducing his apparent expertise

Answer: (C)

This variation systematically removed one component of the authority structure: Yale's institutional prestige. The experimenter was the same, the protocol was the same, but the location stripped away the legitimacy signal provided by the university context. The resulting drop in obedience confirms that authority is not located in the individual giving orders but in the total social situation — the institution, the setting, the costume, and the hierarchy all work together to construct perceived legitimacy.

Question 3

Participants who administered the maximum shock in Milgram's study typically showed no distress, indicating that they had no moral objection to harming the learner.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

The opposite is true. Many participants showed intense physical distress — trembling, sweating, laughing nervously, protesting verbally — while continuing to obey. This is precisely what made the findings so disturbing: participants had not lost their values or moral compass. They had ceded moral *ownership* of the action to the authority. Milgram described this as the agentic state: the person experiences the harm as caused by the authority's command, not by their own choice. The continued obedience despite distress shows the braking system was engaged but the authority structure overrode it.

Question 4

The agentic state, as Milgram described it, refers to a psychological shift in which a person begins to experience their actions as caused by the authority above them rather than by their own moral agency.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is Milgram's core theoretical mechanism. In an autonomous state, a person sees themselves as the moral agent of their actions and feels responsible for their consequences. In the agentic state, produced by entering a legitimate hierarchical relationship, a person sees themselves as an instrument of the authority's will — the authority bears the moral responsibility. This shift explains the moral displacement observed in Milgram's participants: they were following orders, not making choices. Understanding this mechanism suggests the countermeasure: institutional designs that maintain individual accountability.

Question 5

Why does the belief 'I would never obey such orders' tend to be systematically wrong, according to what the Milgram studies revealed about the nature of obedience?

Model answer: The belief assumes obedience is caused by dispositional factors — bad values, weak character, or authoritarian personality — that most people correctly believe they do not have. But Milgram showed that obedience is primarily situational: when an authority structure conveys legitimacy and assumes moral responsibility, most ordinary people comply, including those with strong moral values. The self-prediction fails because people imagine resisting the order as an isolated moral act, without accounting for the gradual escalation, the social pressure of the experimenter's presence, the diffusion of responsibility to the authority, and the normalizing effect of each small compliance step.

Cross-cultural replications of Milgram's findings have found similar results across different countries and time periods, confirming that this is not an American cultural artifact. The systematic overestimation of dispositional resistance is itself a form of the fundamental attribution error applied prospectively — people attribute their hypothetical refusal to their good character rather than to the situational supports that would make refusal easier (e.g., peer modeling of resistance, clear moral accountability).