Stanley Milgram, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The common intuition runs like this: when ordinary people do terrible things on command, something dark must have been released in them — sadism, the beast in man, the lust for inflicting pain.1 That intuition is wrong, and demonstrating why it is wrong is the core of what I set out to do. Destructive obedience is not the expression of aggressive impulses.
It is what happens when a person becomes integrated into a social structure and cannot get out of it.2 The act of pressing a switch that delivers pain to another human being stems not from any cruelty in the actor but from the fact that he is doing what he is told — just as a man who drinks a glass of water on instruction is not thereby demonstrating thirst.3
The action is initiated in the motive system of those higher up in the hierarchy, not in the motive system of the man who carries it out. The evidence for this is direct. In the condition where subjects were free to select any shock level they wished, with the experimenter explicitly legitimizing the full range of the board, the mean level chosen was 3.6 — the lowest end of the scale.4
If destructive impulses were pressing for release, that is precisely the moment they would have shown themselves. They did not. What replaces the aggressive account is something more unsettling. The person in the agentic state — subordinated to a legitimate authority — does not lose his morality; he redirects it.5 Loyalty, duty, discipline: these are the operative moral terms, and they refer not to the goodness of the act but to the adequacy with which a role is performed.6
The authority, meanwhile, has supplied the definition of the situation — the ideological frame that makes the action seem warranted rather than heinous — and the subordinate, having accepted that frame, acts willingly rather than under coercion.7 This is why almost two-thirds of participants in the basic condition went to the maximum level, drawn from ordinary working, managerial, and professional life.8
They were not monsters. They were people doing their jobs, without particular hostility, inside a structure that had absorbed their sense of personal responsibility and redirected it upward.9 That is what destructive obedience is: not evil erupting from below, but compliance flowing through a hierarchy whose destructive terminus the individual agent never fully owns.
when the experiment is first described to ordinary men and women, they immediately think in terms of the 'beast in man coming out,' sadism, the lust for indicting pain on others, the outpouring of the dark and evil part of the soul.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
The act of shocking the victim does not stem from destructive urges but from the fact that subjects have become integrated into a social structure and are unable to get out of it.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
Suppose the experimenter instructed the subject to drink a glass of water. Does this mean the subject is thirsty? Obviously not, for he is simply doing what he is told to do.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
in Experiment 11, subjects were free to use any shock level they wished... the mean shock level being 3.6.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
The most far-reaching consequence of the agentic shift is that a man feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear, but acquires a radically different focus.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
Language provides numerous terms to pinpoint this type of morality: loyalty, duty, discipline, all are terms heavily saturated with moral meaning and refer to the degree to which a person fulfills his obligations to authority.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority... although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
almost two-thirds of the participants fall into the category of 'obedient' subjects, and they represented ordinary people drawn from working, managerial, and professional classes.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View