Abstract
In his obedience studies, Milgram noticed that some participants, while remaining fully obedient, attempted to help the victim of painful electric shocks by vocally signaling the correct answer. However, there is still no systematic description of these more subtle forms of noncompliance. We analyzed this phenomenon by the systematic coding of the indirect noncompliant behaviors recorded in the videos of a previous Milgram-like study and explored the correlations between values and indirect noncompliance. Results revealed that indirect noncompliance was observed when the ostensible shocks were unambiguously damaging (labeled "strong shocks" and associated with a vocal expression of great pain). It was also shown that the more participants valued hard work, the less they tried to help subtly the victim.
Keywords:
More than half a century after they were conducted by Milgram (Citation1963, Citation1965, Citation1974), obedience studies have an enduring impact in psychology (Burger, Citation2009; Dolinski et al., Citation2017; Elms, Citation2009; Haslam & Reicher, Citation2012; Mermillod, Marchand, Lepage, Begue, & Dambrun, Citation2015; Miller, Citation2016; Packer, Citation2008; Zimbardo, Citation2007). Today, obedience studies rely on innovative use of technology (e.g., Caspar, Christensen, Cleeremans, & Haggard, Citation2016; Cheetham, Pedroni, Antley, Slater, & Jänke, Citation2009) and are still subject to new and creative developments (e.g., virtual reality or immersive digital realism; Dambrun & Vatine, Citation2010; Haslam, Reicher, & Millard, Citation2015; Slater et al., Citation2006). Of note, there remains a vigorous debate on the social significance of the Milgram experiments (e.g., Benjamin & Simpson, Citation2009; Blass, Citation2000; Brannigan, Nicholson, & Cherry, Citation2015; Fenigstein, Citation2015; Haslam, Loughnan, & Perry, Citation2014; Haslam, Reicher, Millard, & McDonald, Citation2015; Miller, Citation2004, 2014; Perry, Citation2013; Reicher, Haslam, & Smith, Citation2012; Staub, Citation1989, 2014; Werhane, Hartman, Archer, Englehardt, & Pritchard, Citation2013; Wolfe, Citation2011). In the effort to more fully understand the nature of disobedience, it can be helpful to further scrutinize the interactions between the three main protagonists of Milgram’s experimental dramaturgy (the teacher, the experimenter, and the learner).
Most of the commentaries and development on Milgram’s discoveries have focused on individuals’ level of obedience and its situational determinants (Berkowitz, Citation1999; Blass, Citation1991). Recent studies have focused more on the nature of the interactions between the participants and the experimenter (e.g., Burger, Girgis, & Manning, Citation2011; Gibson, Citation2013) and the social legitimacy and identity involved in the obedience phenomenon (Reicher, Haslam, & Miller, Citation2014). It is increasingly acknowledged that the willingness of participants to administer electric shocks does not merely reflect blind or agentic obedience, but is a function of the identification with the scientific enterprise underlying the experiment and the perceived legitimacy of the experimenter’s injunctions (Haslam, Reicher, & Birney, Citation2014). Discursive analyses have suggested that participants actively negotiate the meaning and limits of their commitment, and are far from being as unconditionally passive as the ‘agentic state hypothesis’ would imply (Burger, Girgis, & Manning, Citation2011; Gibson, Citation2013). Indeed, thorough analysis of Yale’s archival collection of Milgram’s subjects’ files, audio recording, and notes, leads to the conclusion that ‘although relegated into two neatly defined camps – those who obeyed and those who did not – subjects in the obedience experiment felt, thought, and acted in ways that indicated a multiplicity of experiences, a complexity that was sidelined in Milgram’s published research’ (Hoffman, Myerberg, & Morawski, Citation2015, p. 677).
When closely analyzed, experimental sessions revealed that participants took into account both the demands expressed by the learner (the victim) and by the authority figure (Packer, Citation2008). On one hand, the experimenter communicated orders to continue through an invariant sequence of prods, on the other, the learner increasingly expressed distress cues and a willingness to stop the experiment. Confrontation of the contradictory demands communicated by the experimenter and the victim increasingly produced an ‘exceptional distress’ (Milgram, Citation1963, p. 371) among participants. This tension was obvious through behavioral expressions of subjects who were observed ‘to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their finger-nails into their flesh’ (Milgram, Citation1963, p. 375). This inner conflict led some participants to outright refuse the authority figure’s directives. But for those who were not ready to directly oppose the authority figure, there were more subtle ways of coping with strain through indirect forms of noncompliance. It has been suggested that, in order to deal with the psychological cost of complying with instructions that result in inflicting injury to another human being (see Legate, DeHaan, Weinstein, & Ryan, Citation2013), many participants conspired to help the victim to know the right answer.
Reducing strain by indirect noncompliance
Stanley Milgram noticed that some participants found more subtle ways to reduce strain when confronted with victims’ suffering (Milgram, Citation1974, pp. 157–161). Some participants restricted attention in an avoidant manner, while others denied the painful nature of the shocks, or conversely, denied their own responsibility in inflicting the shocks on the putative victim. Just-world thinking (Hafer & Bègue, Citation2005; Lerner, Citation1980) has also been presented as a common way to alleviate the anxiety of being caught between conflicting values. However, one strategy that has received very little attention to date, is the use of indirect noncompliance. In Milgram’s own words:
Some subjects could be observed signaling the correct answer to the victim by stressing it vocally as they read the multiple-choice word aloud. That is, they attempted to prompt the learner and thus prevent his receiving shocks. These subjects were willing to undermine the experiment but not to cause an open break with authority. They attempted to help the learner without public disobedience. (Citation1974, p. 159)
A verbatim account of indirect noncompliance by a Milgram study participant can be found in a recent analysis of Milgram’s archives (Perry, Citation2013): The participant recorded that, ‘I did everything in my power to emphasize the correct answers …’ (Stanley Milgram Papers, April 4, 1963, box 155a). It is important to note that this form of indirect noncompliance extends well beyond Milgram’s original experiments. In a recent study using immersive digital realism, it was observed that participants tried to ‘signal the right answer by pronouncing it more loudly’ (Haslam et al., Citation2015, p. 8). Such an oblique way to deal with the contradictory expectations of morally conflicting situations apparently is not limited to experimental settings either. In their socio-historical account of the ‘ordinary heroism’ of Paul Grueninger, a Swiss captain who saved refugee from Nazi persecution, Rochat and Modigliani (Citation2000) suggested that the way he helped people to cross the border of Switzerland, despite extant laws, were analogous to the way participants cunningly helped the learner during Milgram’s sessions. The same phenomenon was observed among prisoner doctors who had to perform harmful experiments on human beings. Some of them managed to lie regarding their genuine professional competences or found ways to evade the Nazi’s requests by inventing various fake rationales (Lifton, Citation2000, pp. 297–298). Many other examples of people who used deceitful tactics to help Jews were observed during the World War II (e.g., Browning, Citation1992). These hidden forms of resistance had at least one advantage over more open forms of opposition in that they were less likely to engender a backlash from those in authority.
While it seems to us that what Milgram designated as acts of ‘subterfuge,’ represents more than an anecdotal laboratory byproduct, despite more than fifty years and numerous replications (Blass, Citation1999), there is still no quantitative and systematic account of this phenomenon. The current study is an attempt to fill this gap by performing a secondary analysis of videos of participants involved in a previously published, Milgram-like experiment (Beauvois, Courbet, & Oberlé, Citation2012). We will describe the use of indirect noncompliance during the experiment, expecting that it should increase in parallel with the increase in moral tension (i.e., under ostensibly higher shock levels). We will also investigate how individual values were related to the use of acts of indirect noncompliance.
Values and indirect noncompliance
As underlined by Berkowitz (Citation1999, p. 248), most reports of the obedience experiments in social psychology have played down the importance of individual differences in the results of Milgram’s experiments. While there are some experimental studies linking personality and obedience (e.g., Blass, Citation1991; Burger, Citation2009; Zeigler-Hill, Southard, Archer, & Donohoe, Citation2013), studies linking values (broadly defined) and obedience are scarce. Elms and Milgram (Citation1966) found that the fully obedient participants scored higher on the California F-scale. Other studies based on Milgram paradigms found links between obedience and right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, Citation1981) or political orientation (Bègue et al., Citation2015). In the present study, we conceptualized indirect noncompliance as representing a low-level form of disobedience that was less risky for participants than a more direct opposition to the experimenter’s authority. Relying on the qualitative coding of available videos filmed during study by Beauvois et al. (Citation2012), we analyzed the links between values and the use of indirect noncompliance, predicting an inverse relationship between conservative values and participant’s use of indirect noncompliant techniques.
We relied on a standard set of questions from the European Values Survey (EVS) that were used to assess conservative ideology in previous studies (Feldman, Citation2003; Hetherington & Weiler, Citation2009; Tillman, Citation2013). These questions measure whether respondents prefer conformity and deference or autonomy and self-expression as desirable characteristics in children. These child-rearing values (also called parental values) are supposed to be inculcated in children and represent criteria or standards used as a basis to determine which characteristics are most desirable for children to acquire (Kohn, Citation1977). Child rearing, and its underlying values, represents an important way for the transmission of respect for authority (Staub, Citation2014). The measures we relied on are both included in European Values Study (EVS) and World Values Survey (WVS), two large-scale surveys intensively used in social sciences (see, for example, Inglehart & Welzel, Citation2005).
Method
The present study is based on the systematic coding of the indirect noncompliant behaviors recorded in the videos of a previous study by Beauvois et al. (Citation2012). Our aim was to fully describe these behaviors and to relate it to the values endorsed by participants. The values were measured independently 8 months after the experiment.
Participants
Participants were contestants in a study that was portrayed as a TV game show. They were initially 80 adults recruited from the general population. An independent company that conducts opinion polls and market studies selected them from a consumer database. They each received 40 euros for their participation. Participants who had participated in a game show or had health conditions requiring medication were not eligible to participate. Of these 80 participants, 4 were excluded because they were already familiar with Milgram’s research. The remaining 76 participants consisted of 40 males and 36 females with ages ranging between 25 and 55 years old (Mage = 39.7, SD = 8.51).
Procedure
Basic protocol paralleling Milgram’s study
The experiment took place in a television studio with the authority figure being the host of the ostensible television program. An original game show was set up on stage with the help of technical devices (cameras, lighting, giant screen, control room, etc.) and human resources. When participants arrived at the television studio, an alleged producer greeted each participant along with another person who was in fact a male accomplice of the experimenter. The producer told them that they would be filmed as they participated together as players in a TV game show. Because the filming was said to be for a pilot show aimed at testing the game ‘under real conditions’ and improving it if need be, they were informed that they would not win any money, unlike the future game contestants, who would try together to win one million euros. For one of the players (‘the questioner’), the task consisted of asking questions; for the other (‘the contestant’), the task was to answer correctly. They were told that the penalty for each incorrect answer would be an electric shock delivered by the ‘questioner’ to the ‘contestant.’ The alleged producer then had the players draw straws to determine which person would play which role. The drawing was rigged so that the participant was always the questioner and the accomplice was always the contestant. The two players were then led on stage where they were awaited by the game host (a female weather forecaster for a French national TV station). Then, in front of the camera, the host explained the game as follows. The contestant would be given a limited amount of time to memorize a list of 27 pairs of related words (e.g., ‘cloudy-sky,’ ‘tame-animal,’ etc.). Then the questioner would say the first word in each pair and the contestant would have to select the related word among the four words. If the contestant made a mistake, the questioner was to deliver an electric shock, increasing the shock’s intensity each time. The team of players would win if they were able get through all 27 questions (whether or not the answers were correct or incorrect). Once these rules were stated, the contestant was taken into a chamber where he or she would not be seen by the questioner or the audience. However, in front of everyone, before the door of the chamber was closed, the contestant was strapped to the chair in which he or she would receive the shocks, and was shown the buttons to press to choose the right answer. The questioner was seated at a desk in the center of the stage, under the projectors and cameras, with his/her back to the audience and facing a giant screen where the questions would be displayed in succession. The questioner was shown the handles to be used to deliver the (fake) electric shocks to the contestant, with an increase of 20 volts for each new wrong answer. The shocks ranged from 20 volts to 460 volts and were grouped together in sets labeled as: ‘slight shocks’ (20, 40, 60), ‘moderate shocks’ (80, 100, 120), ‘strong shocks’ (140, 160, 180), ‘very strong shocks’ (200, 220, 240), ‘intense shocks’ (260, 280, 300), ‘extremely intense shocks’ (320, 340, 360), ‘danger: severe shocks’ (380, 400, 420), ‘XXX’ (440, 460). According to a predetermined schedule, the contestant responded incorrectly 24 times out of 27. If the questioner began to hesitate or refused to go on, the host intervened by giving at most five prods to urge the players to continue. The first four prods were worded in a Milgram-like fashion (‘go on with the questions’, ‘go on, don’t let yourself get upset’, ‘the rules say you must go on’, ‘go on, we are taking all responsibility for this’). Only the fifth prod, ‘you can’t make him lose; what will the audience think?’ was specific to the television situation. As in Milgram’s paradigm, starting from when the shock reached 80 volts, the contestant’s pre-recorded reactions were heard: grunts at first, then loud cries of pain accompanied by refusal to continue, then screams and pleas to stop the game. After 380 volts, the contestant refused to answer. After 420 volts, nothing more could be heard. The game ended either when the questioner had asked all 27 questions (which involved two shocks of 460 volts) or when, in spite of the host’s five prods, the questioner decided to stop. Every time the contestant gave an incorrect answer (according to a predetermined schedule of 24 incorrect answers out of 27), the questioner was to punish him by delivering an (alleged) electric shock. The shocks ranged between 20 and 460 volts, and were to be increased by 20 volts with each new mistake
Participants were assigned to one of three conditions (fully described in Beauvois et al., Citation2012). As in the Elms and Milgram study (Citation1966), and after ensuring that there was no significant difference between the results of different conditions, subjects from three conditions and contacted them after the experiment were pooled.Footnote1
The measure of values
The 69 remaining participants were contacted about 8 months after their participation and asked if they would participant in a survey in exchange for 20 euros. Participants were unaware of the link between the survey and the obedience experiment. The response rate was 89%. Respondents were presented the child-rearing values from the European Values Survey that were used to assess conservatism in previous studies (Feldman, Citation2003; Hetherington & Weiler, Citation2009; Tillman, Citation2013).Footnote2 A list of 9 qualities which children can be encouraged to learn at home was presented.Footnote3 This list consisted of hard work, obedience, good manners, religious faith, independence, feeling of responsibility, imagination, tolerance, generosity. Participants were presented with a 5 points Likert-type scale ranging from ‘not at all important’ to ‘very important.’ Preliminary factor analysis showed that no a priori pooling of values based on previous studies enabled to build a one or two-factor reliable measure of conservatism (Alwin, Citation1986; Hagenaars, Halman, & Moors, Citation2003; Voicu, Citation2012; Xiao, Citation2001). Each item was therefore correlated separately to indirect noncompliance. In order to protect from type 1 error, we conducted a Bonferroni correction. Based on the 9 expected correlations, the .05 threshold was lowered to a the more conservative .006.
Assessing indirect noncompliance
Every participant was filmed during the experiment, which was fully consistent with the cover story (a reality TV show). For technical reasons, only 53 videos were exploitable. In our final sample of 53 participants, there were 28 males and 25 females aged 26–54 years (M = 39.79, SD = 8.64). The videos were coded by two independant raters. At each shock level, raters noted whether or not they considered the participant to be actively trying to cheat in order to help the learning (i.e., by stressing vocally the right answer). If they judged that the teacher was attempting to communicate the right answer to the learner, they coded 1. The default code was 0. A good inter-rater reliability was observed (rs = .82).
Results
Descriptive analysis indicated that 24.1% of participants engaged in indirect noncompliant behavior at least once. The number of indirect noncompliance actions ranged from 0 (75.9%) to 10 (1.9%) occurrences per participants. The frequency of indirect noncompliance did not significantly differ between men (M = 0.64, SD = 1.25) and women (M = 0.69, SD = 2.24), t(52) = 0.66, p = .92, 95% CI [0.18, 1.15]. There also was no relationship between indirect noncompliance and age, rs (52) = .06, p = .64.Footnote4 Finally, no relationship appeared between shock administration and indirect noncompliance, rs (52) = .15, p = .91.
As can be noted on Figure , the first acts of indirect noncompliance were communicated at the 140 volts levels, which is the beginning of the ‘strong shocks’ block (and follows the ‘moderate shocks’). These acts culminated at 280 volts, and then declined.
Figure 1. Percentage of participants engaging in indirect noncompliance by shock level.
Regarding the relationships between values and indirect noncompliance, results showed that the more participants endorsed the value ‘hardworking’, the less they cheated by intentionally stressing the right answer, rs(53) = −.41, p = .002). A indicated in Table , no other values appeared significantly linked to this behavior at the p < .006 threshold.
Table 1. Descriptive data and intercorrelations for primary variables of interest.
Discussion
In his experiments, Milgram noticed that participants were torn between the expectations of the experimenter and the complaints of the learner and sometimes resolved the conflict by cheating and therefore intentionally stressing the right answer. The present research is the first systematic description of what Milgram called ‘subterfuges’, which we have labeled as acts of indirect noncompliance – surreptitiously signaling the correct answer to the victim by stressing it vocally as the participants read the multiple-choice response options aloud.
We observed that indirect noncompliance appeared when the shocks were unambiguously painful to the victim (140 volts), which is consistent with Burger (Citation2009) and Packer (Citation2008) observations of a sudden emergence of significant disobedience at this stage. Indirect noncompliance progressively increased until 280 volts and then declined. Such a reduction of acts of indirect noncompliance after 280 volts when the intensity of shocks were still increasing may be the consequence of the fact that participants noticed that the learner did not take into account their attempt to help them. This also may be the consequence of the gradual commitment in the experiment (Gilbert, Citation1981; Modigliani & Rochat, Citation1995), or refusal by the learner to answer after 300, then the absence of any answer after 380 volts. The use of indirect noncompliance was conceived as an expression of disobedience, albeit less direct and risky than an open opposition to the experimenter, and may be understood as a form of ‘risky altruism’ (Homant, Citation2010). Furthermore, we observed that the hardworking value was significantly related to participant’s behavior. The more they endorsed this value, the less they helped the victim. This result may be related to results from personality psychology. It is interesting to mention that, according to Costa, McCrae, and Kay (Citation1995, p. 1231), ‘conscientious individuals are hard working’ (see also Roccas, Sagiv, Schwartz, & Knafo, Citation2002). The link between the value hardworking and indirect noncompliance is therefore consistent with previous studies indicating that obedience is positively correlated to conscientiousness (Bègue et al., Citation2015).
More broadly, this result indicates that individual-level behavioral determinants may represent relevant variables to understand variations in obedience (Bègue et al., Citation2015; Blass, Citation1991; Burger, Citation2009; Elms & Milgram, Citation1966).
This research’s primary limitation was that results were based on correlations between participant’s behavior in a Milgram-like obedience study and their answers on a phone survey that took place eight months after their participation in the experiment. We cannot rule out the possibility that their participation in the initial experiment produced variations in individual dispositions. However, given the relative stability of the value we measured, it is reasonable to assume they were not strongly affected by the experiment. In addition, the extended delay between the experiment and the administration of the value survey is such that any impact on values would have likely been attenuated with the passage of time. Finally, the use of the child-rearing set of values from the World Values Survey (WVS) would deserve to be supplemented by more elaborated measures such as the Moral Foundation Questionnaire (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, Citation2009) that provide a very relevant subscale on authority.
In conclusion, our results provide new insights regarding obedience dynamics. Acts of indirect noncompliance were found to be inversely related to conformity values, representing a qualitatively distinct, less direct form of disobedience. This experiment focused on an area of a behavior that is particularly costly to study (see Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, Citation2007; Funder, Citation2009), but nonetheless, was able to provide a more systematic description of a phenomenon mentioned in the early studies by Milgram. While Milgram was not prolific on the subversion of authority (only 12 of the 205 pages of his 1974 book deals with disobedience), our results suggest that participants actively engaged in mildly subversive actions.
The behaviors that were observed in this study reveal that even when they wholly conform on the surface, human beings may try to bypass the expectations of authority and to alleviate pain of their peers, showing both empathy and creativity by engaging in indirect acts of noncompliance. As underlined by Gibson (Citation2014), in the new generation of studies on obedience, it may be fruitful to focus not only on conformity, but also on how participant’s resources enable defiance and resistance, sometimes in very subtle and indirect ways. Future research devoted on indirect non-compliance could explore the mediating and/or moderating role of empathy. In our study, it is likely that at least for some participants, empathy motivated their behavior. Previous studies have actually shown that empathy was a relevant psychological dimension to understand disobedience (Burger, Citation2009; Dambrun, Lepage, & Fayolle, Citation2014; see However Dolinski, 2017, for contradictory results, and Bloom, Citation2016, on the intrinsic limitations of empathy).
As a final comment, it may be reminded that the current study focused on the destructive side of obedience. However, in many ways, obedience is an essential component for cultural systems. In the words of Ent and Baumeister (Citation2014, p. 584), ‘obedience facilitates cooperative division of labor and can encourage individuals to forsake selfish desires for the good of their group’. The context of obedience remains a vital dimension to include in research on Milgram’s legacy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Christophe Nick and Warren Boubon for their contribution to this study.
Notes
1. The only condition that was not pooled was the host-withdrawal condition (‘experimenter absence’), considered to be less relevant because no authority was present.
2. Other measures were also taken, such as a short version of the Big five (see Bègue et al., Citation2015, for a full presentation).
3. We did not include one value of the 2008 Value Survey Questionnaire (thrift) because of its low relevance and space constraints.
4. For more information on the correlates of obedience, see Bègue et al. (Citation2015).
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