Participants were debriefed after the experiment and showed much relief at finding they had not harmed the student. One cried from emotion when he saw the student alive, and explained that he thought he had killed him. But what was different about those who obeyed and those who rebelled?
Milgram divided participants into three categories:. Obeyed but justified themselves. Some obedient participants gave up responsibility for their actions, blaming the experimenter. Others had transferred the blame to the learner: "He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to be shocked. Obeyed but blamed themselves.
Others felt badly about what they had done and were quite harsh on themselves. Members of this group would, perhaps, be more likely to challenge authority if confronted with a similar situation in the future. Finally, rebellious subjects questioned the authority of the experimenter and argued there was a greater ethical imperative calling for the protection of the learner over the needs of the experimenter.
Some of these individuals felt they were accountable to a higher authority. Why were those who challenged authority in the minority? So entrenched is obedience it may void personal codes of conduct. Milgram, S.
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. By Steven Pinker. View Most Popular. Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, — Link Burger, J. Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist , 64, 1— Link Beardsley, E. Link Asch, S. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. Guetzkow ed. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. Recommended for You. To demonstrate the ease with which power can be used to coerce people, Stanley Milgram conducted a scientific experiment that demonstrated how far people will go when confronted with someone who has power and is in a position of authority.
In this instance, subjects often performed actions that were unethical when ordered to by a person in authority. The powerful ability of those in authority to control others was demonstrated in a remarkable set of studies performed by Stanley Milgram Milgram was interested in understanding the factors that lead people to obey the orders given by people in authority.
He designed a study in which he could observe the extent to which a person who presented himself as an authority would be able to produce obedience, even to the extent of leading people to cause harm to others.
Milgram used newspaper ads to recruit men and in one study, women from a wide variety of backgrounds to participate in his research. When the research participant arrived at the lab, he or she was introduced to a man who the participant believed was another research participant but who was actually an experimental confederate. The experimenter explained that the goal of the research was to study the effects of punishment on learning. After the participant and the confederate both consented to participate in the study, the researcher explained that one of them would be randomly assigned to be the teacher and the other the learner.
They were each given a slip of paper and asked to open it and to indicate what it said. In fact both papers read teacher , which allowed the confederate to pretend that he had been assigned to be the learner and thus to assure that the actual participant was always the teacher. At this point, a former student who was not involved with the study spoke up, declaring the treatment of the prisoners to be immoral.
As a result, the researchers stopped the experiment early. Arguably, this conclusion may be applied to the research team itself, which seemingly neglected ethical principles in the pursuit of their research goals. Zimbardo acted as an expert witness in the trial of Sergeant Chip Frederick, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Frederick was the army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where the detainees were abused. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Recent research by Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam suggests that this is indeed the case.
The results of this study were entirely different than those found by Zimbardo. This study was also stopped early, but more because the guards felt uncomfortable in their superior position than because the prisoners were being abused.
Again, the conclusions are clear—the specifics of the social situation, more than the people themselves, are often the most important determinants of behavior. Raven identified five different types of power— reward power , coercive power , legitimate power , referent power , and expert power shown in Table 6.
Understanding the types of power is important because it allows us to see more clearly the many ways that people can influence others.
Reward power occurs when one person is able to influence others by providing them with positive outcomes. The variety of rewards that can be used by the powerful is almost endless and includes verbal praise or approval, the awarding of status or prestige, and even direct financial payment.
The ability to wield reward power over those we want to influence is contingent on the needs of the person being influenced. Power is greater when the person being influenced has a strong desire to obtain the reward, and power is weaker when the individual does not need the reward.
A boss will have more influence on an employee who has no other job prospects than on one who is being sought after by other corporations, and expensive presents will be more effective in persuading those who cannot buy the items with their own money. Because the change in behavior that results from reward power is driven by the reward itself, its use is usually more likely to produce public compliance than private acceptance.
Coercive power is power that is based on the ability to create negative outcomes for others, for instance by bullying, intimidating, or otherwise punishing. Bosses have coercive power over employees if they are able and willing to punish employees by reducing their salary, demoting them to a lower position, embarrassing them, or firing them.
And friends can coerce each other through teasing, humiliation, and ostracism. In many cases, power-holders use reward and coercive power at the same time—for instance, by both increasing salaries as a result of positive performance but also threatening to reduce them if the performance drops.
Because the use of coercion has such negative consequences, authorities are generally more likely to use reward than coercive power Molm, Coercion is usually more difficult to use, since it often requires energy to keep the person from avoiding the punishment by leaving the situation altogether.
And coercive power is less desirable for both the power-holder and the person being influenced because it creates an environment of negative feelings and distrust that is likely to make interactions difficult, undermine satisfaction, and lead to retaliation against the power-holder Tepper et al.
As with reward power, coercive power is more likely to produce public compliance than private acceptance. Furthermore, in both cases the effective use of the power requires that the power-holder continually monitor the behavior of the target to be sure that he or she is complying. This monitoring may itself lead to a sense of mistrust between the two individuals in the relationship.
The power-holder feels perhaps unjustly that the target is only complying due to the monitoring, whereas the target feels again perhaps unjustly that the power-holder does not trust him or her.
Whereas reward and coercive power are likely to produce the desired behavior, other types of power, which are not so highly focused around reward and punishment, are more likely to create changes in attitudes private acceptance as well as behavior. In many ways, then, these sources of power are stronger because they produce real belief change.
Legitimate power is power vested in those who are appointed or elected to positions of authority , such as teachers, politicians, police officers, and judges, and their power is successful because members of the group accept it as appropriate.
We accept that governments can levy taxes and that judges can decide the outcomes of court cases because we see these groups and individuals as valid parts of our society. Individuals with legitimate power can exert substantial influence on their followers. Those with legitimate power may not only create changes in the behavior of others but also have the power to create and change the social norms of the group.
In some cases, legitimate power is given to the authority figure as a result of laws or elections, or as part of the norms, traditions, and values of the society. In other cases, legitimate power comes more informally, as a result of being a respected group member. People who contribute to the group process and follow group norms gain status within the group and therefore earn legitimate power. In some cases, legitimate power can even be used successfully by those who do not seem to have much power.
After Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans in , the people there demanded that the United States federal government help them rebuild the city. Although these people did not have much reward or coercive power, they were nevertheless perceived as good and respected citizens of the United States.
Many U. This might not always work, but to the extent that it does it represents a type of legitimate power—power that comes from a belief in the appropriateness or obligation to respond to the requests of others with legitimate standing. People with referent power have an ability to influence others because they can lead those others to identify with them. A young child who mimics the opinions or behaviors of an older sibling or a famous sportsperson, or a religious person who follows the advice of a respected religious leader, is influenced by referent power.
Referent power generally produces private acceptance rather than public compliance Kelman, The influence brought on by referent power may occur in a passive sense because the person being emulated does not necessarily attempt to influence others, and the person who is being influenced may not even realize that the influence is occurring. In other cases, however, the person with referent power such as the leader of a cult may make full use of his or her status as the target of identification or respect to produce change.
In either case, referent power is a particularly strong source of influence because it is likely to result in the acceptance of the opinions of the important other.
Experts have knowledge or information, and conforming to those whom we perceive to be experts is useful for making decisions about issues for which we have insufficient expertise. Expert power thus represents a type of informational influence based on the fundamental desire to obtain valid and accurate information, and where the outcome is likely to be private acceptance.
Conformity to the beliefs or instructions of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and computer experts is an example of expert influence; we assume that these individuals have valid information about their areas of expertise, and we accept their opinions based on this perceived expertise particularly if their advice seems to be successful in solving problems.
Expert power is increased for those who possess more information about a relevant topic than others do because the others must turn to this individual to gain the information. You can see, then, that if you want to influence others, it can be useful to gain as much information about the topic as you can. Having power provides some benefits for those who have it. Despite these advantages of having power, a little power goes a long way and having too much can be dangerous, for both the targets of the power and the power-holder himself or herself.
According to random assignment to experimental conditions, one half of the supervisors were able to influence the workers through legitimate power only, by sending them messages attempting to persuade them to work harder. The other half of the supervisors were given increased power. In addition to being able to persuade the workers to increase their output through the messages, they were also given both reward power the ability to give small monetary rewards and coercive power the ability to take away earlier rewards.
Although the workers who were actually preprogrammed performed equally well in both conditions, the participants who were given more power took advantage of it by more frequently contacting the workers and more frequently threatening them.
The students in this condition relied almost exclusively on coercive power rather than attempting to use their legitimate power to develop positive relations with the subordinates. At the end of the study, the supervisors who had been given extra power rated the workers more negatively, were less interested in meeting them, and felt that the only reason the workers did well was to obtain the rewards.
The conclusion of these researchers is clear: having power may lead people to use it, even though it may not be necessary, which may then lead them to believe that their subordinates are performing only because of the threats.
Although using excess power may be successful in the short run, power that is based exclusively on reward and coercion is not likely to produce a positive environment for either the power-holder or the subordinate. Although this research suggests that people may use power when it is available to them, other research has found that this is not equally true for all people—still another case of a person-situation interaction.
One type of person who has power over others, in the sense that the person is able to influence them, is leaders. Leaders are in a position in which they can exert leadership , which is the ability to direct or inspire others to achieve goals Chemers, ; Hogg, Leaders have many different influence techniques at their disposal: In some cases they may give commands and enforce them with reward or coercive power, resulting in public compliance with the commands.
In other cases they may rely on well-reasoned technical arguments or inspirational appeals, making use of legitimate, referent, or expert power, with the goal of creating private acceptance and leading their followers to achieve. Leadership is a classic example of the combined effects of the person and the social situation.
One approach to understanding leadership is to focus on person variables. One personality variable that is associated with effective leadership is intelligence. Being intelligent improves leadership, as long as the leader is able to communicate in a way that is easily understood by his or her followers Simonton, , Leaders who have expertise in the area of their leadership will be more effective than those who do not.
Because so many characteristics seem to be related to leadership skills, some researchers have attempted to account for leadership not in terms of individual traits but in terms of a package of traits that successful leaders seem to have. Charismatic leaders are leaders who are enthusiastic, committed, and self-confident; who tend to talk about the importance of group goals at a broad level; and who make personal sacrifices for the group.
Charismatic leaders express views that support and validate existing group norms but that also contain a vision of what the group could or should be.
Charismatic leaders use their referent power to motivate, uplift, and inspire others. Transactional leaders are the more regular leaders who work with their subordinates to help them understand what is required of them and to get the job done.
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