Obedience and Authority

How participation becomes a matter of course the Learning and Personality folder explains from a third side. Festinger’s dissonance predicts that one draws one’s conviction after what one has already done — whoever has pressed the first switch finds reasons for the second. And Bandura’s moral disengagement names the manoeuvres by which decent people get responsibility off their hands: rename, distribute, minimise, dehumanise. Neither line explains the beginning of obedience, but its continuation.

Obedience and conformity look like the same thing and are not. With Solomon Asch a unanimous group names an obviously wrong answer, and nobody asks the participant to join in — the pressure comes from everyone else agreeing. With Stanley Milgram a single person in a coat sits alongside and says the experiment requires you to continue. There, a majority acts; here, a claim to authority.

Psychoanalysis had a different language for the same ground. Anna Freud’s identification with the aggressor describes how suffering a threat turns into taking on the threatening role — no order, no majority, but a shift inside. Three approaches, three vocabularies, one subject.

What links the experimental files under this topic is their reception. Both are routinely cited as evidence that people are easily moulded. Both authors claimed something more precise: Asch stressed that two thirds of all critical answers stayed correct, and with Milgram it was the most order-like prod that most often ended the session.

The third file under this topic is the one the reception has got wrong most thoroughly. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 has no control group, no standardised measurement, and an experimenter who was at the same time the prison superintendent. Thibault Le Texier’s archival work of 2018 established from Zimbardo’s own papers that guards were coached to act tough — which removes the basis for the reading that the roles alone produced the behaviour.

What remains of the three files is not a lesson about malleability but a more precise question: what exactly is it that makes people do what they believe to be wrong? Asch’s answer is unanimity — a single dissenting ally was enough to cut conformity sharply. Milgram’s answer is proximity: across eight variations obedience fell as soon as the victim was visible or the experimenter absent. Both answers name a condition, not a trait.

For practice something else follows than the sentence that anyone can become a perpetrator. What follows is that conditions can be arranged: a dissenting voice in the room, a visible consequence, an authority who is not present. It is precisely these quantities that have stayed stable across the replications of the last twenty years, while the dramatic overall readings have not.