Responsibility Attribution in Milgram Experiments

Mind Hacks mentions a NYT article on some recent semi-replications of the Milgram experiments, which, as most of you no doubt know, involved a researcher telling a participant to administer shocks to another participant (who was not really getting shocks), of higher and higher voltage, in order to see how many people would obey even to the point of killing the other person. I am curious about a point mentioned here: in exit interviews, the experimenters “found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable.” Aside from the general interest this should (I hope) evoke in x-phi circles, I am wondering whether this finding—if accurate—confirms or falsifies one of my pet theories about the experiments.

It has always seemed to me that the experiment wasn’t really about authority at all—or at least not in the sense intended. The point was to see whether ordinary people would obey an authority figure who instructed them to do something obviously wrong. And the idea—at least the way it is usually presented—is that the experiments showed that people do, for the most part, follow authority over their own moral convictions—as well as their moral sentiments (since responding to a person shouting in pain is, I’m fairly certain, not fundamentally a matter of conviction or belief, but of hardwired altruism; in any case, I am guessing, and I’d be interested in seeing work on this if there is some, that in high-stress situations like this, our higher order moral reasoning functions don’t play much of a direct role). Well, yes, the Milgram experiments do show this. But I don’t know if they show just what they are often taken to show, i.e., that most people are sheep. Now some people certainly are sheep—the recent cases of calls to fast food restaurants do seem to suggest that there are people who really will do whatever a police officer tells them just because the person telling them this is a police officer. But maybe even in these cases—and I suspect in many of the Milgram cases—another motive is in play.

We are all stuck in societies that require us to follow rules. Not murdering innocent people, not causing massive and unnecessary harm to others, and not doing to people what they don’t want done to them (at least in the absence of overriding reasons), are central to our social codes. In one form or another (though with many limits on which people are to be protected by these rules), these norms have existed—and probably must exist—in pretty much every human society. It’s also true that many people, not just as teenagers, enjoy breaking rules (psychoanalysis can of course provide quite a bit on this: the killing of the father, jouissance, etc; and speaking of which, I haven’t seen much serious psychoanalytic work on Milgram for some reason; suggestions anyone?). I have a feeling, too, that many very moral people—genuinely virtuous people, who generally do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing—have a deep need to act immorally (a need that is forced on them by morality itself, rather than by some resentment against morality; I’ll post on this later). Violating little rules—shoplifting, for example—creates small pleasures. Violating big rules, on the other hand, is in some way character-transforming.

Most people who generally act morally (not genuinely virtuous agents, but ordinary people) probably do so in part because of some combination of habit and fear: you avoid violating norms because you’re afraid of the consequences, and you get into the habit of sticking to those norms. So most of us wouldn’t seriously consider killing someone—not just in the sense that we’d think it is a bad idea, but we wouldn’t even entertain the thought—at least in part because we don’t want to go to jail, and in part because—having already learned that we don’t want to go to jail—we are accustomed to not taking murderous thoughts seriously. These factors probably motivate most of us more than we’d like to acknowledge, and likely play a stronger role in moral motivation than feelings of respect for the moral law or for the other or for the dignity of persons. Knowing that one can get away with violating norms breaks the habit of following them, making the possibility of violating them a live one. (And of course being put in a situation where one might kill someone already breaks the habit, since we don’t really have habits of not killing people, because situations in which that is a real possibility don’t come up that often.) So if an official researcher, in an experiment, tells you to keep shocking someone, suddenly you might realize: here’s my chance!

If this is what is going on in at least some of the Milgram cases—and I’ve always suspected that it was at some level going on in most of them—then the test subjects who go through to the highest voltage level are not sheep. They are, from a certain perspective, the opposite of sheep. Their desire to hurt and to kill is what drives them; the researcher merely provides a convenient excuse. If they’re not sheep, one might ask, why would they need an excuse, why not just follow their dark heart’s desire on their own? Partly because they are normally sheep—in that they don’t consider acting on the desire a live option—and in the experiment they break out of that sheep-hood. And partly because committing murder is instrumentally irrational—you might get caught (watching crime dramas like Law and Order has more or less convinced me that I could never pull off a real crime and avoid getting caught; though I think Crime and Punishment convinced me of that on other grounds years ago). Generally following instrumental rationality isn’t essentially sheep-like (though it might be sheep-like in some circumstances).

Most of this has probably occurred—in must more concise and less annoyingly preachy ways—to people who have thought about the Milgram experiments. The question now is whether the new findings—that is, the interview reports mentioned above—seem to falsify this thesis. This depends, I think, on whether we take responsibility attribution as primitive. If we do, then the thesis falls apart. If responsibility attribution is primitive, i.e., if people’s reports of their feeling of responsibility are not based on deeper psychological functions, then the interviews confirm that people are sheep. Those who follow through take the researcher, rather than themselves, to be responsible, and this suggests that they did not do something they really wanted to do; they did something they did not want to do because the researcher told them. But we probably shouldn’t take these responsibility attributions as primitive. In a way, if the non-sheep thesis is right, this is exactly what we’d expect. If the subjects are acting out their own desire, but one that their usual norm-following forbids them to act out, then they can only act it out by attributing their action to the researcher. This is the whole point: you can get away with murder in this case, but only provided you are not the one committing it. I don’t mean, of course, that the people who attribute responsibility to the researcher are lying; rather, one explanation for their attribution is that they’ve given the researcher the power to let them fulfill their desires; they then interpret the researcher as the agent, since otherwise they could not act.