Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure.
It is assumed that without such an order, the person would not have acted in this way.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Obedience means following a direct order from an authority figure, distinct from conformity to peer norms.
- Agentic State: People often shift into an “agentic state,” seeing themselves as an instrument of authority rather than a free moral agent (Milgram, 1974).
- Legitimacy: Perceived legitimate authority, not threats, drives obedience; moving the study to a run-down office cut obedience from 65% to 47.5% (Milgram, 1965).
- Situational Factors: Diffusion of responsibility, gradual entrapment, and lifelong socialisation all make destructive obedience easier to sustain once it starts.
- Engaged Followership: Modern re-analysis suggests participants actively identified with the researcher’s scientific goal rather than passively obeying (Haslam et al., 2015).
- Still Relevant Today: A 2017 Polish replication found around 90% obedience to the maximum shock level, showing the effect had not declined with time (Doliński et al., 2017).
Real-Life Example of Obedience
Millions of people were killed in Nazi Germany concentration camps, but Hitler couldn’t have killed them all, nor could a handful of people. What made them all follow orders?
Were they afraid, or was there something in their personality that made them like that?
In order to obey authority, the obeying person has to accept that it is legitimate (i.e., rightful, legal) for the command to be made of them.
Adolf Eichmann organised the transport and murder of six million Jewish people, along with gypsies, communists, and trade unionists, during the Holocaust. He was executed in 1962.
Eichmann was a logistical genius whose part in the Holocaust was the planning of the efficient collection, transportation, and extermination of those to be killed.
At his trial in 1961, Eichmann expressed surprise at being hated by Jewish people. He insisted that obeying orders was simply right.
In his jail diary, Eichmann wrote, “The orders were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question” (extract quoted in The Guardian, 12 August 1999, p. 13).
Eichmann was declared sane by six psychiatrists, he had a normal family life and observers at his trial described him as very average.
Hirsch (1995) argues genocide like the Holocaust depends on three processes working together. Authorisation gives an order the appearance of a legitimate source. Routinisation turns killing into ordinary administrative work. Dehumanisation redefines victims as outside the moral community, removing empathy’s usual pull.
Eichmann showed nothing unusual that might explain his crimes. This forces an uncomfortable possibility: his behaviour may reflect the social situation he was in, not some inner defect. Under the right circumstances, this suggests, any of us may be capable of monstrous acts.
Psychologists began studying obedience after the Second World War. The Holocaust was the reason why.
Early attempts to explain the Holocaust had focused on the idea that there was something distinctive about German culture that had allowed the Holocaust to take place.
Stanley Milgram set out to test the research question, “are Germans different?” He quickly found we are all surprisingly obedient to authority.
In one of the most famous series of experiments in psychology, Milgram (1963-74) demonstrated that most participants would give a helpless victim fatal electric shocks when ordered to.
Milgram later ran a number of variations to the basic study to find out more about the particular factors which might influence obedience.
What is the difference between conformity and obedience?
Obedience occurs when you are told to do something (authority), whereas conformity happens through social pressure (the norms of the majority).
Obedience involves a hierarchy of power/status. Therefore, the person giving the order has a higher status than the person receiving the order.
What is the difference between compliance and obedience?
Compliance refers to adjusting one’s behavior due to a request or suggestion from others, often without internal agreement. Obedience involves following direct orders or commands from an authority figure.
The key difference lies in the source: compliance stems from peers or general social cues, while obedience arises from perceived authority.
Explanations for Obedience
Psychologists have proposed several explanations for why ordinary people obey destructive orders. The main accounts are the agentic state, the perception of legitimate authority, and situational factors, alongside a modern challenge to the first of these.
The Agentic State and Agentic Shift
Milgram argued obedient participants enter an agentic state: they see themselves as an instrument carrying out someone else’s wishes, not as a free moral agent. This is the opposite of the autonomous state, in which a person acts on their own principles and feels responsible for the outcome.
“The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he, therefore, no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions” (Milgram, 1974).
Milgram believed we are taught to enter the agentic state from childhood. We are socialised from an early age to obey authority figures, until doing so feels automatic.
Two conditions make this shift stick, Milgram argued. The person must see the authority as qualified to give the order. They must also believe the authority, not themselves, will answer for what follows (Milgram, 1974).
The Perception of Legitimate Authority
A related question is whether obedience depends on the authority looking genuinely legitimate. Milgram tested this directly.
Aim: To test whether Yale University’s prestige was necessary for high obedience, or whether obedience would survive once the study lost its elite academic setting.
Method: Milgram (1965) reran the identical procedure in a run-down commercial office in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The new setting carried no university affiliation.
Results: Obedience to the maximum 450V fell to 47.5%, well below the Yale baseline but still close to half the sample.
Conclusion: Institutional prestige raises obedience, but a plausible authority structure is enough to sustain destructive obedience in almost half of participants even without a famous university’s name attached.
Authority figures also rely on visible symbols of power. Milgram’s experimenter always wore a grey lab coat, which made refusal harder for participants.
Situational Factors
Beyond legitimacy, three further mechanisms help sustain obedience once it has started.
- Diffusion of Responsibility: When the experimenter said “I’m responsible for what goes on here,” participants visibly relaxed; telling them they themselves were responsible sharply reduced obedience (Hamilton, 1978).
- Entrapment: Gilbert (1981) argued participants were drawn in by small, 15-volt increments, so no single step felt like a big escalation from the last one.
- Socialisation: Brown (1986) notes that obedience is instilled from childhood by parents and teachers, becoming an automatic habit that is hard to suspend even when it feels wrong.
Milgram (1974) also noted further situational cues that deepened participants’ sense of obligation. They believed the study would advance scientific knowledge. They had been paid to take part, and had volunteered.
Engaged Followership
Haslam and Reicher pushed back against the agentic-state account. From the 2010s, they argued obedient participants were active followers who identified with the research, not passive instruments carrying out orders.
Aim: Haslam, Reicher, Millard and McDonald (2015) tested the agentic-state account against an alternative: that continued obedience reflected participants’ identification with the experimenter’s scientific goal.
Method: The researchers analysed post-experimental questionnaires and follow-up letters from Milgram’s archive. Two prods mattered most.
Results: Most respondents described their participation in positive terms, often saying they were “happy to have been of service” to science. The value-based prod worked; direct orders did not.
Conclusion: Obedience is better explained as engaged followership, active cooperation with a goal the person has come to endorse, than as the passive abdication of judgement the agentic state implies.
A related experiment by Haslam, Reicher and Birney (2014) found the same pattern: participants continued when appeals were made to the value of science, but not when given direct orders.
Critical Evaluation
The situational, legitimacy-based account of obedience has substantial support, though the agentic state itself has been challenged directly.
- Situational Variables: Burger (2011) links obedience to four features of the situation: small incremental demands, diffused responsibility, a novel situation with no script, and limited time to think, each with empirical support.
- Legitimacy Over Trait: The legitimate-authority account explains the graded drop in obedience when authority is made remote or less legitimate far better than a fixed personality trait could.
- Cross-Cultural Robustness: Smith and Bond’s (1998) review found broadly similar obedience rates across several countries, suggesting the effect is not a quirk of 1960s America.
- Agentic State Unproven: Reicher and Haslam (2011) argue the studies “provide no real evidence of such an agentic state,” and note it cannot explain differences between conditions.
- Ecological Validity: A scripted confederate and a one-off lab encounter may trigger different psychological processes from the sustained, real-world obedience found in institutions.
- Situational vs Dispositional: These situational explanations directly oppose trait-based accounts like the authoritarian personality, and the debate between the two remains unresolved.
- No Single Explanation: The agentic state, legitimacy, diffusion of responsibility, entrapment, socialisation and engaged followership work best together, as complementary mechanisms rather than as rival, mutually exclusive theories.
Contemporary Research
Ethical rules rule out an exact replication today. Modern partial replications instead ask whether destructive obedience has declined.
Burger (2009) stopped the procedure at 150V, adding safeguards such as a screening interview, and found obedience up to that point remained close to Milgram’s original figure.
Aim: Doliński et al. (2017) asked whether the classic Milgram effect would still appear in a contemporary Polish sample, using a modern, ethically reviewed version of the procedure.
Method: Participants believed they were delivering increasingly severe shocks to a confederate for wrong answers on a memory task. The study added no early stopping point.
Results: Around 90% of participants reached the highest shock level, at least as high as Milgram’s original baseline decades earlier.
Conclusion: The tendency to obey a legitimate-seeming authority had not declined by the mid-2010s. This matches Blass’s (1999) earlier meta-analysis, which found no decline between 1963 and 1985.
References
Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29(5), 955–978. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00134.x
Brown, R. (1986). Social psychology: The second edition. Free Press.
Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0010932
Burger, J. M. (2011). Alive and well after all these years. The Psychologist, 24(9), 654–657.
Doliński, D., Grzyb, T., Folwarczny, M., Grzybała, P., Krzyszycha, K., Martynowska, K., & Trojanowski, J. (2017). Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015? Obedience in the experimental paradigm developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 years following the original studies. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(8), 927–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617693060
Gilbert, S. J. (1981). Another look at the Milgram obedience studies: The role of the graduated series of shocks. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 7(4), 690–695. https://doi.org/10.1177/014616728174028
Hamilton, V. L. (1978). Obedience and responsibility: A jury simulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(2), 126–146. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.2.126
Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Birney, M. E. (2014). Nothing by mere authority: Evidence that in an experimental analogue of the Milgram paradigm participants are motivated not by orders but by appeals to science. Journal of Social Issues, 70(3), 473–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12072
Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Millard, K., & McDonald, R. (2015). “Happy to have been of service”: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s “obedience” experiment. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54(1), 55–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12074
Hirsch, H. (1995). Genocide and the politics of memory: Studying death to preserve life. University of North Carolina Press.
Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human Relations, 18(1), 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872676501800105
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harper & Row.
Reicher, S., & Haslam, S. A. (2011). After shock? Towards a social identity explanation of the Milgram ‘obedience’ studies. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50(1), 163–169. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.2010.02015.x
Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.
