Authority as a psychological question

To some psychologists, the interesting issue concerning authority is how it can overcome other considerations in compelling individuals to obey orders, especially basic considerations such as survival and basic morality. In the latter half of the 20th century, this question took on particular importance as social scientists struggled to make sense of the nightmares of World War II, particularly the willingness of ordinary German citizens and soldiers to take part in the extermination of Jewish and other minorities in the concentration camps. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University, conducted the most famous (and infamous) of these studies, the ”Milgram experiment,” designed to understand the limits of a person’s willingness to obey authority. Milgram discovered, as he later wrote in his book Obedience to Authority (1974), that adults would do almost anything when commanded by an authority, including inflicting painful electric shocks remotely on an unseen person (who, unknown to the subject, did not actually receive any such shocks). He traced this willingness, in no small part, to the division of labour that characterizes modern society and alienates individuals from the consequences of their own actions.

The willingness of individuals to authorize others to control them raises a serious dilemma. On the one hand, this willingness to obey represents one of the key psychological underpinnings of complex organizations. For example, the reason companies adopt hierarchies rather than leaving every corporate practice or decision to be worked out by ad hoc means is that it is more efficient and less costly for a person to obey a superior rather than engaging in constant negotiations. On the other hand, many of the most infamous moral lapses in recent organizational history have involved individuals who were willing to follow authoritative commands rather than questioning their morality. For political philosopher Hannah Arendt, commenting on the behaviour of Adolf Eichmann during World War II, this “banality of evil” represents the ultimate horror of bureaucracy, in which even unspeakable acts can become normal and routine through the exercise of authority.