THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYsaw his work as demonstrating the power of independence. A closer look
at the statistics helps show why. For example, while it’s true that 76 percent
of participants yielded to the majority view at least once, 95 percent stayed
independent at least once. Or put another way, just 5 percent of partici-
pants were always swayed by the erroneous majority, while 24 percent
were always true to their own opinion. “The facts that were being judged
were, under the circumstances, the most decisive”, Asch wrote.
In another retrospective analysis, Bert Hodges at Gordon College
and Anne Geyer at Florida State University highlighted in 2006 that the
majority of Asch’s participants were sometimes yielding and sometimes
independent, which makes perfect sense given that they were attempting
to balance the demands of an extremely awkward situation in which
everyone else appeared to be consistently wrong. Theirs is a more nuanced
picture than the mindless-conformity myth found in many textbooks.
OBEDIENCE
If there was room for interpretation in Asch’s data, the same surely can’t
be said for the obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram conducted at
Yale in the 1960s. Inspired by Asch, Milgram invited participants to the
university to take part in what they were told was a study of the effects
of punishment on learning. Their task was to apply electric shocks to
another participant, the “learner” (actually an actor), whenever he got
answers wrong. This he kept doing, so the participants were instructed
to continue cranking up the shocks in fifteen-volt increments. At 300
volts the learner pounded the wall in protest, at 315 volts he fell silent.
Despite this, 26 out of 40 participants continued to obey the experi-
menter, a stern man in a grey lab coat, and applied shocks right up to
the highest level of 450 volts. This took them past the level labelled as
“Danger: Severe Shock”.
Not long before Milgram conducted these rather alarming experi-
ments, the Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann had been on trial for
his role in the Holocaust. The historian and philosopher Hannah
Arendt witnessed the proceedings and wrote in the New Yorker that,
far from appearing as a sadistic monster, Eichmann seemed to be an
ordinary man. The fact that such an unremarkable man could, through
blind obedience to authority, be capable of such crimes was famously
described by Arendt as “the banality of evil”. Just as Zimbardo’s study
had parallels in Abu Ghraib, Milgram’s work had its real-world parallels
in the evil of Nazi Germany.