386 Social Influence and Group Dynamics
detriment of themselves or others. In recognition of this po-
tential, social psychologists have devoted considerable atten-
tion to the nature of legitimate power, with special emphasis
on obedience to authority. Not wanting to question this schol-
arly norm, we highlight this topic in the following section.
Obedience to Authority
Guards herding millions of innocent people into gas cham-
bers, soldiers mowing down dozens of farmers and villagers
with machine guns, and hundreds of cult members waiting in
line for lethal Kool-Aid that is certain to kill themselves and
their children: These images may be unthinkable, but they are
part of the legacy of the twentieth century. Nestled in the
security of our homes, we are nonetheless affected by such
undeniable examples of mass abdications of personal respon-
sibility and decision making; they can keep us up nights, not
to mention undermine our sense of control. Although recent
times have no monopoly on genocide, the abominations of
World War II intensified the drive to plumb the depths of so-
cial influence, especially influence over the many by the few
in the name of legitimate authority.
The best-known and most provocative line of research on
this topic is that of Stanley Milgram (1965, 1974), who con-
ducted a set of controversial laboratory experiments in the
early 1960s. Milgram wanted to document the extent to which
ordinary people will take orders from a legitimate authority
figure when compliance with the orders entails another per-
son’s suffering. The idea was to replicate in a relatively be-
nign setting the dynamics at work during wartime, when
soldiers are given orders to kill enemy soldiers and citizens.
In his experimental situation, ostensibly concerned with the
psychology of learning, participant “teachers” were asked to
deliver electric shocks to “learners” (who were actually ac-
complices of Milgram) if the learners produced an incorrect
response to an item on a simple learning task. In the initial
study, Milgram (1965) found that 65% of the subjects cast in
the teacher role obeyed the experimenter’s demand to pro-
ceed, ultimately administering 450 volts of electricity to a
learner (a mild-mannered, middle-aged man with a self-
described heart condition) in an adjoining room, despite hear-
ing the learner’s protests, screams, and pleas to stop
emanating from the other room. Milgram subsequently per-
formed several variations on this procedure, each designed to
identify the factors responsible for the striking level of obe-
dience initially observed. In one of the most intriguing
variations, subjects were cast in the learner role as well as the
teacher role, and the experimenter eventually told the teacher
to cease administering shocks. Remarkably, some learners
in this situation insisted that the teacher continue “teaching”
them for the good of the experiment. Because the learner did
not have the same degree of legitimacy as the experimenter
did, however, none of the teachers acceded to the learner’s
demand to continue shocking them.
Milgram’s findings proved unsettling to scholars and
laypeople alike. With the horrors of World War II still fairly
fresh in people’s memories, Milgram’s research suggested
that Hitler’s final solution was not only fathomable, but per-
haps also likely to occur again under the right circumstances.
After all, these findings were produced by people from a
nation of self-professed mavericks whose ancestors had risen
up against the motherland’s authority less than two centuries
earlier. Subsequent research employing Milgram’s basic par-
adigm has demonstrated comparable levels of obedience in
many other countries, including Australia, Germany, Spain,
and Jordan (Kilham & Mann, 1974; Meeus & Raaijmakers,
1986). The tendency to defer to legitimate authority, even
when the demands of authority run counter to one’s personal
beliefs and inhibitions, appears to be robust, representing
perhaps an integral part of human nature.
The power of authority can derive from purely symbolic
manifestations, such as titles or clothing, even when the
ostensible authority has no credible claim to his or her role
as a legitimate authority figure. A man wearing a security
guard’s uniform, for example, can secure compliance with a
request to pick up litter, even when the requests are made in
a context outside the guard’s purview (Bickman, 1974).
Even fictional symbols of authority can produce compliance.
Television advertising trades on this tendency with astonish-
ing commercial success. For example, the actor Robert
Young, who played the part of Dr. Marcus Welby in a popu-
lar TV doctor series in the 1960s, wore a white lab coat in a
commercial for Sanka (a brand of decaffeinated coffee). He
was not an expert on coffee and certainly not a real doctor,
yet the symbols of his authority (the white lab coat, the
association with Dr. Welby) were sufficient to increase dra-
matically the sales of Sanka. Even when an actor states at
the outset of a commercial pitch thatI am not a doctor, but I
play one on TV,his recommendations regarding cold reme-
dies are followed by a significant portion of the viewing
audience. This deference to titles and uniforms can have
devastating effects. A study performed in a medical context,
for example, found that 95% of nurses who received a
phone call from a “doctor” agreed to administer a dangerous
level of a drug to a patient (Hofling, Brotzman, Dalrymple,
Graves, & Pierce, 1966).
Although pressures to obey authority are compelling,
obedience is not inevitable. Research has shown, for exam-
ple, that obedience to authority is tempered when the vic-
tim’s suffering is highly salient and when the authority figure