Obedience (human behavior)

Obedience is a type of social influence where someone follows direct orders or instructions given by an authority figure. It is different from compliance—which some researchers define as going along with peers or, more broadly, responding positively to a request—and from conformity, which means adjusting one’s behavior to match the majority. Whether obedience is seen as moral, immoral, or morally neutral depends on the situation. In psychological studies, for instance, people are often put in situations where they are asked to do something unethical, creating inner conflict.

Implications

If they still follow the order, that counts as obedience. Research shows that humans tend to obey when they perceive an authority figure as legitimate. This was demonstrated in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram’s experiments, which were designed to understand how ordinary Germans participated in Nazi atrocities. Milgram found that obeying authority was the rule, not the exception.

Classical methods and results

He argued that obedience is a fundamental part of social life, noting that some system of authority is necessary for any community, and only someone living alone can avoid responding to others’ commands—either by defying or submitting. A similar conclusion came from the Stanford prison experiment. Most research on obedience has come from social psychology, which has tested it in various ways. Milgram’s classic study was controversial but often repeated.

Like many psychology experiments, it involved deceiving participants. They were told they were studying how punishment affects learning, but the real goal was to see how far people would go in obeying a harmful authority. Each participant acted as a “teacher” who paired words with a “learner” (actually an actor) in another room. The teacher was instructed to give electric shocks of increasing intensity for wrong answers.

If the teacher hesitated, a researcher (another actor) urged them to continue, telling them to ignore the learner’s screams, pleas to stop, claims of a heart condition, and demands to be freed. The key measure was the voltage level the teacher administered. The other major study was run by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford in the 1970s. College students were placed in a fake prison to examine how social forces shape behavior.

Unlike Milgram’s study, where everyone faced the same conditions, participants were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners. The setting was designed to look like a real prison and to create a psychological sense of imprisonment. Milgram found that most participants obeyed orders even when it caused serious harm. With encouragement from an authority figure, about two-thirds were willing to deliver the highest shock level.

This surprised Milgram, who believed people learn from childhood that hurting others against their will is morally wrong. He explained this by suggesting participants entered an “agentic state,” letting the authority figure take responsibility for their actions. Another unexpected finding was the emotional strain: participants showed signs of tension and distress, especially after giving strong shocks. Three had full-blown seizures, and the experiment was stopped once because of this.

In Zimbardo’s study, guards obeyed orders and became aggressive, while prisoners grew hostile and resentful. The guards’ cruelty and the prisoners’ stress forced Zimbardo to end the experiment early, after six days. These two studies shaped how modern psychologists view obedience, especially Milgram’s work. In a recent replication, Jerry Burger used a similar method but with changes.

Modern methods and results

In the base condition, participants could decide whether to continue after reaching 150 volts, and the experiment ended there. To protect participants, Burger added a two-step screening process to exclude those who might react badly. In a modeled refusal condition, two actors were used: one as the learner, the other as a teacher who stopped at 90 volts. The participant was then asked to take over from that point.