The Insidious Power of Obedience to Authority#
The study of social influence reveals a capacity for compliance and conformity, but an extreme and particularly pernicious form is obedience to authority. Driven by the need to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust, Stanley Milgram conducted his famous obedience studies at Yale in the 1960s to determine how normal individuals could follow immoral orders. In the study, participants (“teachers”) were required to administer increasing levels of electric shocks to a confederate (“learner”) for incorrect word pairings, believing the shocks were real and potentially dangerous.
Despite the learner’s scripted protests, screams, and eventual silence from 330 volts onward, an authority figure (the experimenter) persisted in ordering the participant to continue. Before the study, psychiatrists predicted that only 0.1% of people would obey completely up to the maximum “450 volts: XXX—danger severe shock”. The results were staggering: 65% of participants obeyed Milgram right up to the maximum shock level.
This profound effect is partially explained by Bibb Latané’s social impact theory, which states that influence depends on the number, strength, and immediacy of the influence source. In Milgram’s study, the experimenter possessed high strength due to his perceived role as a respected scientist at Yale. High immediacy was achieved because the orders were given in the same room as the participant. Subsequent variants showed that obedience dropped significantly (to 40%) when Milgram gave orders via intercom, reducing immediacy.
Dehumanization and the Authoritarian Reflex#
While social impact describes the conditions, it doesn’t explain the psychological process that allows individuals to commit immoral acts. Infrahumanization explains how people justify such acts by dehumanizing others—attributing uniquely human secondary emotions (like admiration, hope, or melancholy) to their own group to a greater extent than to other groups. If a group is perceived as “less than human,” it becomes easier to rationalize denying them the same rights.
A 2007 study on reactions to Hurricane Katrina found white participants attributed more secondary emotions to a grieving mother if she was identified as white, compared to black. Brain-scanning research further supports this, showing that when highly stigmatized groups (like the homeless) are described without secondary emotions, there is a lack of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the region associated with advanced social cognition. Instead, these minorities activate the insula and amygdala, associated with disgust. This provides a biological mechanism for how infrahumanization facilitates prejudice and intolerance.
Early theories attempted to attribute such hatred to an authoritarian personality, arguing that strict childhood parenting creates repressed hatred for authority that is redirected toward “weaker targets” like minority groups. However, this theory could not explain the situational, cultural, and historical variations in prejudice; for instance, Virginia miners displayed racial segregation above ground but camaraderie below ground, indicating moderation of behavior by context. Modern individual difference theories, such as social dominance orientation, suggest that individuals who favor social hierarchies actively work to maintain them, predicting opposition to immigration and gay rights.
The Cognitive and Existential Roots of Conflict#
Social psychology identifies broader social mechanisms that trigger aggressive attitudes. The frustration-aggression hypothesis (FAH), a cathartic model, suggests that accumulated frustration must be released, often taken out on minority targets as scapegoats. Archival evidence from the late 1800s showed that lynching of African Americans increased when cotton prices (and thus economic stability) decreased. An alternative, cognitive view is the excitation-transfer model, where frustration primes a general angry state that frames subsequent interactions.
Cognitive shortcuts can also generate oppression through illusory correlation—the belief that two variables are associated when they are not. In a classic experiment, Hamilton and Gifford presented participants with a majority group (A) and a minority group (B), where the ratio of positive to negative behaviors was identical for both. Because the minority group (B) and negative behaviors were statistically infrequent, participants recalled a disproportionately high number of negative behaviors for Group B, perceiving an illusory correlation between the minority and negativity. This effect is explained by the representativeness heuristic.
Deeper motivational drives also maintain oppression. System justification theory argues that the social mind’s need for order and stability compels people to defend the status quo, even if it is disadvantageous to their group. Furthermore, terror management theory (TMT) proposes that recognizing one’s mortality creates existential terror. Adopting a cultural ideology—a set of values, beliefs, and laws—buffers this terror by providing a sense of meaningful, symbolic continuity. When mortality is salient, people increase their support for their cultural worldview, potentially leading to aggression against groups that violate it, which has relevance for understanding acts of terrorism. Moghaddam’s “stairway to terrorism” outlines a five-floor radicalization process, beginning with the perception of relative deprivation and injustice, and culminating in infrahumanization and the suspension of moral rules.
