[Open Access Online Journal] Frontiers in Psychology

Frontiers in Psychology.

“Frontiers in Psychology is an open access journal that aims at publishing the best research across the entire field of psychology. Today, psychological science is becoming increasingly important at all levels of society, from the treatment of clinical disorders to our basic understanding of how the mind works. It is highly interdisciplinary, borrowing questions from philosophy, methods from neuroscience and insights from clinical practice – all in the goal of furthering our grasp of human nature and society, as well as our ability to develop new intervention methods. The journal thus welcomes outstanding contributions in any domain of psychological science, from clinical research to cognitive science, from perception to consciousness, from imaging studies to human factors, from animal cognition to social psychology.”

People May Be Motivated To Carry Out Unspeakable Acts By Social Identification Rather Than Obedience

 

The Milgram experiment: The experimenter (E) persuades the participant (T) to give what the participant believes are painful electric shocks to another participant (L), who is actually an actor. Many participants continued to give shocks despite pleas for mercy from the actor. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

After reading this article, a few thoughts came to mind…

 

The importance of empathy, especially in identifying with the powerless and those different from us.
The importance of religion/spirituality in fostering community and service to others, especially to those who do not hold our beliefs.

 

From the 21 July 2012 article at Medical News Today

 

What makes soldiers abuse prisoners? How could Nazi officials condemn thousands of Jews to gas chamber deaths? What’s going on when underlings help cover up a financial swindle? For years, researchers have tried to identify the factors that drive people to commit cruel and brutal acts and perhaps no one has contributed more to this knowledge than psychological scientist Stanley Milgram.

Just over 50 years ago, Milgram embarked on what were to become some of the most famous studies in psychology. In these studies, which ostensibly examined the effects of punishment on learning, participants were assigned the role of “teacher” and were required to administer shocks to a “learner” that increased in intensity each time the learner gave an incorrect answer. As Milgram famously found, participants were willing to deliver supposedly lethal shocks to a stranger, just because they were asked to do so.

Researchers have offered many possible explanations for the participants’ behavior and the take-home conclusion that seems to have emerged is that people cannot help but obey the orders of those in authority, even when those orders go to the extremes.

This obedience explanation, however, fails to account for a very important aspect of the studies: why, and under what conditions, people did not obey the experimenter.

In a new article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews and Alexander Haslam and Joanne Smith of the University of Exeter propose a new way of looking at Milgram’s findings.

The researchers hypothesized that, rather than obedience to authority, the participants’ behavior might be better explained by their patterns of social identification. They surmised that conditions that encouraged identification with the experimenter (and, by extension, the scientific community) led participants to follow the experimenters’ orders, while conditions that encouraged identification with the learner (and the general community) led participants to defy the experimenters’ orders.

As the researchers explain, this suggests that participants’ willingness to engage in destructive behavior is “a reflection not of simple obedience, but of active identification with the experimenter and his mission”. …

…According to the authors, these new findings suggest that we need to rethink obedience as the standard explanation for why people engage in cruel and brutal behavior. This new research “moves us away from a dominant viewpoint that has prevailed within and beyond the academic world for nearly half a century – a viewpoint suggesting that people engage in barbaric acts because they have little insight into what they are doing and conform slavishly to the will of authority,” they write.

These new findings suggest that social identification provides participants with a moral compass and motivates them to act as followers. This followership, as the authors point out, is not thoughtless – “it is the endeavor of committed subjects.”

Looking at the findings this way has several advantages, Reicher, Haslam, and Smith argue. First, it mirrors recent historical assessments suggesting that functionaries in brutalizing regimes – like the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann – do much more than merely follow orders. And it simultaneously accounts for why participants are more likely to follow orders under certain conditions than others. …

 

Related articles

 

• Social Identification, Not Obedience, Might Motivate Unspeakable Acts (psychologicalscience.org)
• Social identification, not obedience, might motivate unspeakable acts (eurekalert.org)
• Not Obedience But Followership (psychologicalscience.org)
• Social identification, not obedience, might motivate unspeakable acts (medicalxpress.com)
• Social identification, not obedience, might motivate unspeakable acts (sciencedaily.com)
• The Stanley Milgram Films on Social Psychology | Now Available (alexanderstreet.typepad.com)
• Sam Sommers: When Good People Behave Badly (huffingtonpost.com)
• When Good People Behave Badly (psychologytoday.com)
• A scientific study of unethical behavior (southofheaven.typepad.com)
• Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority (dawnmarie4.wordpress.com)
• Social Engineering (vaticproject.blogspot.com)
• What are the similarities and differences between conformity, compliance, and obedience? (pavlovscouch.com)