henever I enter an office-building elevator, I automatically turn and face front, do not make eye contact with other passengers, stop talking or speak only in hush tones to a companion. Are these my personal preferences or idiosyncrasies? Hardly, since most people in most elevators behave similarly. Those actions tell you little about me but a lot about the unspoken rules of public elevators. Why do we do it? Unlike signs forbidding us to smoke or advising us what to do in case of a fire, nothing in any elevator says we should act in these strange ways. Our behavior is under the control of unwritten social rules, implicit norms, which govern appropriate elevator demeanor.

We can test if such situational rules are in silent force by violating them and seeing what our own and others' reactions will be. The reactions will be either of distress or laughter at the apparent violation of these unwritten expectations. One of the most popular scenarios in the long history of Alan Funt's ingenious Candid Camera programs is "Face The Rear." An elevator is rigged so that after an unsuspecting person enters, four Candid Camera staff enter, and one by one they all face the rear. The doors close and then reopen; now revealing that the passenger had conformed and is now also facing the rear. Doors close and reopen, and everyone is facing sideways, and then face the other way. We laugh that these people are manipulated like puppets on invisible strings, but this scenario makes us aware of the number of situations in which we mindlessly follow the dictates of group norms and situational forces.

Social norms are expectations shared by the members of a group about appropriate ways to behave in given situations. Norms are the potential "pressure" in situations that: help to define the nature of social reality; form the foundation upon which people base their interaction; and provide a common referent for members' self-evaluation. By means of these mechanisms, norms increase feelings of personal and group identity.

Norms shape behavior by providing limits within which people receive social approval for their behavior. These guidelines establish an informal basis for estimating how far one may go before experiencing the normative power of ridicule, rejection, and loss of status among friends, acquaintances, and co-workers.

Although group norms that are backed by powerful punishments for violations can restrict behavioral freedom and promote excessive uniformity, they nevertheless serve important functions. Norms contain the collective power to create and regulate social reality. Awareness of the norms operating in a group situation enables each participant to anticipate how others will enter the situation (for example, what they will wear) and what they are likely to say and do, as well as what behavior on one's own part will be expected and approved. Norms also help to interlock the roles that people perform in social situations. Roles are the socially programmed behaviors available for self-expression within group situations. Knowing what is expected from each role performance--one's own role and others' roles -- oils the machinery of social interaction.

Sometimes in a group setting, a new norm will emerge that was not operating before or that challenges the prior standard operating procedure. In the SPE, the emergent norm following the prisoner rebellion on day 2 was for the student-guards to treat the students playing the role of prisoners as "dangerous prisoners" who had to be dealt with harshly to keep them in their place. Until September 11, 2001, the norm for passengers on hijacked airplanes was to docilely obey the hijackers, who would negotiate with authorities about where the plane would safely land. However, on the United Airline flight 93, headed to San Francisco from Boston that terrible morning some passengers learned from cell phone conversations that other planes had been hi-jacked and crashed into the New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Some of those passengers then violated the sit tight norm and apparently "let roll" an attack on their hijackers that may have prevented the plane from destroying its intended terrorist target, likely Washington’s Capital building. A stewardess has reported noticing a change since that time with big beefy guys requesting aisle seats so as to be better ready to “kick ass” if necessary. I believe that the media reports of that incident have created a new emergent norm on future air flights wherein passengers will be energized to oppose their captors.

Dramatic Parallels Between the Obedience Experiments and The Stanford Prison Experiment

There are a few other parallels between the Obedience Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment that are worth mentioning. In both, we can observe individuals struggling to maintain their dignity, autonomy, and morality against the situational power of a mercilessly unjust authority figure or an indifferent, hostile System. In both, the basic experimental design is wrapped in a dramaturgical narrative, with roles, costumes, props, and stage settings. The audience for both comes away with an intuitive appreciation of the translatability of the essential features of this research to personal and societal analogues where power, domination and cruelty operate against good will, generosity and kindness. These dramatic features moved this research out of academia into mainstream media and public awareness.

The large, diverse cast of ordinary characters in the obedience studies and the normal, healthy, intelligent cast in the prison study also serve to make vivid the tragic conclusion that we all hate to acknowledge: The goodness of Everyman and of Everywoman can be transformed and overwhelmed by the an accumulation of small forces of evil. The character transformation seen in many of the participants in both studies represents "The Lucifer Effect" in action. Both studies teach us lessons about authority; the obedience research teaches us to question authority when it is excessive and unjust, while the SPE teaches us the dangers of too little responsible authority when it is needed to perform oversight of the behavior of individuals within its agency.

A final similarity puts both studies in time capsules from an earlier era that did not exert the ethical safeguards on research that currently protect human subjects from such suffering. Each of these experiments raised awareness of the need for more careful institutionalized analyses of research proposals based on a fuller appreciation of their potential pain to participants relative to gain accrued to science and society. In the Milgram studies no one ever actually got shocked, but most participants believed they were delivering ever more painful shocks with each increasing shock lever they pressed. The learner's distressing remarks were tape recorded and synchronized to each shock level in order to maintain standardized feedback across all subjects. While engaged in this intense task, many participants were extremely distressed, and some continued to be upset even after having been debriefed – by the knowledge, and thus guilt, of what they might have done. One obedient man's experience reveals both the on-line and post-experimental impact. "I went the whole nine yards...hysterically laughing, but it was not funny laughter... It was so bizarre. And I mean I completely lost it, my reasoning power." During the study he felt like an "emotional wreck," a "basket case," and afterwards he was upset that "somebody could get me to do that stuff."

I end this section on a personal note that I believe forces us to raise the obedience level in these studies to 100 percent. In a phone conversation, I asked Milgram to check his records to recall how many subjects got up out of their seat to help the Learner-Victim after they had quit the experiment -- the heroically disobedient -- or after the learner had apparently become unconscious because they had administered such intense shock to someone complaining of a heart condition. His answer was quite simple. "Not one, not ever."

I take this to mean that the deeper conditioning in obedience, instilled in us from elementary school on, is still at work among these middle-aged citizens: "Do not leave your seat without the teacher's permission!" In other words, one could say that obedience was 100 percent because even those who resisted Milgram's situational pressures were still abiding by those rules of their grade school teacher, Mrs. Jackson, or Mr. James.

Religious upbringing also comes to play in a complex way, leading both to unquestioning obedience to doctrinal beliefs as well as a profound caring for one’s fellows. The first values should lead to greater obedience to authority in the Milgram paradigm, while the second should lead to less obedience to such authority. Support for the first prediction comes from a Milgram-like study that compared participants with various measured levels religious orientation in the extent to which they obeyed one of three authority figures: neutral, scientific, or religious. The results reveal that the shock scores elicited in this experiment were highest for the most religious participants, less for those moderately religious, and lowest for the least religious. Among those highly and moderately religious, the scientific and religious authorities were more effective than the neutral authority in eliciting the most obedience. Those who scored lowest on the religious measures, that centered around beliefs that one’s life is under divine control, tended to reject any authority, be it religious or scientific.

Another positive parallel between these two examples of dramatic experimental demonstrations is their praise from an unlikely source. George Miller, a Princeton University psycholinguist, startled the members of the American Psychological Association with his 1969 presidential address that urged them to “give psychology away to the public.” A decade later he offered two specific exemplars of what he believed would fit that order, Milgram’s obedience studies and the SPE. In a Psychology Today interview, Miller said: “ I’d make every person aware of research like Phil Zimbardo’s on prisoners and guards…. The only thing I can see any chance of giving away is the sort of psychology that Zimbardo’s research represents….Stanley Milgram’s research falls in the same category.” Miller then went on to add a really significant applied implication of our work. He believes the media has missed the most important implication of this line of research. “ I would tell them to stop looking at individual responsibility and start looking at social institutions. I’d ask them to examine the conditions that take responsibility away from people, and let them regard others as a species apart.”

©2006-2012, Philip G. Zimbardo