Ethan Lencz

Obedience is a phenomenon in which someone’s actions are directed or influenced by a perceived authority figure. The study of obedience to authority became popular with the experiments of Stanley Milgram. These experiments tested how individuals responded to an authority figure instructing them to shock another human being. Milgram’s results showed high obedience rates in almost every variation of his experiments.

Milgram’s famous experiments included three roles, only one of which was a real participant, while the other two worked for Milgram. These roles were shocker (participant), victim, and instructor. Research on obedience through Milgram’s lens focuses on the shocker, but what about the instructor telling the participant to harm others? Milgram and other researchers have not studied the potential obedience of someone in the instructor role. 

Thus, I will study the obedience of a participant instructing others to harm people as well as the actual person doing the harming. An implication of my project can be seen in the real world, where it may be even easier for someone to give harmful instructions than to commit harmful acts. For example, in a workplace setting, passing along harmful orders down the chain of command may seem much less daunting than committing them yourself.

In my study, online participants will either take the role of the shocker or the instructor in an immersive survey. They will see videos I have recorded on their screen and have the ability to choose whether or not to obey the orders of their role. Rather than electrical shocks, though, I will use the destruction of origami, presumed to have been made by the learner, as the means of destructive obedience. The major question in my research is the following: will participants in the role of the teacher or experimenter cause more origami to be destroyed?