ABSTRACT
Drawing on the 'engaged followership' reinterpretation of Milgram's work on obedience, four studies (three pre-registered) examine the extent to which people's willingness to follow an experimenter's instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either 'hard' (prototypical) science (i.e., neuroscience) or 'soft' (non-prototypical) science (i.e., social science) before completing an online analogue of Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority' paradigm. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in the neuroscience condition completed more trials than those in the social science condition. This effect was not replicated in Study 3, possibly because the timing of data collection (late 2020) coincided with an emphasis on social science's importance in controlling COVID-19. Results of a final cross-sectional study (Study 4) indicated that participants who perceived the study to be more prototypical of science found it more worthwhile, reported making a wider contribution by taking part, reported less dislike for the task, more happiness at having taken part, and more trust in the researchers, all of which indirectly predicted greater followership. Implications for the theoretical understanding of obedience to toxic instructions are discussed.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Humans , Cross-Sectional Studies , Cooperative Behavior , Trust , Group ProcessesABSTRACT
In Milgram's seminal obedience studies, participants' behaviour has traditionally been explained as a demonstration of people's tendency to enter into an 'agentic state' when in the presence of an authority figure: they attend only to the demands of that authority and are insensitive to the plight of their victims. There have been many criticisms of this view, but most rely on either indirect or anecdotal evidence. In this study, participants (n = 40) are taken through a Virtual Reality simulation of the Milgram paradigm. Compared to control participants (n = 20) who are not taken through the simulation, those in the experimental conditions are found to attempt to help the Learner more by putting greater emphasis on the correct word over the incorrect words. We also manipulate the extent to which participants identify with the science of the study and show that high identifiers both give more help, are less stressed, and are more hesitant to press the shock button than low identifiers. We conclude that these findings constitute a refutation of the 'agentic state' approach to obedience. Instead, we discuss implications for the alternative approaches such as 'engaged followership' which suggests that obedience is a function of relative identification with the science and with the victim in the study. Finally, we discuss the value of Virtual Reality as a technique for investigating hard-to-study psychological phenomena.
