1.1.3, 1.1.6, 1.1.7 - Obedience, personality and culture

Personality and obedience

A personality explanation looks for relatively enduring differences between people that may influence how they respond to authority.

An individual difference is a characteristic on which people vary. Personality refers to patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, rather than a momentary mood. A dispositional explanation might predict that some people are more willing than others to accept instructions across situations. However, obeying once does not establish a permanent “obedient personality”. The instruction may be sensible, the authority trusted or resistance costly.

Adorno and colleagues' authoritarian personality account links uncritical submission to recognised in-group authorities with rigid conventional values and hostility toward people seen as violating those values. Submission is selective: the person may defer to an authority they admire but resist someone outside their accepted hierarchy. This distinguishes authoritarianism from obeying every person who makes a demand.

The account proposes a developmental pathway. Harsh, controlling discipline may encourage a child to suppress hostility toward powerful parents, idealise authority and later displace hostility toward less powerful groups. This is a proposed explanation of how an enduring pattern develops through experience; a personality account is not automatically a genetic account. Nor does the proposal imply that every child raised strictly develops authoritarian attitudes.

Elms and Milgram examined personality measures in approximately 20 obedient and 20 defiant participants from the obedience research. Obedient participants tended to score higher on the F-scale, a questionnaire developed to assess authoritarian tendencies. This association supports investigating personality rather than assuming the situation explains every difference. Milgram's original account, appendix.

It does not establish that authoritarianism caused obedience. The participants were selected after their experimental behaviour, the measures were not a randomly assigned personality manipulation, and questionnaire responses may be influenced by how people want to present themselves. Items concerning submission to authority also resemble the outcome being explained, so the evidence needs to show more than two measures sharing similar wording. The findings do not justify diagnosing a real person from one obedient act.

Gender and environmental experience

A gender explanation needs evidence about behaviour and an account of how relevant social experience could produce any difference.

Gender socialisation means learning expectations associated with gender through family, peers, school, work and the wider culture. Expectations about assertiveness, care, deference or leadership may affect the costs of dissent or whose authority is accepted. These are possible environmental pathways, not universal characteristics of women or men. They can vary across settings and change over time.

The original 1963 obedience sample contained only men, so it could not establish a gender difference. Milgram's later Experiment 8 tested 40 women as teachers in a condition comparable to the new baseline. 26 of 40 reached the maximum, the same 65% as the corresponding male group. Milgram reported greater experienced conflict among women overall, illustrating that the same observed obedience rate can coexist with different reported feelings. Equal behaviour does not prove equal psychological experience.

Blass's 1999 review compared Milgram's result with nine methodological replications containing male and female participants. Nine of the ten comparisons found no gender difference. The exception, Kilham and Mann's Australian research, reported greater full obedience among men than women. The evidence therefore does not support a simple universal claim that one gender obeys more. Original review.

The comparisons also have limits. Participants were not randomly assigned a gender or a lifetime of socialisation; groups can differ in experiences beyond the label. Earlier studies mostly used binary male/female classifications and particular authority/victim roles. They do not establish how every gender identity responds, or that results remain identical with a different authority. A non-significant difference is not proof that every individual is equal or that socialisation has no effect.

A careful conclusion is that gender-related experiences may matter in particular contexts, but the inspected obedience evidence gives weak support for a general gender difference. Any explanation must specify which learned expectations, authority relationship and situation it predicts will matter.

Culture and learned authority

Culture can shape the meaning of an instruction and the expectations people learn about legitimate authority.

Culture includes shared values, norms and practices learned in social groups. A norm is an expectation about acceptable behaviour. A family, professional community or society may encourage respect for rank, questioning decisions, loyalty to colleagues or protection of vulnerable people. Cultural learning can therefore promote obedience to some instructions and resistance to others.

For example, a workplace where staff learn that questioning a senior colleague is disloyal may make dissent harder. Another workplace may teach that anyone must stop unsafe activity, giving resistance an accepted role. These fictional examples concern learned norms; neither assigns a fixed trait to a nationality. People belong to overlapping cultures and may accept different authorities in different roles.

The broad labels individualist and collectivist describe tendencies to value personal independence or group interdependence. They can suggest hypotheses, but “collectivist people always obey” is an unjustified shortcut. Group obligation might encourage obeying an in-group leader, or encourage resisting an outsider's harmful instruction to protect the group. The content and source of the order matter.

Blass's review found substantial obedience in several countries and considerable variation between studies. This shows that Milgram-like obedience was not confined to one American sample. However, a comparison between studies in different countries changes more than culture. Recruitment, participant ages, learner responses, authority credibility, task details and historical period may differ. A national difference in percentage cannot, by itself, establish a cultural cause.

Stronger evidence would use comparable procedures, check that translated instructions carry similar meanings, recruit comparable samples and measure the specific values or norms proposed to explain behaviour. Even then, differences within each group must be considered. A country's average is not a prediction about every person from it.

How the person and situation interact

The most useful explanation often considers what a particular person brings to a particular authority relationship.

Milgram's specified variations changed the immediate setting. Giving instructions by telephone reduced direct presence and monitoring; removing Yale's visible sponsorship changed institutional cues; an apparent peer giving increasing-shock orders changed the command's source. Obedience fell in these conditions relative to the relevant baseline, although the office-block difference was not statistically significant in Milgram's report. This variation is difficult to explain using an unchanging personality trait alone.

A trait account still has something to explain: some people resisted and others continued within the same condition. Yet these differences need not all arise from personality. Participants may understand the task differently, trust science to different degrees, or have relevant experiences not measured in the experiment. A situational finding does not prove that personal characteristics are irrelevant, and individual variation does not prove a particular trait is causal.

An interaction means that the effect of one influence depends on another. An authoritarian disposition might predict obedience most strongly when the authority is recognised as part of the person's accepted hierarchy. The same person could resist an apparent peer. Similarly, cultural norms about questioning a supervisor may become especially important when the supervisor is present and colleagues are watching.

Consider fictional employees Mira and Dan. Both receive the same unsafe instruction. Mira has learned a professional duty to challenge unsafe work; Dan worries that disagreement shows disloyalty. Their different interpretations may affect resistance. If the order is then delivered by an unqualified visitor, both may reject it. This example connects personal learning to legitimacy and situation; it does not establish either person's personality from one event.

For organisations, a reasoned implication is to make safe dissent legitimate: clear stop-work procedures, protection for questioning and responsibility that remains with individuals can reduce pressure to comply with harmful demands. This is an application of the mechanisms, not a guarantee of success. Evidence would need to compare behaviour before and after such a change while considering other influences.

A balanced judgement recognises complementary levels of explanation. Personality may describe individual tendencies; gender and cultural learning can shape those tendencies and social expectations; the immediate situation determines which authority and consequences are salient. The evidence supports testing these influences together rather than reducing obedience to a stereotype about one type of person.