The Power of Situation, or Why We Yield to Authority

Katarzyna Sankowska-Nazarewicz: What does obedience mean to you?

Tomasz Grzyb: Above all, it’s a source of misunderstandings.

Why is that?

Because we immediately judge it in moral terms. Some argue that being obedient is a positive and desirable trait, as a world without rules would be unbearable. To others, obedience conjures images of docile sheep, easy to manage but also to manipulate. Therefore, when thinking about obedience, we should always ask additional questions, because without context, making an ethical judgment is difficult. However, I have no doubt that throughout history, more harm has been done by obedient people than those who questioned the rules imposed on them.

This was demonstrated, among other things, by a series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the United States in the 1960s. Under the influence of authority, participants, acting as teachers, would administer electric shocks to students who failed to perform tasks correctly. With each mistake, the teachers were instructed to increase the voltage using a panel of 30 switches. The final switch, which would deliver a 450-volt shock, was pressed by over 60% of participants. Of course, the pain was simulated, and the aim was to see how far a person would go when placed in the role of a teacher. More than 50 years later, you and Professor Dariusz Dolinski replicated this experiment in Wroclaw. Unfortunately, the results were very similar to Milgram’s.

Our goal, however, was not just to replicate Milgram’s experiment. We aimed to find variables that could reduce the pathological obedience exhibited by people during the study. We completed this project only in 2023. Over nearly a decade, about 700 individuals participated in 15 variations of the experiment. We managed to identify several factors that make people less obedient.

The most effective strategy involved creating a sense of unity, a community between the two individuals on either side of the machine. We simply achieved this – by asking the teacher and the student to fill out a questionnaire with eight statements. Participants were to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement. These statements covered topics that are commonly debated in our country. For example: “Poland should restore full access to abortion” or “The death penalty is a sensible punishment for the most serious crimes.” The actor playing the researcher in this experiment would immediately check the results. He would scan the sheets and then a computer monitor would show a 98.4% match, and the researcher would say: “This is very strange. You have 98.4% agreement in your answers, it’s extremely rare to find individuals with such consistent views.” In another group, he would say the opposite: “98.4% disagreement in your answers, it’s rare to encounter individuals who differ so much from each other.” There was also a control group for which he did not comment on the results. It turned out that when people believed they were similar to each other, about half of the “teachers” refused to press the subsequent buttons and withdrew from the study.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this variant of the experiment. The negative one is that we treat a person we see for the first time as a stranger. The positive one, however, is that in just two minutes, it’s possible to make someone think of another as “one of their own.” This shows that we can always find some similarities – elements of a shared history, and life experiences – that influence our approach to people. In the case of this experiment, these drastically changed its outcome.

In your book Posłuszni do bólu (Obiedient to death), written with Professor Dolinski, you emphasize that the situation we find ourselves in has a significant impact on our decisions. This highlights how dangerous it becomes when someone has authoritarian power over us. But I think the conclusions from the classic version of the experiment – that over 60% of people can blindly trust authority and do terrible things – are quite depressing. Isn’t attributing blame to ‘the power of the situation’ an attempt to justify our behavior?

I wouldn’t interpret it that way. If it were so that we could identify personality factors that predict whether a person will press the buttons or refuse in a binary way, then indeed, that would be pessimistic. It would mean we’re able to precisely diagnose groups of people who behave in a specific way and are completely beyond reform.

Our results, nonetheless, are optimistic because they give us specific directions on how to build proper social relationships at various levels. It’s not because people will be better. History shows that even if we talk about some moral development of humans, it takes very little, just a spark, to return us to absolutely tribal behaviors. We’re trying to show that through certain social interventions, we can create mechanisms or safeguards in society that will either make certain behaviors impossible or ensure they’re immediately noticed and penalized.

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Your study also involved participants who didn’t fully break down: a Solidarity activist, a “tough neighborhood” guy, but also atheists and ultra-orthodox individuals. Do you see a common denominator here?

Before I answer, let’s take a step back. Before starting the experiment, we conducted personality tests on each participant. We checked, among other things, their level of empathy, locus of control, and belief in a culture of honor. One might think that a person who showed a high level of empathy in the test and claimed they would never hurt another person would be resistant to authority during the experiment. Far from it. Unfortunately, the same was true for other traits we “paper-tested”  – neither a high level of control, belief in the value of honor, nor any other variable in a real situation made people say “stop.”

However, our experiment showed that what truly influences our behavior in challenging situations is our prior experience. The individuals who were able to withdraw from our study at an early stage were those who, at some point in their lives, had to resist, defend their viewpoints, or stand up to the local toughs.

I remember one of the most dramatic conversations we had with a participant in our experiment. During the study, she behaved obediently, meaning she pressed all the buttons and followed all instructions. When we later explained what our experiment was testing, she burst into tears. She explained, “You see, all my life I’ve done things I was told to do. Maybe I needed this experience to realize what it could lead to. This constant saying “yes”, this constant agreeing to people’s requests, can lead me to such extremes.”

Of course, we didn’t have the audacity or the right to ask what she was referring to, but we can imagine that perhaps she was someone in an abusive relationship or strongly bullied at work and unable to stand up to it. Maybe experiencing such an extreme makes people start to reflect on themselves. I don’t want to strike a pompous note, but it’s somewhat like in the poem by Cavafy: that in life, there comes a moment when you must say a big “Yes” or a big “No.”. 

So perhaps we should value challenging situations more, as nothing else toughens us up quite as well?

This question is particularly important when it comes to our children. Imagine asking a teenager: what would you do if someone offered you drugs? Obviously, they’d say no, absolutely not, they wouldn’t take them. But now imagine that this boy is with his friends who are pressuring him, saying: come on, don’t be a wimp, would you turn down your buddies? What would he do in that situation?

He’d agree. Your experiment showed that most would. But maybe we should ask a different question: what can we do to make him refuse?

Maria Montessori once said that any help we give a child that they could manage without is actually a disservice to them. Montessori was talking about everyday situations, for example: a child is busy frying an egg, and a parent starts advising: turn down the heat, you’re holding the spatula wrong, and eventually takes over because, of course, they can do it faster and better. It seems this metaphor can be expanded. Every challenging situation that a child could face and get out of on their own is good for them because it teaches them something. When my children come home from school or the playground and I see something bad has happened to them, of course – it hurts me, but on the other hand, I realize that these incidents are within their capacity to handle. In life, certain dramas are indeed tailored to our age. The classic example: is if a child’s hamster dies and a parent immediately replaces it (or says it ran away), protecting the child in such a way makes them less resilient to the harder things that will come later.

On the other end of the spectrum are parents who demand unquestioning obedience from their children, on the principle of: do it because I said so, you must listen to your parents. Such a child will carry this attitude into adult life, for instance, obediently performing all tasks assigned by a boss, even if they seem pointless.

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Does the school teach us to reflect today? I’m reminded of Ellen Langer’s experiment with second-grade elementary school children. She told them a story about a ship with 10 sheep and 24 goats. The question was: how old is the ship’s captain? Most children immediately answered: 34.

This experiment shows how easily we operate within certain patterns, and school indeed teaches these patterns. Unfortunately, it also teaches conformity and obedience to various norms. But there are many teachers who, a bit like the last of the Mohicans, defend common sense, saying: okay, here is the order of the Polish school, where you must fit the correct key to receive the right number of points on the eighth-grade exam or the final exam. But beyond that, there’s common sense: learn this, read that, think about it. Perhaps paradoxically, this is a positive element, because it also shows that in every system, no matter how bizarre, there are people who want to do sensible things. Sure, it would be nice if someone stamped their foot and said: the emperor has no clothes, we need to organize this school differently. But we all realize that such revolutions could harm us, so we should try small steps and think about changes more in terms of evolution.

Let’s move on. We finish our education and start working. School patterns are replaced by corporate procedures. We also like to shift responsibility onto others, so we don’t get into trouble if anything goes wrong. Don’t you think that we are constantly forced to practice the same thing?

I agree that corporations are another school of conformity. But in the job market, there are some people who say: no, this is absurd, I want to do things that make sense to me. Currently, such messages are most often met with deep surprise and even aggression from the older generation, who say: but this is terrible, we worked so hard, and they want everything handed to them on a silver platter. But this social transformation is already underway, and more often, for example, it is said that we should have the right to completely disconnect after work hours and our superiors should not infringe on this time in any way.

If the participants in your study were exclusively from Generation Z, would the results be different?

Theoretically, it should be. In this generation, the belief that one should do certain things due to social norms is lower. This is compounded by the “woke” culture, which dictates thinking about other people and their well-being. But still, I wouldn’t be optimistic. I think the power of the situation created in this experiment is so great that it wouldn’t be enough.

Imagine you could conduct the experiment again. What variant would you like to test to try and reverse the proportions, to bring out empathy and courage in the participants?

It would be a study where ‘teachers’ have in front of them a red button, like the one from the TV show The Voice of Poland. It would be a clear message for them – if you no longer want to participate, just press it. I think the vast majority of people would then have no problem stopping their participation in the experiment.

However, the participants of previous versions knew they could withdraw at any time. Without any consequences.

Of course, they even signed a sheet with that information. But still, few dared to say ‘stop.’ We, in real life, also often theoretically know that we can withdraw from something, but in practice, we only think about it when someone makes us aware or visualizes it for us. This says a lot about the world we live in.

Tomasz Grzyb is a social psychologist and professor at SWPS University, where he teaches courses on research methodology in psychology, statistics using computers, and experimental methods of perception research. He conducts training in the fields of social psychology, manipulation, and persuasion. Since 2013, he has been training NATO officers and officers from associate countries in social influence techniques.

He is the author of publications on social influence psychology and the mechanisms of human behavior in crisis, including the book “Psychological Aspects of Crisis Situations” (2011). He is also an editor of numerous scholarly and popular science articles, among others, in the “Journal of Applied Psychology.”

Translation: Klaudia Tarasiewicz