The Deferential Personality

A very different kind of explanation grows out of the cognitive psychology of the past three decades. Much of this research has revolved around the claim that we all rely on heuristics - rules of thumb - to make everyday judgments.

One of these is what might be called the Trust Authority heuristic. And this suggests that what drives Milgram’s compliant subjects is not the Agentic Personality, nor the Authoritarian Personality, nor the Sadistic Personality, but the Deferential Personality. Indeed, some of Milgram’s subjects said in their debriefings that they went along with the experimenter because they were sure he knew what he was doing. Remember the Berkey-Kodak associate, who “kept thinking there must be a reason” for Perkins to lie. Ordinarily, we do well to follow the Trust Authority heuristic, because in many common situations authorities know better than lay people. At times, though, even the best heuristic fails - and Milgram devised one such situation.^[454]

This is a sophisticated explanation, but I think that Milgram’s own find­ings cast serious doubt on it. In one experiment, Milgram places the naive subject who draws the role of teacher with two experimenters instead of one. Before the session begins, one experimenter announces that a second volunteer has unexpectedly canceled his appointment. After some discussion of how they are going to meet their experimental quota, one of the experi­menters decides that he himself will take the learner’s place. Like the learner in the basic set-up, he soon begins complaining about the pain, and at 150 volts he demands to be released.

Surely, if subjects were relying on the Trust Authority heuristic, the fact that one of the authorities was demanding that the experiment stop should have brought about diminished compliance. Indeed, in another version of the experiment, in which two experimenters disagree in the subject’s presence about whether the subject should go on shocking the learner after the learner begins protesting, all of the subjects broke off the experiment immediately. Here, however, the usual two-thirds of the subjects complied to 450 volts. Apparently, it isn’t deference to the experimenters’ superior knowledge that promotes obedience.

Another variant of Milgram’s experiment reinforces this conclusion. In this version, the experimenter gives his orders from another room, in a situation where it is clear that he cannot see what level of shock the teacher is actually administering. Unsurprisingly, compliance drops drastically; and yet the experimenter’s superior knowledge is no different than if he was standing directly behind the teacher. Again, it appears that whatever causes the teacher to obey, it is not the experimenter’s perceived expertise.