Do You Play Follow the Leader?

In 1961, a scientist called Milgram conducted a series of experiments on obedience to authority figures and different volunteers were drafted to take part. The volunteers were given some form of payment for participating. There were three roles involved in the experiment, an expert (authority figure), a teacher and a learner. The expert and the leaner were internal people who knew what was going to happen in the experiment, and only the teacher was an outside volunteer. The experiment was run a number of times with different teachers used each time. The teacher was told by the expert that he or she would be giving the learner a series of word pairs to learn, and when the learner got the word pairs wrong, the teacher was to press a button that would give an electric shock to the learner in increasingly higher voltage increments for each wrong answer, up to a maximum shock of 450 volts. The teacher thought real electric shocks would be given, but there was actually no live electrical current, and a pre-recorded tape recorder was played with corresponding sounds for each shock level. The learner would be in an adjoining room, able to be heard but not seen. The teacher was told in some of the cases that the learner had a heart condition.  When the voltage of the shocks given reached a certain point, the learner would start begging the teacher to stop by banging on the wall and then after that the learner would be silent. The different teachers taking part in the experiment showed varying responses to participating, some showing stress and laughing nervously, some questioning why the experiment was taking place, but most continued with the experiment when assured they would not be held responsible for any problems. If the teacher wanted to halt the experiment, the expert would say up to four different times in different preselected ways that the teacher must continue or that there was no other choice but to carry on, and some of the teachers did stop at this point. In some cases, and regardless of demands by the learner to stop, the teacher would carry on participating until the full 450 volt shock was given. In the first series of experiments, 65% of the teachers (26 out of 40 individuals) participated until the final 450 volt shock was given.

Isn't it incredible to think that ordinary people like you and I would participate in an event that caused harm to another human being if told to do so by someone in authority. Most of the participants were very uncomfortable taking part, yet many carried on when ordered to do so. Is this possibly how historical events like genocidal holocaust can take place?

The same principle applies if you find yourself in an environment where you see someone being bullied or mistreated day after day, and perhaps you have come to see the behaviour as acceptable because everyone else seems to accept it. Did you come to ignore the uncomfortable feeling gnawing away at you inside telling you the behaviour is wrong? Ask yourself, are you unconsciously playing follow the leader? Does anyone deserve bad treatment and how would you feel in that person's situation?

I believe if we are all aware of the inclination in ourselves to blindly follow and to ignore even if we hurt others in the process, we may be able to stop patterns of hurt repeating.

Link to more information about the Milgram experiment