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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: The power of responsibility

People can do some pretty terrible things when an authority figure tells them to. The atrocities of war are pretty solid evidence of this, especially those committed by the Nazis in World War II.

In the ‘60s, with World War II fresh in mind, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to determine why that is. He wanted to find out why people listen to authority and what an authority figure could make a person do in a controlled setting.

He designed an experiment to investigate people’s responses to pressure by authority. If you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology class, you’re probably already familiar with it.

His setup was simple: A “teacher” asks a “learner” questions and administers an electric shock for wrong answers. With every wrong answer, the shocks would become a little stronger. A third person, the “researcher,” would prod the “teacher” to continue the study if they would ever become 
uncomfortable.

Of course, it was all a show. The “learners” were actually actors pretending to receive shocks. The “teacher” is the only real subject of the experiment. By the end of the experiment, the learners appeared to become unconscious and, shockingly, two-thirds of participants continued administering shocks.

While the results were shocking, not everyone was happy about the experiment. For one, participants could have been traumatized by the experience given the severity of the actor’s behavior.

Participants may have figured out the experiment was a show and altered their behavior accordingly. This could have created issues with the researchers’ interpretations of the results.

Issues aside, the experiment reiterated an important message: people can do some terrible things when they’re told to do them. Unfortunately, Milgram’s experiment was unable to tell us why that is, but a recent study led by Patrick Haggard of University College London filled this gap in our understanding of human behavior.

Haggard essentially re-did Milgram’s experiment but with the issues resolved. He put two participants together and had them press buttons on a keyboard. One button would cause a shock, calibrated to the other participant’s pain tolerance, and the other button would not.

An experimenter would tell each participant which button to press, but sometimes the experimenter would turn his or her back and allow the participants to choose which button to press.

While doing this, Haggard monitored the participants’ brain activity using a process known as electroencephalography. This allowed him to determine the degree of emotional response following button presses, whether the participants were told to or not.

Haggard found participants had a stronger 
emotional response to 
administering shocks when they chose which button to press than when they were ordered to administer a shock. This was also supported by participants who reported a reduced feeling of responsibility when ordered to administer shocks by the experimenter.

These results could have big implications for society. For one, it creates a legal dilemma. Should people be held responsible for actions they carried out on orders, even though they did not feel responsible for them? These results could also help employers create or eliminate a feeling of personal responsibility among their 
employees.

More importantly, however, this experiment shows how powerful responsibility can be in shaping the way we treat each other in daily life.

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