Obeying Orders

When commanded to do a bad thing, what would you do?

Welcome to the Salience Network, a new section on the Brain Pizza substack, exclusively for paid subscribers. The title is a loose pun on the brain’s ‘salience network’ which has the job of monitoring striking or unusual external inputs as well as internal brain events; it has a central role in identifying important biological and cognitive events. Here, you'll find new material beyond the paid and free regular newsletter, all through a psychology and neuroscience lens. This post will be unlocked as a one-off gift for free subscribers in six days time.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi¹

These are the people – the functionaries – on whom evil committed at scale depends. Those who ‘go along to get along’, unwilling to question and disobey commands from higher-status authority figures. They are obedient.

Why are they obedient? Is this something peculiar to them as persons?

Will we all fall when confronted with the ‘system’, with ‘authority’?

To kick off this edition of the Salience Network, I'm going to look back on a book published half a century ago by Stanley Milgram (1974), entitled “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View,” which challenges comforting and self-regarding views of human nature. Milgram worked in what was a ‘golden age’ in social psychology, where marked advances were made in understanding the dynamics of humans behaving when gathered in groups. Just as we see great and wonderful things done by humans working together in directed groups, we also terrible things done by humans working together in directed groups, obedient to the demands of authority.