Obedience means to follow orders from those in a position of authority. Obedience studies are open to criticism and there is some debate about just how obedient we are. Social psycholog y is largely concerned with what happens between people, and our understanding of what happens in the mind of the individual when we obey orders is limited. Stanley Milgram, who carried out the most famous and dramatic demonstrations of human obedience in the 1960s, suggested that under certain circumstances we enter an altered state — the agentic state —in which we surrender our individuality and act instead as an agent of society.
A common criticism of Milgram’s ideas about agency has been that it has been impossible to verify that something different is happening on a biological level when we behave in a way we might call ‘agentic’. Until now that is! A recent study by Caspar et al. (2016) set out to investigate what happens in the brain when we obey. Participants were either ordered or offered the opportunity to give a victim an electric shock or steal money from them. In both conditions they were then asked to estimate the time between pressing a button and hearing a sound. In the orders condition but not the choice condition participants significantly overestimated the elapsed time. This inability to judge time accurately suggests an altered state of consciousness. When they repeated the procedure whilst measuring participants’ brain waves, a distinct pattern of electrical activity was found when participants acted under orders. This study supports Milgram’s idea that we exist in an altered state when we obey orders.
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