On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:48:31 -0700, Allen Esterson wrote:
>On 19 August 2008 Mike Palij wrote:
>>No, not that one, this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0819.html#article
>>Now THAT was an experiment on obedience to authority.
>>Perhaps a good exercise would be to try to explain how/why
>>a person could get 90% of a large population to vote for him
>>and whether this is really something that a society should desire.
>[...]
>
>Since no one else has taken this up, I'll give it a go!
Hi Allen, let's see what you've got!
>I think there was rather more to this vote (on 18 August 1934) than
>"obedience to authority" (though I'm not at all dismissing this factor -
>far from it).
It might be useful to point out that the phrase "obedience to
authority" is an ambiguous one. It can refer to the behavioral
manifestation of obeying a particular person but (a) the degree
to which such obedience is manifested depends upon situational
factors (e.g., in Milgrams's "Touch-Proximity Condition" only
30% went to the top shock in contrast to the 67% in the "Remote
Condition" that was reported in Milgram 1963; see pp93-96
in Blass' "The Man Who Shocked The World") and (b) as far
as I know there has not been a good/enduring theoretical
explanation of why such degrees of obedience have been obtained.
Clearly, it cannot be a purely situationist phenomenon because
of the presence of subjects such as "Bruno Batta" who is described
in detail in Blass on page 96 ("Bruno" was a subject who was a
more or less emotionless complier who forced the subject to
cooperate in the "Touch-Proximity Condition"; reading his
description in Blass reminded me of the police in Terry Gilliam's
movie "Brazil" who are just doing their job in rounding up
and brutalizing suspected terrorists).
>William Shirer, in *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich",
>writes that within a year of his appointment to the Chancellorship
>in January 1933, Hitler "had overthrown the Weimar Republic...
>destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state
>governments and their parliaments,... wiped out the labour unions,
>stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews
>out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech
>and of the press", and so on. The SA and SS had terrorised active
>anti-Nazis, driving some of the more prominent abroad.
Which is to say, the social and political environment in Germany
had been restructured to concentrate power in a small groups of
individuals who tried to eliminate dissent and enforce confomity
in support of a single person.
>In other words, the basic conditions for anything like a *democratic*
>free vote had been eliminated. How many people voted "yes" in the
>plebiscite for fear that the authorities might be in a position to know
>how they voted and take reprisals can never be known.
I concede the point but would assert that Germany allowed itself
to reach this point. A number of bad decisions had been made by
many individuals, many political and social organizations, and there
were failures of oversight and protection of democratic processes.
If I may, I suggest the following article available on Jstor as one way
to evaluate how organizations can function benevolently and/or
dictatorially (for psych relevance, Milgram is cited):
|The Challenge of a More Responsible, Productive Public Workplace
|Author(s): Richard A. Loverd
|Source: Public Productivity & Management Review, Vol. 13, No. 1
|(Autumn, 1989), pp. 43-59
|Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3380910
|
|Abstract
|How might leaders encourage employees to behave responsibly,
|avoid abuse of power, and express the "right stuff" in the productive
|public workplace? This article analyzes why abuse occurs and the
|types of abuse one might encounter. Then, a host of external and
|internal checks are presented and critiqued to suggest ways in which
|those abuses might be curbed. None of the checks turns out to be
|foolproof.
>Nevertheless, there's no doubt that Hitler's gift for inspiring the German
>people with his rhetoric, notably his vision of strong government leading
>to a resurgence of Germany among the community of nations, was probably the
>major factor in the electorate's giving him a resounding victory. Whether
>that counts as "obedience to authority" for the majority of Germans at that
>*early* stage of Nazi rule I'm not sure.
Of course, that depends upon what means by "obedience to
authority". If we deal with the phenomenon in purely behavioral
terms, then one way to interpret what it means is setting up a
situation which maximizes the probability that a person feels obligated
to comply/obey persons in authority. In Milgram's series of
4 conditions, one can get a sense of how this can be done (Milgram
1963 reports the condition with the greatest compliance, other
conditions had lower levels of compliance; see Blass 2004 Fig 6.1,
page 97 and Fig 6.2 on p98).
If one views the building and dominating of political processes and
organizations as environmental re-structuring in order to maximize
dominance over others, then Hitler and the Nazis were doing something
like the behavioral definition of "obedience to authority". If one
assumes that Hitler starts out with a base of people like "Bruno
Batta" (a form of obedience that suggest either a personality trait
or some sort of genetically based behavioral response, that is,
submission to alpha males), the only question is how does one acquire
and consolidate political power?
If we can be theoretical for a second, let's assume that a person
does a cost-benefit analysis in deciding how to respond (e.g.,
voting for a particular candidate) and attempts to maximize benefit
and minimize costs. If costs are significant (i.e., "if I vote for this
person, I and my family will be killed"), then it is easy to see why
certain choices might be made. An interesting question for psychology
is why do certain people make a decision with significant costs
even when it is in their best interest not to do so (e.g., not voting
for Hitler)?
>>...a person could get 90% of a large population to vote for him
>>and whether this is really something that a society should desire.
>
>(Pedantically speaking, it was around 85% of the electorate as a whole.)
Okay, as Shirer (p229-230) points out:
|On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had registered
|went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million
|of them, voted approval of Hitler's usurpation of complete power.
So, .95 x .90 = .855 or 85.5% of the those eligible to vote
had voted for Hitler but 90% (or, pedantically, 89.9%) of the
people who actually voted had voted for Hitler.
>> P.S. In 2000 we had "hanging chads". In 1934 it was
>> "spoiled votes". What message was being sent there?
>
>As there's no "smiley" I'll treat this as it reads. To make any
>comparison with the conditions in Nazi Germany in 1934 with the
>United States in 2000 is, shall we say, just a wee bit facile.
Let me expand upon the point I appear to have failed to make.
In 2000, the form of voting (i.e., using punched cards, etc.)
served as the basis for distorting the vote count. This was out
of the control of the voters and does not allow one to infer
their intent or state of mind (though some may argue against this
view). However, in 1934, a spoiled vote could be interpreted
in different ways. First, quoting the NY Times article:
|Nevertheless 10 per cent of the voters have admittedly braved
|possible consequences by answering "No" and nearly [text
|unreadable] made their answers, ineffective by spoiling the
|simplest of ballots. There was a plain short question and two
|circles, one labeled "Yes" and the other "No," in one of which
|the voter had to make a cross. Yet there were nearly 1,000,000
|spoiled ballots.
Possible explanations for the "spoiled votes" include:
(1) Cognitive incompetence, that is, a person had problems
following the instructions and executing a response. Though
in 2000 the "butterfly ballot" posed challenges to some voters,
it is unclear how the 1934 ballot described above could be
misunderstood.
(2) Active opposition to the vote: a number of votes had
the write-in of "Thaelmann", an imprisoned communist leader.
Though "spoiled", the intent is clear.
(3) Passive opposition to the vote: whether due to fear of
reprisals or being forced to vote (e.g., quoting the Times:
|All over Germany means were taken to get the Sunday
|late-sleeping population out of bed early. The polls opened
|at 8 o'clock, but in Berlin Storm Troops, Hitler Youth
|Troops and Nazi labor union groups took to the streets as
|early as 6 o'clock to wake the populace by shouting at them
|to do their duty )
one way to show one's opposition with minimum cost was
to simply provide an invalid vote (comparable to the
"diabolical subject" who participates in an experiment and
does the *opposite* of the instructions in order to show
one's opposition to being in the experiment).
So, in 1934, in contrast to 2000, a "non-vote" could be
interpreted as a form of opposition which might have been
the intended message.
-Mike Palij
New York University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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