Demonstrating Obedience

William Hunter (1981) noted that many students have difficulty believing the results of Milgram's study on obedience to authority. He proposed a simple demonstration designed to illustrate in a more personal manner the concept of obedience. Prior to discussing obedience and the Milgram studies, you should enter the classroom and make sure that everyone is seated. Then go through a series of increasingly bizarre requests with your students. Examples of possible requests are given below (feel free to substitute or add your own ideas here):

ask students to switch seats with another student

have everyone remove their shoes and place them in a pile at the front of the room

ask students to take off their watch and exchange it with one other person

ask students to do jumping jacks in order to loosen up

ask students to rub their tummy while patting their head (and vice-versa)

ask students to do the wave (this one is actually very neat in a large class)

ask students to quack like a duck or to sing a silly song

ask students to come up with a class cheer (e.g., "We've got spirit yes we do, we've got spirit how 'bout you?") and yell it in unison several times as loud as they can

End your session with a big round of applause, and then, after everyone has returned to their seat, ask them why they complied with the sequence of behaviors you requested of them. Once students recognize that they responded to requests made by an authority figure (i.e., because you are the professor), Hunter suggests focusing the discussion on issues such as attributes of authority figures, why we obey authority, whether we should always obey authority, how a person gets authority, and what society would be like without authority. This exercise is a real crowd-pleaser; besides being invigorating and entertaining, it helps students relate the seemingly unreal circumstances of the Milgram experiment to their own real-life experiences. It also tends to cure the "I would never obey an authority without good reason" feeling that students often have when hearing about Milgram's results for the first time.

Hunter, W. J. (1981). Obedience to authority. In L. T. Benjamin, Jr. & K. D. Lowman (Eds.), Activities handbook for the teaching of psychology (pp. 149-150). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.