It seemed as if you were saying someone who is agreeable is someone who obeys the orders of other people. That’s not how the term is typically defined and that’s not how the study defined it. There are a number of factors that determine agreeableness. You can score high on agreeableness and still be a rule-breaker…as long as you think rule-breaking is what will make you liked and respected by others. Someone with low agreeableness has no problem following rules…as long as they are consistent with their own values and purposes.
So no, I’m not agreeing with you if you’re saying what I think you’re saying.
As you say, agreeable people will follow or break rules based on what confers social status, and what avoids social conflict. Again, to me it seems obvious that someone with these traits is inherently more likely to do bad things as part of a system of socially authoritative instructions and to follow the bad instructions of authority for social gain.
It just seems circular because the traits of agreeableness are such that, when you place agreeable people in a situation where they gain socially by hurting others, agreeable people will hurt others because doing things to gain socially and avoiding conflict are part of the trait of agreeableness. Do you see what I’m saying?
When most people think of agreeableness, they think of someone with (as the wikipedia article says) warmth, empathy, kindness, and, well, niceness. One would not expect someone with these attributes to do bad things.
The study wouldn’t be interesting at all if agreeableness was simply about who is more likely to obey authority. Most people think agreeableness is a good thing and try to instill it in their children, not because they associate agreeableness with following rules and authority, but because the quality is associated with kindness and fairness and making friends. You would think that a kind person would be the first to say “No!” to something immoral or unethical. So the study’s findings are somewhat surprising.
“What will the neighbors think!” is an expression of agreeableness that we’ve all heard before. A non-agreeable person such as myself can see how this is a dangerous sentiment. But probably not the person who goes around saying it.
(As another counterpoint to agreeableness = obeying authority, when I was a kid, I disdained peer relations because experience had taught me that hanging out with other kids was a guaranteed way of getting in trouble with adults. I hated getting in trouble more than I loved having friends my own age. So I was an example of a someone with low agreeableness who had no problem with authority. It would be interesting to see how someone like me would have fared in the OP’s experiment.)
Because they are serving a greater good: the advancement of science.
The experiment is not simply to show that people will obey authority. The more illuminating insight is that when people believe in a cause they are willing to do most anything to advance it.
So, are we suppose to question ALL authority at ALL times as a matter of course? Sounds like a difficult way to live.
Like most people, I start from the assumption that most people in authority are competent and attempting to do the right thing. If I see a policeman directing traffic at the next intersection, I follow his instructions- I stop when he tells me to, go when he tells me to, turn when he indicates it’s okay.
Does that make me a sheep, blindly obeying a tool of the fascists? Maybe, but I’ll chance it. I’m “nice,” after all.
MOST of the time, being “nice” and obeying the rules is the right thing to do, both morally and practically. In my 53 years on this planet, I have yet to encounter a single Milgramesque situation in which my acquiescence to the instructions of legitimate authority figures has led to a real person being electrocuted.
Of COURSE there are times when rules and authority need to be questioned, but those are rare exceptions. When my Dad told me to clean my room, I “followed orders” and did it. I have a hard time seeing how that’s analogous to folloiwing orders at Dachau.
I don’t think niceness and agreeableness are bad traits. What the studies simply show is that traits that are often considered socially undesirable (self-entitlement, irreverence, problems with authority) serve an important purpose in our society.
If North Korea ever overturns it’s oppressive regime, it won’t be the nice, demure, easy-going types who make this happen. It’ll be the people who are the most obnoxious, the most difficult to tame, and the least likely to care about making the government happy.
Likewise, if America is at risk of being overtaken by a fascist dictatorship, it won’t be because of the loud-mouth rabble rousers who refuse to cave as their rights are incrementally eroded by the jack boot thugs knocking on their door. Our undoing will be caused by people who don’t like making a fuss, don’t like uncertainty, and don’t like questioning authority.
Being nice and agreeable is a universal good only if everyone is nice and agreeable. If we aren’t living in that utiopia, with need people who aren’t so nice and agreeable to fight against those that are like them except who have power.
I don’t know about that- it seems to me the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis themselves WERE loud-mouthed rabble rousers who didn’t cotton to other people’s authority. Obnoxious jerks are at least as likely to LEAD fascistic movements as they are to fight them.
Or, at an intersection where the ‘nice’ person has the right of way but stops suddenly to let someone else go. Pay no attention to the twelve car pileup behind you because everyone expected you to follow the rules of the road.
Agreed. What we don’t need is for everyone to be like that, all the time.
I guess maybe a theoretical best middle would be for everyone to be nice and agreeable, but have a breaking point where they aren’t so nice. Oddly, that’s what I thought people were generally like, really.
An important point about the Milgram experiments that sometimes doesn’t get explicitly mentioned in discussions is that the willingness-to-shock-to-the-point-of-causing-screams was produced through a gradual process. It wasn’t the case that subjects were shown a “person to be shocked” (actually a confederate who wasn’t being shocked at all, and merely play-acted pain), and asked out of the blue to give them a shock so strong they could die.
The subjects started out giving shocks that, as they believed, were barely a tingle.
After giving a tingle-shock, the person was willing–in the name of the Greater Good and advancement of knowledge, as Stringbean mentioned–to give a slightly larger shock. This next shock was still not painful, so far as the subjects believed.
Now the subject was asked to give a bit-stronger shock. It’s only a bit stronger, so, why not?
The principle at work here is not merely about obeying authority. It’s about the way we can rationalize. “I already gave him a shock at level 3, so why not give him one at level 4? It’s only a bit stronger than the previous one.”
Cognitive dissonance ensures that the subject will perform this mental exercise. If he was a good person who was helping advance science by giving the level 3 shock, then is he suddenly a bad person if he gives the level 4 shock? Of course not; he is a good person and therefore whatever he’s doing, directed by these lab-coated men who surely know their business, must be A Good Thing.
And so the subject progresses from the level 3 shock to the level 4 one, the level 5 one, the level 6 one, and so on…until the actor “receiving” the shocks is screaming and having a heart attack and otherwise reacting to the “lethal shocks.”
There has been huge resistance to Milgram’s findings. The obvious reason is that we don’t want to believe that we could be so obedient to authority that we’d give “lethal shocks” to someone. But I wonder if a more deep-seated reason for resistance to the findings is that we don’t like being reminded how very, very skillful we are at rationalizing–at justifying the unjustifiable.