A basic feature of human social groups is hierarchy and authority. Families, religious groups, governments, and businesses all utilize a form of social interaction where subordinates defer to others with more power, information, and control. At their best, authority and hierarchy allow people to coordinate their efforts quickly and efficiently, and carry out tasks that a single individual cannot do alone. For example, in consulting companies, new consultants and analysts defer to the expertise of the project manager, since she has more experience and knowledge about how to complete the project successfully. Cognition and action in hierarchical groups become specialized and unequally distributed so that out of many lesser individuals is born a more capable organization.

The use of authority to coordinate action is not without its drawbacks. By subverting individual freedoms to group norms and autocratic controls, hierarchies can create high bureaucracy, lower worker empowerment, which ultimately decreases the innovation and adaptation capability of the group. The most dangerous consequence of hierarchies, however, is the blurring of responsibility that can happen within them. When many actors come together to produce a joint outcome, it becomes very difficult to answer the question, “Who is responsible for what?” For example, think about the development of a new product or service, typically in companies a new product results from the behavior of many different actors, and it is hard to tease apart which one person brought it about. Knowing each individual’s contribution can help sort out responsibility, but in hierarchies, the thinking and the acting are separated and carried out by different people. So it’s hard to say who is really responsible: those who had the idea, or those that made it happen? Sorting out responsibility is important for executives who want to know where to invest their limited funds in order to increase the company’s capabilities, and what exactly to fix when something goes wrong.

For decades, social psychologists have been interested in the effects of authority and hierarchy on human well-being. In the early 1960’s, a young social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted a set of experiments at Yale University that forever changed the field of social psychology and our understanding of authority and obedience. Upon arrival to the laboratory, each of the experiment’s participants were told that they were about to begin a study on the role of punishment in learning. They were to read word pairs through a microphone to a learner, who was strapped to a chair in another room. The learner would then try to remember the word pairs, and when prompted with the first word of the pair, would try to recollect the second. If he got it correct they would continue on to the next work pair, if he got it wrong, he was to receive an electric shock. The participants were instructed to administer the shocks in increasing voltages from 15 up to 450 volts.

In reality, the learner was not shocked; he was actually a confederate of the experiment, which was not really about learning and memory. Milgram and his research team were interested in whether people would obey orders to continue delivering shocks in the face of protest by the learner to stop. As the test continued, the learner/confederate would begin to get increasing uncomfortable and eventually demand to be let out of the experiment. At which point the experimenter in charge of the experiment (who was also an actor) would simply say, “please continue,” as if the protesting was normal and nothing to worry about.

To Milgram’s surprise, he found that roughly 65 percent of participants would obey the experimenter and continue on with the procedure until the end of the experiment, while the learner screamed to be let out.