50 Psychology Classics (42 page)

What makes one person able to disobey authority, while the rest cannot? Disobedience is difficult. Milgram's subjects generally felt that their allegiance was to the experiment and the experimenter; only a few were able to break this feeling and put the person suffering in the chair above the authority system. There was a big gap, Milgram noticed, between protesting that harm was being done (which nearly all subjects did), and actually refusing to go on with the experiment. Yet this is the leap made by those few who do disobey authority on ethical or moral grounds. They assert their individual beliefs
despite
the situation, whereas most of us bend
to
the situation. That is the difference between a hero who is willing to risk their own life to save others, and an Eichmann.

Culture has taught us how to obey authority, Milgram remarked, but not how to disobey authority that is morally reprehensible.

Obedience to Authority
seems to offer little comfort about human nature. Because we evolved in clear social hierarchies over thousands of years, part of our brain wiring makes us want to obey people who are “above” us. Yet it is only through knowledge of this strong tendency that we can avoid getting ourselves into situations in which we might perpetrate evil.

Every ideology requires a number of obedient people to act in its name, and in the case of Milgram's experiment, the ideology that awed subjects was
not religion or communism or a charismatic ruler. Apparently, people will do things in the name of Science just as Spanish Inquisitors tortured people in the name of God. Have a big enough “cause,” and it is easy to see how giving pain to another living thing can be justified without too much difficulty.

That our need to be obedient frequently overrides previous education or conditioning toward compassion, ethics, or moral precepts suggests that the cherished idea of human free will is a myth. On the other hand, Milgram's descriptions of people who did manage to refuse to give further shocks should provide us all with hope for how we might act in a similar situation. It may be part of our heritage to obey authority mindlessly, but it is also in our nature to set aside ideology if it means causing pain, and to be willing to put a person above a system.

Milgram's experiments might have been less well known were it not for the fact that
Obedience to Authority
is a gripping work of scientific literature. This is a book that anyone interested in how the mind works should have in their library. The genocide in Rwanda, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the affronts to human dignity at Abu Ghraib prison are all illuminated and partly explained by its insights.

Born in New York City in 1933, Milgram graduated from high school in 1950 and earned a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1954. He majored in political science, but decided he was more interested in psychology and took summer courses in the subject in order to be accepted into a doctoral program at Harvard. His PhD was taken under the supervision of eminent psychologist Gordon Allport, on the subject of why people conform. Milgram worked with Solomon Asch at Princeton University, who developed famous experiments in social conformity
.

Other areas of research included why people are willing to give up their seats on public transport, the idea of “six degrees of separation,” and aggression and nonverbal communication. Milgram also made documentary films, including
Obedience,
on the Yale experiments, and
The City and the Self,
on the impact of city living on behavior. For more information, read Thomas Blass's
The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram
(2004)

Milgram died in New York in 1984
.

“The sexes are different because their brains are different. The brain, the chief administrative and emotional organ of life, is differently constructed in men and in women; it processes information in a different way, which results in different perceptions, priorities and behaviour.”

“There has seldom been a greater divide between what intelligent, enlightened opinion presumes—that men and women have the same brain—and what science knows—that they do not.”

In a nutshell

By the time we emerge from the womb, most of the differences between males and females are already formed.

In a similar vein
Louann Brizendine
The Female Brain
(p 52)
John M. Gottman
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
(p 136)
Alfred Kinsey
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(p 174)
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate
(p 228)

For thousands of years, everyone treated men and women as quite different; people were assigned roles based on skills, aptitudes, perceptions, and behavior, and it was taken as given that these things depended on what gender you were. In the sexual revolution of the 1960s, however, these role definitions were dismissed as a male conspiracy to maintain social and economic domination over women. Educational policies were reframed to remove gender bias in how children were taught, and the Israeli kibbutz, which threw out the traditional demarcations of “male” and “female” jobs, was thought to be a great model. In this new world, never again would a woman simply fall into a role assigned to her by society.

Just one thing got in the way of this brave new world of equality: science. While we were being taught to believe that there were no differences between men and women that mattered, advances in brain science and empirical behavior studies were coming up with contrary findings. The sexes were not just different in a physical way, but worlds apart in life priorities, ways of communication, and sexual needs. According to Anne Moir and David Jessel, the idea of equality was “a biological and scientific lie.”

Brainsex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women
was a bestseller and one of the first popular books on gender differences, long before John Gray wrote
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
. Superbly written and often amusing, it remains a great example of “myth busting.” Moir is a geneticist and the book is based on plenty of scientific references—there is a lot of information in fewer than 200 pages—yet despite being over 15 years old it does not seem dated. Readers seeking the latest information on the link between gender, neurology, and behavior should read Brizendine's
The Female Brain
; however
Brainsex
is still an excellent all-round treatment of the subject.

Children are not born a blank slate, comment Moir and Jessel, ready to be conditioned. At six or seven weeks in the womb a baby literally “makes up its mind” with the help of hormones, and is configured into a male or a female patterned brain. Sex differences in the brain originate with the chromosomes (generally “xx” for female, “xy” for male), but the foetus will only
become a boy if male hormones are present; if they are absent it will become a female.

It is the concentration, timing, and appropriateness of hormonal action on a fetus that organize the neural network into its definite male or female pattern—and these patterns are very resistant to change after birth. Moir and Jessel note that mammal brains generally are “dimorphic”; that is, they are either male patterned or female patterned. As mammals, therefore, it would have been a freak of nature if the human brain had defied this neural sex patterning.

Even at a few hours old, before external conditioning can influence them, babies exhibit definite tendencies. A girl baby gazes at people's faces, while boys seem more interested in objects. Girl babies respond better to soothing sounds and are more frightened by noise, reflecting a keener sense of hearing.

When babies turn into toddlers, the way they see and experience the world is through the lens of their gender's brain chemistry. Boys are more adventurous in their play and roam more widely. They work to improve their spatial skills, while girls work harder at their interpersonal skills. Girls talk on average a year earlier than boys (Einstein, Moir and Jessel note, was five before he could speak). The difference continues at the pre-school stage, boys preferring vigorous play over a large area, while girls tending to more sedentary play and orderly activity. Girls treat newcomers with friendliness and curiosity, boys show nothing but indifference.

At puberty, the brain, which has already been “pre-wired” by the hormones in the fetal stage, responds to the gush of hormones with massive physical and psychological changes. Teenage boys have a testosterone level 20 times that of girls, and as an anabolic steroid, testosterone bulks up body mass and makes boys think about sex all the time.

Whereas the male hormonal system remains in steady balance, working like a thermostat, in women the system generates cycles of highs and lows corresponding to the menstrual cycle. In the premenstrual period the flow of progesterone, which helps to create a feeling of wellbeing, stops; the effect can be like coming off a drug. The authors note the rise in crime committed by premenstrual women; in the French penal code, premenstrual tension is included in the category of “temporary insanity,” and elsewhere has been used successfully in judicial defenses.

Overall, Moir and Jessel conclude, male hormones increase aggression, competition, self-assertion, self-confidence, and self-reliance; these traits are reduced in the presence of female hormones. However, as they age, men's level
of testosterone declines and they tend to mellow out; in contrast, changes to their hormonal chemistry see women become more assertive.

Men's brains are more specialized and compartmentalized, with their spatial and language skills located in specific centers, while women's brain functions are generally more diffused, with these skills controlled by centers in both sides. The more focused organization of the male brain may account for male single-mindedness, and men's famous ability to read maps can be attributed to stronger spatial capacity. Women, on the other hand, have greater overall awareness of a situation and are much more successful at picking up small facial cues that men don't see; this helps them to be better judges of character, and may account for “women‘s intuition.” Women also have more effective peripheral vision and generally better senses all round.

Men's brains give them an action orientation and a preference for things over people. They are disturbed when women cry, and wonder why it happens so often. Moir and Jessel explain: “Women… see, hear, and feel more, and what they see, hear and feel means more to them. Women cry more often than men because they have more to cry about—they are receiving more emotional input, reacting more strongly to it, and expressing it with greater force.” When a man cries, on the other hand, there must be something seriously wrong.

When it comes to sex, men and women's brains and hormones are so configured that the experience is totally different.

Men are easily aroused by visual sexual stimuli: They are happy for the light to be left on so they can “see the action,” and they enjoy seeing images of breasts and genitalia. Women are aroused when they feel secure and intimate, and their keener sense of touch and hearing gives them a preference for making love in the dark.

Men can easily treat sex as an isolated event and women as objects. A man is probably being truthful when he says, after a fling, “It didn't mean anything.” But the event will be a disaster for the woman because for her, sex is inseparable from intimacy and love. Moir and Jessel quote a psychologist's summing up of the differences: “Women want a lot of sex with the man they love, while men want a lot of sex.”

Men and women enter into a marriage under the misconception that they are essentially the same; they seem “compatible.” They are not.

Women crave emotional intimacy, interdependence, and verbal affirmation in their daily life with their partner, while men assume that financial
security and a good sex life form the basis of a successful marriage. The man does not properly appreciate just how much a woman's biology makes her vulnerable to changes in mood, while the woman will not know that her man's tendency to “blow up” at her is in large part attributed to a biologically lower threshold for anger and frustration.

Women perennially complain that men do not communicate, yet men's brains are not structured to make them want to talk frequently about their deepest feelings—the parts of their brain relating to feelings and to conveying thoughts are literally in separate places.

Brainsex
refers to a number of surveys on men's and women's priorities. These indicate that what men value most in life are power, profit, and independence, while women value personal relationships and security. Men are happier in marriage when their wives look good and provide “services,” while women seem happier if their husband was affectionate on the day they answered the questionnaire!

Given men's inclination to “roam,” the success of marriage as an institution, Moir and Jessel suggest, is a triumph of the female brain: “Power, in any state, depends on the possession of information. In the married state, women have more of it.” Marriage works not because women become subservient, but because women's social intelligence enables the relationship to be well managed.

The priority that women give to personal relationships tends to rule out the egocentricity, obsession with success, ruthlessness, and “suspension of personal values” that can characterize a man's approach to his career. A woman's brain is programmed to find fulfillment in whatever role she does above and beyond some external perception of status, achievement, or success. Men, on the other hand, move into occupations where success can be easily measured. They have historically avoided fields where there is a high concentration of women.