In 1961, curious about a person’s willingness to obey an authority figure, social psychologist Stanley Milgram began trials on his now-famous experiment. In it, he tested how far a subject would go electrically shocking a stranger (actually an actor faking the pain) simply because they were following orders. Some subjects, Milgram found, would follow directives until the person was dead.
The news: A new Milgram-like experiment published June 2015 in the Journal of Personality has taken this idea to the next step by trying to understand which kinds of people are more or less willing to obey these kinds of orders. What researchers discovered was surprising: Those who are described as “agreeable, conscientious personalities” are more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while “more contrarian, less agreeable personalities” are more likely to refuse to hurt others.
The methodology and findings: For an eight-month period, the researchers interviewed the study participants to gauge their social personality, as well as their personal history and political leanings. When they matched this data to the participants’ behavior during the experiment, a distinct pattern emerged: People who were normally friendly followed orders because they didn’t want to upset others, while those who were described as unfriendly stuck up for themselves.
“The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial — disagreeableness — may actually be linked to ‘pro-social’ behavior,'” writes Psychology Today‘s Kenneth Worthy. “This connection seems to arise from a willingness to sacrifice one’s popularity a bit to act in a moral and just way toward other people, animals or the environment at large. Popularity, in the end, may be more a sign of social graces and perhaps a desire to fit in than any kind of moral superiority.”
The study also found that people holding left-wing political views were less willing to hurt others. One particular group held steady and refused destructive orders: “women who had previously participated in rebellious political activism such as strikes or occupying a factory.”
FROM THE PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE:
Personality Predicts Obedience in a Milgram Paradigm
Laurent Bègue Jean-Léon Beauvoir Didier Courbet Dominique Oberlé Johan Lepage and Aaron A. Duke
Journal of Personality 83:3, June 2015 © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12104
Abstract
This study investigates how obedience in a Milgram-like experiment is predicted by interindividual differences. Participants were 35 males and 31 females aged 26–54 from the general population who were contacted by phone 8 months after their participation in a study transposing Milgram’s obedience paradigm to the context of a fake television game show. Interviews were presented as opinion polls with no stated ties to the earlier experiment. Personality was assessed by the Five Factor Model questionnaire (Saucier, 1994). Political orientation and social activism were also measured. Results confirmed hypotheses that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness would be associated with willingness to administer higher-intensity electric shocks to a victim. Political orientation and social activism were also related to obedience. Our results provide empirical evidence suggesting that individual differences in personality and political variables matter in the explanation of obedience to authority.
DISCUSSION
The present research makes at least three significant contribu- tions to the literature. This is the first study showing that individual obedience in a Milgram-like paradigm can be pre- dicted using the Five-Factor Model of personality. As expected, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness predicted the intensity of electric shocks administered to the victim. Second, we showed that disobedience was influenced by political orienta- tion, with left-wing political ideology being associated with decreased obedience. Third, we showed that women who were willing to participate in rebellious political activities such as going on strike or occupying a factory administered lower shocks
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For more than 50 years, social and personality psychology have tried to unravel the role of personality in obedient behavior. Our results provide new empirical evidence showing that individual dif- ferences in Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, political orien- tation, and social activism matter. Not only “evil” behavior such as destructive obedience may indeed be “banal” in the sense of not relying on extraordinary cruelty of ideological hate, but it also may even be facilitated by dispositions that are consensually desirable elsewhere with family and friends, as Hanna Arendt proposed over 50 years ago. Although our results suggest that adaptive traits in the interpersonal domain may be maladaptive in a context involving destructive author- ity, they also suggest that some behaviors that may disrupt social functioning, such as political activism, may express and even strengthen individual dispositions that are both useful and essential to the whole society, at least in some critical moments.
Engage! 
I get it, but a bit simplistic. I think anyone who is nice all the time is inauthentic and pretty fucking boring, to boot. I think there is a grey area somewhere too, between being an angry rebel and being excessively nice. Personally, I can’t be any one thing all the time.
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I’d like to know more about the predicates of both experiments. How exactly was it defined to the people participating? What were the reasons given for what they were going to do? What was the assumptions and how were they built into the structure of the experiments?
I believe a more reliable indicator of moral and ethical behavior comes from someone with a strong personality that values others opinions without being unduly influenced by them. Someone of this nature is more likely to ask themselves questions like: “Does this situation pass the smell test?” or “What is wrong with this photograph?” rather than political leanings. Perhaps such a personality trait can’t be measured easily or accurately.
I think this is broadly true. The mos agreeable are also agreeable to authority, no matter what is asked of them.
But I would like to know more about the rebellious women – were they rebelling because they were being told what to do by a man?
What! That’s a bit silly – either the women were rebelling BC of men, meaning feminists rock, or they were rebelling for the same reasons as the men.
If the women were rebelling under the same rationales as the hyper masculine males, then their sole reason can be to gain popularity from the said male crowd.
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Thank you for the excellent article.
The pool sample is atrocious. Exactly how large a population is 66 individuals supposed to represent?
That aside, I agree with some previous comments. There is very little detail in this article, and the premise we are given is obviously simplistic.
Speaking for myself, I am a right – leaning friendly person that fits your apparent view of a monster, and yet I have literally placed my life and health on the line to aid others. Being amiable does not equal being unthinking and immoral.
Standard sampling procedure allows that n>30 (sample number is greater than 30) is a sufficient size for a representative sample of the population µ mean. (I have a Ph.D. in Sociology). However, there are other sampling conditions that have to met, such as drawing a stratified random sample, and other intervening variables must be controlled. I don’t know all the specifics of how the sample was drawn. But if it was published in a peer-reviewed journal, it probably meets those basic requirements for social research.
Forgive me, I lack the degree, exactly how large a population is n>30 supposed to represent?
The pool sample is perfect because 66 individuals is just enough to run a prison, a death camp, a slave labour factory or a reality TV show. All of these exist now within our current world population and they continue to start up new ones in what appears to be a spontaneous natural way. The flimsy pretence of the scientists who administered the experiment seems improbable until compared to sweat shop labour recruiting. Its better than where they are now seems to be the logic of the people both as those who sign up as participants for these experiments and for those who get stuck in sweat
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This article is like a sore that needs picking at. It needs to bleed its self clear of all kinds of social puss and habit. As soon as people read this article about compliance to authority having a bad side people went right back to their scientific and cultural tools to re-establish the authority that had been mangled by this very slight/thin sample of a truth that many of us know from first hand knowledge. Lets not also forget that when Hanna Arendt wrote about the Nazi leadership her point was that it was ordinary people doing ordinary things, just doing their jobs unquestioningly which was the backbone of an entire system and not the rabid haters and sociopaths. If an entire country can be pulled onto this path is this not enough proof that this weakness to complain or resist is truly an active negative agent in our modern societies?