Indeed. IIRC, some of the follow-up experiments found that when there are multiple people involved, once one of them defies the authority it becomes much more likely that others will fail to comply as well (an effect not seen in the original study since the original study only applied authority to one subject at a time, of course). On the surface, this seems to suggest that authoritarian regimes should have a problem; the existence of any opposition should substantially undermine their authority. I can speculate about why they are sometimes able to succeed anyway, of course. A government is a much more powerful authority than a researcher, and is able to operate over the long term; that difference is huge enough that I could imagine it pushing compliance from the 60s into the 90s. And once opposition is in single digits, it may become possible to dehumanize and demonize them sufficiently to prevent people from seeing them as a possible example to follow. But I’d love to see some research which provides more than such guesswork. I know plenty of books have been written about how authoritarian regimes maintain power, of course, but mostly they’ve seemed to me to contain guesswork of their own, usually supported by anecdotes. This may be because this is such a hard topic to research (where to get the data? And so many possible confounding factors for any hypothesis!), but I’d love to discover that I just haven’t found the right books.
Indeed. IIRC, some of the follow-up experiments found that when there are multiple people involved, once one of them defies the authority it becomes much more likely that others will fail to comply as well (an effect not seen in the original study since the original study only applied authority to one subject at a time, of course). On the surface, this seems to suggest that authoritarian regimes should have a problem; the existence of any opposition should substantially undermine their authority. I can speculate about why they are sometimes able to succeed anyway, of course. A government is a much more powerful authority than a researcher, and is able to operate over the long term; that difference is huge enough that I could imagine it pushing compliance from the 60s into the 90s. And once opposition is in single digits, it may become possible to dehumanize and demonize them sufficiently to prevent people from seeing them as a possible example to follow. But I’d love to see some research which provides more than such guesswork. I know plenty of books have been written about how authoritarian regimes maintain power, of course, but mostly they’ve seemed to me to contain guesswork of their own, usually supported by anecdotes. This may be because this is such a hard topic to research (where to get the data? And so many possible confounding factors for any hypothesis!), but I’d love to discover that I just haven’t found the right books.