Title Influence of authoritarianism, vagal tone and mental fatigue on obedience to authority.
Author Lepage, Johan; Begue, Laurent; Zerhouni, Oulmann; Courset, Remi; Mermillod, Martial
Journal Cogn Emot Publication Year/Month 2019-Mar
PMID 29502460 PMCID -N/A-
Affiliation + expend 1.a Laboratoire InterUniversitaire de Psychologie, Departement de psychologie , Universite Grenoble Alpes , Grenoble , France.

Recent research suggests that obedience in the Milgram paradigm is underpinned by stress vulnerability and inhibitory control over pain sharing. Because self-regulatory fatigue (SRF) induction is a suited method to investigate the influence of inhibitory control on behaviour, participants (n = 99) were randomly assigned to a High vs. Low self-regulatory condition. Heart rate variability (HRV, a biomarker of stress vulnerability) was collected during 5-min baseline and continuously during the experimental procedure. Prior to the experiment, participants completed an online survey assessing right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), a well-known predictor of obedience. Using the Immersive Video Milgram Obedience Experiment, we found (i) that lower resting HRV predicted higher destructive obedience, (ii) that low self-regulatory inhibition (induced by fatigue) reduced destructive obedience, (iii) that the well-established influence of RWA on destructive obedience was suppressed in the presence of SRF. Implications for future directions in obedience research are discussed.

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