Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments remain one of the most inspired contributions in the field of social psychology. Although Milgram undertook more than 20 experimental variations, his most (in)famous result was the first official trial run - the remote condition and its 65% completion rate. Drawing on many unpublished documents from Milgram's personal archive at Yale University, this article traces the historical origins and early evolution of the obedience experiments. Part 1 presents the previous experiences that led to Milgram's conception of his rudimentary research idea and then details the role of his intuition in its refinement. Part 2 traces the conversion of Milgram's evolving idea into a reality, paying particular attention to his application of the exploratory method of discovery during several pilot studies. Both parts illuminate Milgram's ad hoc introduction of various manipulative techniques and subtle tension-resolving refinements. The procedural adjustments continued until Milgram was confident that the first official experiment would produce a high completion rate, a result contrary to expectations of people's behaviour. Showing how Milgram conceived of, then arrived at, this first official result is important because the insights gained may help others to determine theoretically why so many participants completed this experiment.

In May 1962, social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, ran what was arguably the most controversial variation of his Obedience to Authority (OTA) experiments: the Relationship Condition (RC). In the RC, participants were required to bring a friend, with one becoming the teacher and the other the learner. The learners were covertly informed that the experiment was actually exploring whether their friend would obey an experimenter's orders to hurt them. Learners were quickly trained in how to react to the impending "shocks". Only 15 percent of teachers completed the RC. In an article published in 1965, Milgram discussed most of the variations on his baseline experiment, but only named the RC in passing, promising a more detailed account in his forthcoming book. However, his 1974 book failed to mention the RC and it remained unpublished until François Rochat and Andre Modigliani discovered it in Milgram's personal archive in 1997 at Yale University. Their overview of the RC's procedure and results left a number of questions unanswered. For example, what were the etiological origins of the RC? Why did Milgram decide against publishing this experiment? And does the RC have any significant methodological or theoretical implications on the Obedience studies discourse? Based on documents obtained from Milgram's personal archive, the aim of this article is to shed new light on these questions.

Drawing on unpublished documents from his personal archive at Yale University, this article explains how social psychologist and political scientist Stanley Milgram's new baseline procedure both coerced and tempted most participants into completing his so-called Obedience to Authority (OTA) experiment. This procedure relies cumulatively on a range of manipulative and seductive psychological techniques that progressively and systematically induced most participants to pursue what they sensed to be a morally reprehensible course of action. The article examines a variety of influences at work in Milgram's controlled laboratory that help understand how functionaries may resolve an moral dilemma in a bureaucratically organized work situation. In doing so, the article also provides an alternative explanation for Milgram's new baseline findings, one that is more consistent with Bandura's concept of "moral disengagement" and Barnard's concept of an organizational "zone of indifference." It concludes that Milgram's experiments have less to do with obedience to authority per se and more to do with how people resolve moral dilemmas confronting them in a structured organizational setting.

Based on documents from Yale University, this article advances new sociological insights on Milgram's experiments, which bolster and extend Russell and Stanley Milgram's (1963) most (in)famous "Remote condition" demonstrated that 65% of ordinary people followed the instructions of an "experimenter" to inflict seemingly intense shocks on another person. Milgram then spent over a decade contemplating why so many participants inflicted every shock. The theory Milgram (1974) provided-the agentic state-is widely believed to be his book's "weakest" section (Blass, 2004, p. 216).Recently, Russell and Gregory (2011) published a theory arguing that most participants who completed the baseline experiment were initially coerced but eventually tempted into inflicting every shock.

This article interprets Stanley Milgram's laboratory experiments on obedience, and their significance in under-standing the Holocaust and the ways by which governmental systems enable people to do things they would otherwise find undoable. Milgram tended to conflate "proximity"-between participants and learners-and sensory perception, and overlooked the difference between physical and emotional distance. Neither Milgram nor his commentators have fully recognized the importance of the shock generator in these experiments. Milgram's paradigm shows why the Nazis' search for increasingly "productive" killing means, which minimized levels of sensory perception among immediate perpetrators, was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition of the Holocaust. Milgram's key concept of "the agentic state" is reinterpreted as an act of moral choice, rather than as a psychological state of mind. An understanding of the conditional nature of legal-rational (bureaucratic) authority is essential if ways are to be found of resolving "the paradox of modernity."