A truth that does not always speak its name: How Hollander and Turowetz's findings confirm and extend the engaged followership analysis of harm‐doing in the Milgram paradigm

Abstract

Hollander and Turowetz (2017, Br. J. Soc. Psychol., 56, 655-674) present important data from post-experimental interviews with participants in Milgram's 'obedience' research. In these, participants responded to various questions about their perceptions of the study and their behaviour by indicating that they trusted the Experimenter not to let them inflict serious harm. Relatively few participants indicated that they acted as they did because they were committed to the Experimenter or to science. We argue, however, that there are two key reasons why this evidence is not inconsistent with claims that harm-doing is a product of engaged followership. The first is that (in contrast to the data obtained from later post-experimental surveys) the conversational logic of the interviews does not topicalize a discussion or valorization of science, but instead requires participants to defend themselves against an accusation of improper behaviour. The second is that participants' accounts of their behaviour nevertheless revolved around expressions of trust in the Experimenter which can themselves be seen as manifestations of shared identity and engaged followership. Nevertheless, we argue that H&T's analysis points to significant ways in which the engaged followership account and its broader implications for understanding perpetrator behaviour can be embellished.

Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test

“…Turowetz and Hollander similarly argued that “no single social psychological process uniquely suffices to explain [subject] actions but rather that compliance resulted from multiple processes involving a complex interplay of situational forces and individual dispositions” (2018:89). A problem with the engaged followership perspective is that acknowledgement of its broad reach, when widened beyond “the epistemic capital of science” (Haslam and Reicher 2018:294) to include the attachments related to religion, professional obligations, concern with living up to a contract, and fear of legal liability, tends to lose its specific traction as a factor encouraging obedience. Haslam et al.…”

“…The recent exchange between Haslam and Reicher (2018) and Turowetz and Hollander (2018) was preoccupied with obedience. One contribution in this article is to shift emphasis to the 56 percent of subjects who resisted the experimenter and exercised a degree of self-control and independence by breaking off.…”

Obedience without orders: Expanding social psychology's conception of ‘obedience’

“…In contrast, we might understand Milgram's post‐experiment interviews not in terms of what they can tell us about what participants were ‘really thinking’ during the experimental sessions, but as specific contexts themselves, in which participants were engaged in specific interactional projects. For obedient participants, this entailed providing accounts for why they had continued to administer electric shocks to the protesting learner (Gibson et al ., ; Haslam & Reicher, ). While Hollander and Turowetz () suggest (albeit cautiously) that there are good reasons to take participants’ accounts as indicative of underlying psychological processes, this in effect contradicts the epistemological principles of the ethnomethodological/conversation analytic position that they adopt.…”

“…Haslam and Reicher (2018) have recently argued that their perspective should not, in any case, be understood as a 'one-size-fitsall' explanation.…”

Multiple compliant processes: A reply to Haslam and Reicher on the engaged followership explanation of ‘obedience’ in Milgram's experiments

“…Engaged followership, a theory of social identification, challenges the received wisdom that participants obeyed out of passive acquiescence to authoritative commands, per Milgram's agentic state theory (). Instead, ‘participants are induced to co‐operate because they accept the Experimenter's assurances about the study which in turn is because they accept the credibility of his statements as a scientist’ (Haslam & Reicher, , p. 292–300; see also Haslam & Reicher, ). A string of recent studies offers evidence supporting this analysis of Milgramesque compliance (e.g., Haslam, Reicher, & Birney, ; Reicher, Haslam, & Smith, ).…”