Acting otherwise: Resistance, agency, and subjectivities in Milgram’s studies of obedience

Abstract

In this account of the Obedience to Authority experiments, we offer a richer and more dynamic depiction of the subjects' acts and reactions. To paraphrase Milgram, our account tries to examine the central elements of the situation as perceived by its research subjects. We describe a model of the experimenter-subject system that moves beyond experimentalism and humanism, positing instead a model that considers experimenter-subject relations and extends both spatially and temporally past the experiment's traditionally assumed limits: the walls of the laboratory and its canonical methods. Following Butler and Krause, we propose an approach that attends to quotidian, subtle, and unregistered ways of acting otherwise. Taking the Yale archive's collection of Milgram's subject files, audio recordings, and notes as historical traces of the experimentersubject system, our analysis introduces a grounded understanding of how Milgram's cut between obedience and disobedience renders invisible all but the most explicit manifestations of resistance or ways of acting otherwise. Investigating Milgram's work through an experimenter-subject systems model illuminates previously undocumented affective and temporal dimensions of laboratory life and serves as a template for assessing other experimental situations.

The categorisation of resistance: interpreting failure to follow a proposed line of action in the diagnosis of autism amongst young adults

“…Third, resistance may be kept off the 'public balance sheet'. Hoffman et al (2015), for example, note that participants in Stanley Milgram's studies on obedience to authority consistently resisted calls to obey but that these acts were excluded from published reports. Acts which unsettle diagnostic practices in situ may, therefore, ultimately be disregarded.…”

Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test

“…But while he used responses from the questionnaire data to defend himself against charges of unethical treatment of his subjects, he dismissed data from the same questionnaire when it appeared to challenge his conclusions on methodological grounds (Milgram, in Sabini and Silver 1992). Hoffman, Myerberg, and Morawski (2015:678) note that Milgram dismissed subject skepticism as a “defense function” and a “post facto explanation,” that is, an attempt by those who had obeyed to save face by denying any suffering occurred. Fearing contamination of the potential subject pool, Milgram did not conduct a formal debriefing of subjects until after 75 percent of those recruited had completed the experiment.…”

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

“…Allied to this is the observation that the experimenter frequently departed from the standardized form of the prods in ways that rendered his interventions more akin to persuasive rhetoric than the exercising of blunt authority (Gibson, 2013a(Gibson, , 2013b. Secondary analysis of Milgram's studies has thus drawn attention to the levels of resistance and argumentation in the experiments (Gibson, 2013a(Gibson, , 2014(Gibson, , 2017Hoffman, Myerberg, & Morawski, 2015;Hollander, 2015;Hollander & Maynard, 2016) and has found that there are regularities in the timing of participants' attempts at defiance (Packer, 2008). Moreover, across all experimental conditions, defiance was more common than obedience (Haslam, Loughnan, & Perry, 2014).…”