Arguing, Obeying and Defying

Abstract

The Obedience Experiments Milgram conducted his obedience experiments from 1961-1962 at Yale University, and published his first academic paper reporting his findings in 1963. The reaction was almost instantaneous, with Baumrind's (1964) critique and Milgram's (1964b) response setting the tone for decades of debate and research. As Kaposi (2017) has suggested, the reaction to the obedience experiments can be loosely divided into two 'waves'. A first wave of reaction involved important ethical, methodological and conceptual debates, and can (again, loosely) be said to have lasted until the 1980s. Subsequently, there was something of a hiatus, with a relative paucity of workespecially empirical workin the 1990s. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, there was a reawakening of interest in the experiments, stimulated in part by the increasing availability of material from the experiments in Milgram's archive. In Chapters 1 and 2 I will provide an overview of this work. In Chapter 2 I will focus on the 'new wave' of critique, commentary and analysis. First however, the present chapter will review the initial wave of post-Milgram scholarship, as well as providing a summary of Milgram's experiments themselves.In reviewing Milgram's experiments and the first wave of extensions, replications and critiques, the aim is not to be comprehensive but rather to survey the main themes and arguments that are apparent in this rich literature. Arthur G. Miller (1986) provided the definitive account of the first 20 or so years of scholarship provoked by Milgram's studies in his comprehensive and scholarly book, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. Miller, of course, has his own position on the experiments, and it would not be unfair to describe him as essentiallythough not uncriticallyof the view that Milgram's studies were, and remain, valuable and important contributions to psychology and the wider social sciences (for a restatement and updating of his position, see Miller, 2016). Regardless, however, of one's own take on the obedience experiments, Miller's (1986) book remains a valuable resource.

What Does “Resistance” Actually Look Like? The Respecification of Resistance as an Interactional Accomplishment

“…This can be illustrated if we turn the tables, and use the organization of action sequencing (cf. Schegloff, 2007) as a basis for evaluating aspects of the early experiments on resistance (Gibson, 2019). For example, by attending to whether a subject complies with a directive or agrees with a prior assessment both the Milgram (1974) and Asch (1956) experiments focused primarily on responsive actions.…”

Resistance in Business-to-Business “Cold” Sales Calls

“…In what follows, we introduce these conceptualizations (for more details, see Fransen, 2013;Knowles & Linn, 2004) before attempting to demonstrate that and how they are ill-equipped to identify, describe, and share how resistance is actually accomplished in real-life interactions. Our skeptical stance toward these conceptualizations is informed by discursive psychological scholarship that has repeatedly demonstrated how laboratory-based studies, employing researcher-designed stimuli and psychometric measurements of psychological constructs, can neither replicate real-life phenomena, nor reproduce the conditions in which they occur naturally (Billig, 1994;Edwards & Potter, 1993;Gibson, 2019;Leudar & Antaki, 1996, 1997Potter & Wetherell, 1987;Stokoe, 2013;Stokoe et al, 2020b). Thus, when theorizing on the basis of laboratory-based studies, social psychologists fail to engage with the real-life relevancies of the investigated phenomena.…”

Taming Human Subjects: Researchers’ Strategies for Coping with Vagaries in Social Science Experiments

“…Experimental subjects may be sitting alone in a quiet cubicle without contact with the outside world, but their behavior could be influenced by everything big and small that they had experienced in the past day, the past week, the past year, and so on. They are aware of being in an experiment and they may react to attempts to manipulate their behavior and attitudes in various ways (Gibson 2019;Marowski 2015; 1 By "experimental behavioral and social sciences" we mainly refer to disciplines that study human behavior with the experimental method. According to conventional disciplinary division, most experimental social sciences falls into this category, but some areas not conventionally considered as social sciences, such as neuroscience, also fit this description.…”