Normalizing trust: Participants’ immediately post‐hoc explanations of behaviour in Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments

Abstract

We bring an ethnomethodological perspective on language and discourse to a data source crucial for explaining behaviour in social psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic 'obedience' experiments - yet one largely overlooked by the Milgram literature. In hundreds of interviews conducted immediately after each experiment, participants sought to justify their actions, often doing so by normalizing the situation as benign, albeit uncomfortable. Examining 91 archived recordings of these interviews from several experimental conditions, we find four recurrent accounts for continuation, each used more frequently by 'obedient' than 'defiant' participants. We also discuss three accounts for discontinuation used by 'defiant' participants. Contrary to what a leading contemporary theory of Milgramesque behaviour - engaged followership - would predict, 'obedient' participants, in the minutes immediately following the experiment, did not tend to explain themselves by identifying with science. Rather, they justified compliance in several distinct and not entirely consistent ways, suggesting that multiple social psychological processes were at work in producing Milgram's 'obedient' outcome category.

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

“…H&T () characterize engaged followership as the idea that people are able to inflict harm on others to the extent that they see it as advancing a noble cause with which they identify. In Milgram's studies, that ‘noble cause’ is the cause of science and ‘participants are motivated to overcome the difficulties of compliance by E's appeals to science’ (H&T; 2017, p. 657).…”

“…Hollander and Turowetz (; hereafter H&T) present important and intriguing data from hitherto unexamined post‐experimental interviews with participants in Milgram's (, ) ‘obedience’ research. These interviews were conducted immediately after participants had completed the study and involved them responding to various questions about their perceptions of the study and their behaviour within it.…”

“…It certainly advances our understanding of why Milgram's participants acted as they did. However, our reading of the material as presented in H&T () is less that it marginalizes or provides alternatives to the ‘engaged followership’ analysis and more that it helps develop and enrich that perspective.…”

Not by Behaviour Alone: In Defence of Self-Reports and ‘Finger Movements’

“…Moreover, the fact that he was more successful in this theoretical endeavour than Milgram can be attributed in no small part to this fact. Indeed, where Asch attended closely to the self-reports that he garnered, it was left for later researchers to do this in the case of Milgram's work Hollander & Turowetz, 2017).…”

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

“…However, our immersion in a large collection of Milgram's archived audio recordings has led us to dissatisfaction with the social identification account (Hollander & Turowetz, : henceforth H&T). Starting with Milgram's own theory, and currently with engaged followership, every contending ‘obedience’ explanation has encountered daunting challenges in accounting for relevant data – whether Milgram's () summary statistics of the various conditions’ outcomes; archived audio recordings of the experiments and immediately post‐experiment debriefing interviews (Gibson, ; Gibson, Blenkinsopp, Johnstone, & Marshall, ); follow‐up mailed questionnaires (Haslam, Reicher, Millard, & McDonald, ; Nicholson, ); Burger's () partial replication of the original study; or Perry's () archival research and interviews with participants.…”