Obedience and Responsibility

Abstract

Milgram's theory of obedience was tested with 93 subjects in three variations of the ‘obedience’ paradigm. The amounts of compliance in shocking a victim were higher in a baseline condition than in Milgram's experiments and, as expected, lower in a self‐decision and in a modelling de‐legitimization condition. However, compliant subjects did not consistently disown responsibility for their behaviour in shocking a victim. The data of these experiments did not support Milgram's theory that obedience is an agentic state in which a person no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument of an authority figure. Objections are raised regarding Milgram's interpretation of the subjects' behaviour in the shock experiments and the relevance of these experiments to wartime atrocities.

Making a Virtue of Evil: A Five‐Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate

“…Film and transcript of the studies also show that, far from becoming morally disengaged and passive, participants were profoundly troubled by what they were doing and initiated long debates about the justification for continuing the study. Both Milgram's own studies and subsequent research (Mantell & Panzarella, 1976) find no relationship between the amount of responsibility attributed to the experimenter and levels of obedience. In short, there is nothing to support the ‘agentic state’ and much to question it (Blass, 2004).…”

‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments

“…Principal among these is the fact that there is a general consensus among those who have looked closely at Milgram's research that the agentic state account fails to provide a convincing explanation of his findings. In particular, this is because it does not explain why levels of obedience differed across the many variants of the paradigm, why participants were clearly tormented by the tasks they had to perform, or why (to varying degrees) they were influenced by the protestations of the Learner (Blass, ; Mantell & Panzarella, ; Reicher et al ., ; Rochat & Modigliani, ).…”

Just following orders? The rhetorical invocation of ‘obedience’ in Stanley Milgram's post‐experiment interviews

“…Blass, ; Miller, ). In particular, Mantell and Panzarella () cast doubt on the extent to which the responsibility data actually support Milgram's theory. In this context, it might be argued that Milgram's responsibility data and the agentic state theory have been conclusively discarded and further consideration of these issues is not warranted.…”