Revisioning Obedience: Exploring the Role of Milgram's Skills as a Filmmaker in Bringing His Shocking Narrative to Life

Abstract

In his “Obedience to Authority” experiments, Milgram took on the dual roles of scientific investigator and documentary filmmaker. He used photography and film as tools of investigation and dissemination throughout his career. Milgram claimed the documentary Obedience (1965) as audiovisual evidence of his “obedience to authority” paradigm. “Revisioning Milgram” looks behind the scenes at the scripting and authoring of Obedience in order to assess its claims as both art and science. It examines the way in which Milgram constructed a visual narrative to support his preferred findings and some of the tensions that arose when his film was first broadcast. This article considers how we might recover the lost visual narratives of Obedience in order to contribute to contemporary reappraisals of “Obedience to Authority.”

50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram's Obedience Experiments

“…First, even though Milgram () often emphasizes the ease of falling in the “trap of obedience” and the difficulty of disobedience, to an outside observer, the behavior of those who were willing to administer the maximum level of shock was not that different from that of those who refused to continue. As recently unearthed tapes show, both sets of participants signaled their concern, pleaded with the experimenter to stop the study, and made their objections heard (Gibson, ; Millard, ). It thus appears that for participants obedience was just as difficult as disobedience.…”

“…However, obedience levels plummeted in the latter compared to the former (see Rochat & Blass, ). Furthermore, the agentic state explanation also fails to account for the finding that people were upset when obeying the authority (Millard, ) or the observation that participants frequently challenged the experimenter's authority (Gibson, ).…”

Developing psychology’s archival sensibilities: Revisiting Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments.

“…Gibson, 2013aGibson, , b, 2014Haslam, Reicher, Millard & McDonald, 2015;Hollander, 2015;Millard, 2014;Nicholson, 2011;Perry, 2012Perry, , 2013Russell, 2011Russell, , 2014a. This sits alongside a smattering of earlier work (e.g.…”

“…are usually referred to as the 'obedience' experiments 1 (e.g. Gibson, 2013aGibson, , b, 2014Haslam, Reicher, Millard & McDonald, 2015;Hollander, 2015;Millard, 2014; Nicholson, 2011;Perry, 2012Perry, , 2013Russell, 2011Russell, , 2014a. This sits alongside a smattering of earlier work aim was thus to use the methodological tools of rhetorical and discursive approaches to social psychology (Billig, 1996;Potter & Wetherell, 1987) to explore the nature of the experimental encounter (for fuller details of these analyses, see Gibson, 2013aGibson, , b, 2014; for a recent analysis using the related technique of conversation analysis, see Hollander, 2015).…”

Observing Obedience: How Sophisticated are Social Perceivers?

“…Although perceivers rated the obedient teacher as less moral than the disobedient teacher, it is important to note that the obedient teacher was nevertheless rated above the midpoint on the morality scale. Together, results from these studies show that people viewed the obedient teacher as caught between wanting to help the learner and wanting to placate the experimenter (Millard, ).…”