The repertoire of resistance: Non‐compliance with directives in Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments

Abstract

This paper is the first extensive conversation-analytic study of resistance to directives in one of the most controversial series of experiments in social psychology, Stanley Milgram's 1961-1962 study of 'obedience to authority'. As such, it builds bridges between interactionist and experimental areas of social psychology that do not often communicate with one another. Using as data detailed transcripts of 117 of the original sessions representing five experimental conditions, I show how research participants' resistance to experimental progressivity takes shape against a background of directive/response and complaint/remedy conversational sequences--sequence types that project opposing and competing courses of action. In local contexts of competing sequential relevancies, participants mobilize six forms of resistance to the confederate experimenter's directives to continue. These range along a continuum of explicitness, from relatively subtle resistance that momentarily postpones continuation to techniques for explicitly trying to stop the experiment. Although both 'obedient'- and 'defiant'-outcome participants use all six of the forms, evidence is provided suggesting precisely how members of the two groups differ in manner and frequency of resistance.

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.…”

“…The analysis outlined in the present paper can be seen as just such an exercise, and while readers will be the judge of the utility or otherwise of the exercise, there is a wider issue here of treating archives as simply showing in an unmediated way that which was previously obscured. It is precisely this tendency which Byford and Tileagă (2014) criticise in their discussion of interdisciplinary 'borrowing' when they highlight the way in which Neitzel and Welzer (cited in Byford & Tileagă, 2014) produce transcripts which more closely abide by such conventions in order to offer novel insights on the nature of the experiments at an even finer-grained level of detail (Hollander, 2015). Transcribing at this level of detail would be well-suited to conversation analytic purposes, and might appear to be a 'better' or more 'real' representation of what went on, but it wouldn't be long before arguments were advanced that in transcribing to this level of detail, we focus our analytic attention at the wrong level: the detail of interaction rather than the purposes?…”

“…My RE-VISITING MILGRAM 5 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). In the present paper, I will outline an illustrative case analysis which highlights two of the key findings of my analyses: (1) The rhetorical nature of the experimental encounters, and (2) the extent to which the experimenter in Milgram's studies had to depart from the standardized procedure in his attempt to elicit 'obedience'.…”

“…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).…”

Ethnomethodology and Social Phenomenology

“…Recently, Hollander ( 2015 ) has addressed such questions from the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, respecifying "obedience to authority" in terms of directive-response conversational sequences. Whereas most literature on Milgram has focused on obedience, Hollander highlights the role resistance to continuation played in the experiments.…”