The resistance experiments: Morality, authority and obedience in Stanley Milgram's account

Abstract

The paper seeks to re-conceptualize Stanley Milgram's (in) famous experiments on willing obedience by drawing solely on Milgram's own contemporary account. It identifies a substantial incongruence between the findings Milgram presented (i.e., his description of the experiments) and the meaning he imputed to them (i.e., his interpretation of the experiments). It argues that instead of operationalizing the concepts he claimed to operationalize -legitimate authority, embodied morality and willing obedience -, Milgram's description suggests that the operative forces in the experiments were an illegitimate authority and acts which in effect collude with that authority. As a result, the paper concludes that what the experimental findings represented was not so much obedience out of choice, but out of coercion. Thus, the paper seeks to redirect the conceptual-moral focus of the findings from the participants who "shockingly" obeyed to those who managed to resist the coercive force of the total experimental situation.

Walking the Plank: An Experimental Paradigm to Investigate Safety Voice

“…Safety voice appears conceptually related to obedience to authority and the bystander effect, and the experimental paradigm may be used to investigate conceptual and operational overlap. Milgram's behavioural study of obedience (Milgram, 1963) has been reconceptualised as operationalising an act of defiance (Miller et al, 1995) or resistance (Kaposi, 2017) that closely resembles safety voice (i.e., people repeatedly speak up to resist a harmful order from an authority figure), and resistance may represent a special type of safety voice. Similarly, research on bystander interventions of people in need of assistance (Darley and Latane, 1968; Fischer et al, 2011; Bennett et al, 2014) operationalised harm-prevention behaviours and these have included non-verbal (e.g., walking to another room to intervene in sexual harrasment; P. Fischer et al, 2006) and verbal actions (van den Bos et al, 2009).…”

“…To study similar phenomena in other fields, experimenters have designed standardised situations for eliciting participant behaviour: for example bystander interventions (for a meta-analysis see: P. Fischer et al, 2011) or defiance/resistance to authority (Milgram, 1963; Miller et al, 1995; Kaposi, 2017). Within the field of voice more generally, experiments have been used to investigate employee voice for volunteering non-safety related information (Morrison et al, 2015).…”

Saving a victim from himself: The rhetoric of the learner’s presence and absence in the Milgram experiments

“…Indeed, genuinely transformative frameworks have been emerging as contemporary experiential, discursiverhetorical, and social identity frameworks are changing the ways we look at the experiments and human beings' capacity to commit evil. As such, it is now accepted that they constitute a true 'second wave' of critical engagements (Gibson, 2019a;Haslam & Reicher, 2017;Kaposi, 2017).…”

“…Recent work coming from the discursive-rhetorical perspective is a case in point. Citing Kaposi (2017), Stephen Gibson notes that the learner's position in the room next door and his consequent unavailability for interaction deeply complicates his very role (Gibson, 2019a, pp. 127, 147).…”

Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test

“…The archives have allowed a growing number of scholars to scrutinize unpublished material and recordings related to the obedience experiments. Scholarly examination of the material has prompted revelations about the extent and nature of debriefing (Nicholson 2011), unstandardized experimental protocols (Gibson 2013a; Russell 2011), unreported data and misrepresentation of results (Modigliani, 1995; Perry 2013b), and incongruities in Milgram’s conceptual accounts of the research (Kaposi 2017).…”