“We must continue.” The strange appearance of “we” instead of “you” in the prods of the Milgram experiment

Abstract

But I have always told you," said my grandmother, "that he had plenty of taste." "You would, of course," retorted my great-aunt, "say anything just to seem different from us." For, knowing that my grandmother never agreed with her, and not being quite confident that it was her own opinion which the rest of us invariably endorsed, she wished to extort from us a wholesale condemnation of my grandmother's views, against which she hoped to force us into solidarity with her own.

Examining the role of Donald Trump and his supporters in the 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol: A dual-agency model of identity leadership and engaged followership

“…In both these paradigms, the experimenters had to do a considerable amount of work both to build a sense of shared social identity with participants and to make the goals of the research appear virtuous and noble so that participants would identify with them. In Milgram's case this work centered on the effort he put into building rapport with participants and ensuring that the experimental set-up (and, in particular, the shock machine) looked appropriately scientific (Laurens & Ballot, 2021;Russell, 2011), and into devising an experimental cover story that stressed the role the studies would play in advancing scientific understanding of the learning process (Gibson, 2013;Russell, 2014). Similarly, Zimbardo's experimenters recognized that guards needed a reason to be cruel to prisoners.…”