Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments

Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority are amongst the most influential and controversial research programs in the social sciences. For more than five decades, they have typically been held to show that people will cause pain and suffering to an innocent victim simply to follow orders from an authority figure. However, in the last decade or so a fundamental re-evaluation of Milgram’s studies has been underway. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the obedience experiments and some key aspects of the initial reaction to them, before going on to draw out some of the major themes in this more recent work. Specifically, I suggest that, in addition to renewed questions about theory, method, and ethics in Milgram’s work, it is now clear that participants did not follow orders in the experiments and that the significant number of people who nevertheless continued to inflict what they believed to be painful punishments did so without having to receive orders. This raises questions about the very definition of obedience typically used in psychological studies of perpetrator behavior.