From legitimate to illegitimate violence : Violations of the experimenter's instructions in Stanley Milgram's “obedience to authority” studies

Abstract Stanley Milgram's Obedience to authority experiments are widely known to have demonstrated the human proclivity to follow violent orders coming from a legitimate authority. The present paper examines the extent to which Milgram's participants, during the obedient phase of their sessions, did in fact follow the full set of instructions that was given by the experimenter: a recursive sequence of procedures in a fake laboratory experiment on “Memory and learning.” Results show that while participants did not fail to administer electric shocks, (1) no entirely “fully obedient” participant fully obeyed the procedures Milgram's experimenter instructed them to do; (2) violations of the procedures occurred on average 48.4% of the time in “fully obedient” sessions; and (3) violations occurred significantly more frequently in “fully obedient” than in the obedient phase of “disobedient” sessions. In sum, in sessions traditionally regarded as fully obedient legitimate violence got to a substantial extent transformed into illegitimate violence. The paper concludes with the possibility that, the context of illegitimate violence that has been constructed implicitly by the experimenter constituted a coercive environment and thus made a causal contribution to obedient participants' inability to resist the experimenter to the point of disobedience.