Reexamining the Milgram Paradigm: Agentic Shift, Gender, and Obedience to Authority

This paper derives from the classic Milgram Experiments and analyzes the correlation between gender and rates of obedience in relation to the agentic state. Milgrams results suggest that people tend to obey an authority even though the orders they receive are not ethical because they have entered agentic states, in which they do not feel responsible for their actions. Replications and alterations have been made to the original study over the decades, but few of them included gender as a variable and provided reliable data on gender difference. This 2*2 experiment is based on the design of Milgram, Srivastava and Raj, and aims to study the difference in obedience rates in female subjects in the presence of male or female experimenters and confederates. The predicted result of the study will indicate that female subjects are most likely to obey a male experimenter in the contexts of a female confederate. The author will also discuss the alternative results due to limitations in the experiment design and date collecting process.