True Believers: The Incredulity Hypothesis and the Enduring Legacy of the Obedience Experiments

Numerous commentaries on the Milgram experiments entertain versions of the Incredulity Hypothesis, which maintains that Milgram’s participants did not as a rule believe they were administering actual shocks. If the Incredulity Hypothesis were generally applicable, it would appear that obedient participants typically did not believe they were doing anything wrong, with the implication that MiIgram was not able to demonstrate alarming levels of destructive obedience—as countless commentators have taken him to have done. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Incredulity Hypothesis is not generally applicable: it cannot easily explain participant behavior in the Milgram experiments and their many replications, nor does it comport well with participants’ self-reports of their experience.