One Serious Shock Versus Gradated Series of Shocks: Does “Multiple Feet-in-the-Door” Explain Obedience in Milgram Studies?

From among the alternative interpretations of the astonishing servitude of study participants in Stanley Milgram experiments, a particularly suggestive one is Steven Gilbert’s. He asks the rhetorical question of whether one person would agree to administer a high-strength shock to another person under conditions where the demand to do so was advanced at the very beginning. This question has been the subject of two empirical studies. The results we have achieved do not, however, indicate that Gilbert’s conception is accurate in respect of situations created in experiments conducted consistently with the paradigm of studies by Milgram.