Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment

TANLEY MILGRAM, in a series of experiments in the early sixties, has sharply focused the experimental method in psychology on a question of considerable significance:' Why do men obey authority? In a series of experiments involving hundreds of subjects, he found a disturbing number of people willing to administer what they thought were very painful shocks to an innocent victim strapped in an electric chair. Milgram reasoned, and with some force, that if an experimental scientist, with no coercive threat lurking, could achieve this degree of compliance, just imagine the degree of control it implied in the hands of the state. The Nazi experience seemed now both more understandable and more disturbing. Milgram's studies of obedience have drawn considerable discussion which has tended to focus either on the ethics of the experiment (deception; nervous strain to the participants), or has attempted to offer an alternate account to Milgram's concerning why people complied with the experimenter's orders.12 In this article we will continue, in part, the latter discussion, but shift it to a more deliberate analysis of the theoretical concepts he employs. The language of authority, obedience, legitimacy, and responsibility are central to any assessment of his work. We contend that a clarification of these concepts is crucial to an understanding of the findings.