A reader writes:
While Stanley Milgram may have misled us, in science, the question is whether the results can be replicated. So isn’t the real question whether Milgram’s thesis was replicated in later studies? Like this one, for instance. Or this one. Of course, there have been attempts to replicate Milgram that challenged the results, but narratives like the one posted seem to perpetuate the notion that one experiment gives us a scientific conclusion, just as the notion that finding errors in an experiment debunks the conclusion. The results come in the process of replication or failure to replicate results. The deeper flaw was that we took one experiment to be the authoritative word on a question, instead of seeing it as one piece of a puzzle.
Another reader:
I’m a social psychologist, so I have some background in the substance of Milgram studies. I’ve not read Gina Perry’s book, but I’ve heard her talk about it and I’ve been extremely unimpressed by her take on the meaning of the research. One example of a thoughtful response to Perry’s book is this review by Carol Tavris:
“Deep down, something about Milgram makes us uneasy,” Ms. Perry writes. There is indeed something that makes everyone uneasy: the evidence that situations have power over our behavior. This is a difficult message, and most Americans have trouble accepting it. “I would never have pulled those levers!” we cry. “I would have told that experimenter where to go!” Ms. Perry insists that people’s personalities and histories influence their actions. But Milgram never disputed that fact; his own research found that many participants resisted. “There is a tendency to think that everything a person does is due to the feelings or ideas within the person,” Milgram wrote. “However, scientists know that actions depend equally on the situation in which a man finds himself.” Notice the “equally” in that sentence; Ms. Perry doesn’t.
“Milgram’s definition of obedience,” she writes, “despite his arguments about the power of the situation, seemed like a life sentence, as if people were frozen forever that way—fixed, stuck, like butterflies on a pin.” By the end of her investigation, she is transformed: “I had traded my admiration of Milgram for a better view of people.” These remarks would be naive coming from a nonprofessional; from a psychologist, they are perplexing. Milgram’s message, which has stood the test of time and replications, is precisely that people aren’t fixed and stuck like butterflies on a pin. People aren’t cruel by nature. To accept the findings of the experiments doesn’t require us to abandon a “better view of people”—it requires us to understand that ordinary people are capable of both obedience and rebellion, conformity and heroism. Forget Nazis; think of workers who bend to the will of employers when told to ignore evidence that their product is unsafe.
Update from a reader:
Radiolab did a really great episode (at around 9 minutes) on an alternative interpretation of Milgrim’s experiments. They consider some of the discarded evidence and actually have a somewhat different explanation: that although the subjects were administering deadly shocks, they weren’t motivated by obedience per se, but hoped their participation furthered science. I thought this was a rather compelling interpretation, because it addresses why anyone would trust the authority of someone in a lab coat in the first place. In other words, that it wasn’t blind obedience.
The Dish 