Gina Perry (author of Behind The Shock Machine) has said the experiment was more akin to an investigation of “bullying and coercion” than obedience. In fact, he frequently improvised, inventing his own terms and means of persuasion. When a participant hesitated in applying electric shocks, the actor playing the role of experimenter was meant to stick to a script of four escalating verbal “prods”.In a new analysis to be published in Theory and Psychology, Richard Griggs and George Whitehead summarised recent criticisms of the obedience studies and then they turned to the 10 leading and most recently updated social psychology textbooks (in the US, with publication dates from 2012 to 2015) to see which, if any, of the criticisms are featured. However, this is not the picture that any psychology student will discover if they turn to their social psychology textbook, at least not if it’s an American text. That Milgram’s studies had a mighty cultural and scholarly impact is not in dispute the meaning of what he found most certainly is. These contemporary criticisms add to past critiques, profoundly undermining the credibility of the original research and the way it is usually interpreted. Importantly, part of the reason for this is that several scholars raised new criticisms of the research based on their analysis of the transcripts and audio from the original experiments, or on new simulations or partial replications of the experiments.
Indeed, though Milgram’s obedience studies were published decades ago, the rate at which they are cited actually increased between 20. Understandably, this has led to a continued fascination with the research, reflected both in popular culture – just this month a new film, The Experimenter, about Stanley Milgram, was aired at the New York Film Festival – and in the academic literature. The usual, disturbing interpretation is that Milgram showed how readily most people will harm others if they are told to do so by authority. A perfect example: Stanley Milgram’s so-called “obedience experiments”, conducted in the 1960s, in which the majority of participants, acting as a “teacher” in a learning task, followed experimenter instructions and gave what they thought was a fatal electric shock to another participant, the “learner”, as a punishment for wrong answers. Accounts of what happened are frequently simplified and distorted to better convey a powerful revelation about human nature. Some classic psychology experiments, known and discussed far beyond the discipline, have become modern-day myths.
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