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Unplugging the Milgram Machine Volume 25 Number 5 October 2015 Contents Special Issue: Unplugging the Milgram Machine Guest edited by: Augustine Brannigan, Ian Nicholson and Frances Cherry Articles Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine 551 Augustine Brannigan, Ian Nicholson and Frances Cherry Coverage of recent criticisms of Milgram’s obedience experiments in introductory social psychology textbooks 564 Richard A. Griggs and George I. Whitehead III Milgram’s shock experiments and the Nazi perpetrators: A contrarian perspective on the role of obedience pressures during the Holocaust 581 Allan Fenigstein Designing obedience in the lab: Milgram’s shock simulator and human factors engineering 599 Maya Oppenheimer Seeing is believing: The role of the film Obedience in shaping perceptions of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiments 622 Gina Perry The normalization of torment: Producing and managing anguish in Milgram’s “Obedience” laboratory 639 Ian Nicholson Obedience in perspective: Psychology and the Holocaust 657 George R. Mastroianni Acting otherwise: Resistance, agency, and subjectivities in Milgram’s studies of obedience 670 Ethan Hoffman, N. Reed Myerberg and Jill G. Morawski Essay Review When subjects become objects: The lies behind the Milgram legend 690 Diana Baumrind Review Understanding the unthinkable 697 Augustine Brannigan, Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide Reviewed by Matthew P. Unger Visit http://tap.sagepub.com Free access to tables of contents and abstracts. Site-wide access to the full text for members of subscribing institutions. TAP0010.1177/0959354315604408Theory & PsychologyBrannigan et al. 604408research-article2015 Article Theory & Psychology 2015, Vol. 25(5) 551 –563 Introduction to the special © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: issue: Unplugging the sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0959354315604408 Milgram machine tap.sagepub.com Augustine Brannigan University of Calgary Ian Nicholson St. Thomas University Frances Cherry Carleton University Abstract The current issue of Theory & Psychology is devoted to Stanley Milgram and his contribution to the study of obedience. It presents a decidedly critical evaluation of these well-known experiments that challenges their relevance to our understanding of events such as the Holocaust. It builds on recent investigations of the Milgram archive at Yale. The discipline’s adulation of the obedience research overlooks several critical factors: the palpable trauma experienced by many participants, and the stark skepticism of the deceptive cover-story experienced by many others, Milgram’s misrepresentation of the way in which the prods were undertaken to ensure standardization, and his failure to de-brief the vast majority of participants. There is also the cherry-picking of findings. The project was whitewashed in the film, Obedience, prepared by Milgram to popularize his conclusions. The articles contributed for this issue offer a more realistic assessment of Milgram’s contribution to knowledge. Keywords experiments as theatrical devices, internal and external validity of the OTA studies, the Milgram machine, obedience and the Holocaust Corresponding author: Augustine Brannigan, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from tap.sagepub.com at UNIV CALGARY LIBRARY on December 1, 2015 552 Theory & Psychology 25(5) On August 6–8, 2013, Nestar Russell from Nipissing University and Gina Perry from the University of Melbourne convened the “Obedience to Authority Conference: Milgram’s Experiments 50 years on.” It was held at the Muskoka campus of Nipissing University to mark the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Stanley Milgram’s obedience research. Over the course of 3 days more than 30 presentations were given by over 50 speakers, and featured expert panel discussions on the ethics, science, politics, and his- tory of Milgram’s obedience to authority (OTA) research. The conference brought together an international group of attendees, most of whom were psychologists and soci- ologists by training. While there was no official proceedings of that conference, several recent retrospectives have probed the full range of celebratory to critical perspectives on Milgram and the OTA research program. These have included the American Psychologist (Burger, 2009), The Psychologist (Reicher & Haslam, 2011), “Stanley Milgram and the Ethics of Social Science Research” (Herrera, 2013), and the special issue, “Milgram at 50: Exploring the enduring relevance of psychology’s most famous studies” (Reicher, Haslam, & Miller, 2014). What distinguishes the approach taken in this particular look backwards is that it carves out a space at the critical end of the epistemological spectrum. The papers we have included in this issue argue for a narrative that runs counter to the more generally accepted celebration of Milgram’s OTA program. They invite readers to “unplug” from the usual story as told in traditional venues such as disciplinary textbooks and handbooks. In those sources, we see an uncritical celebration of Milgram’s flawed but daring brilliance, the 1963 and later publications as a crucial experiment revealing unanticipated obedience by ordinary people, behaving in ways that approximate the more extreme conditions under which Germans committed genocide in World War II. In this issue, contributors draw on a wider array of materials ranging from the Milgram papers at Yale University to more recent historical scholarship on the Holocaust. These authors bring together multiple ele- ments of the Milgram Machine in a way that creates a challenge to the standard narrative. For example, participants are heard in their own words challenging the ethics and the validity of the research. A study found in the Milgram archives, suggesting the power of “relationship” to moderate obedience, is left unpublished. The Obedience film and the shock machine both become part of a rhetorical strategy to convince readers and partici- pants alike of the “truth” of the 65%. Add to this mix the research undertaken by historians of World War II and the Holocaust, and the conclusion is that the excessively obedient are anything but banal. In textbooks, particularly in social psychology, there is rarely mention of longstanding challenges to the standard narrative; on the contrary, it continues to thrive in the context of an uncritical acceptance of the merit of high impact theatrical experi- ments and situationist explanations in advancing our scientific understanding of obedi- ence to authority. Taking the articles in this collection as a whole, it is our view that Milgram’s persuasiveness in shaping how we should understand obedience to authority has become dramatically diminished. Into the archives: Fresh perspectives on Obedience to Authority The obedience research has been contentious from the outset. While the intensity of the debate has fluctuated over the years, the terms of the discussion have been drawn almost Downloaded from tap.sagepub.com at UNIV CALGARY LIBRARY on December 1, 2015 Brannigan et al. 553 entirely from Milgram’s own published accounts—his three papers published shortly after the study’s completion (Milgram, 1963, 1964a, 1965b) and more notably his 1974 book Obedience to Authority. For many psychologists, 50 years of discussion has given these accounts a kind of “Biblical” status, as if Milgram’s publications constitute the definitive version of what “really” happened. For example, responding thoughtfully to some of the newer scholarship on the Obedience studies, Carraher (2014) encouraged readers to “carefully examine the original publications by Milgram … [because] readers have much to gain from looking very closely at what actually happened [emphasis added]” and concluded that, “it is critical that people form their own judgements after they have examined the evidence for themselves.” Although Milgram’s published accounts remain an invaluable resource to anyone interested in the Obedience studies, we now have a much wider and richer range of mate- rials to consider. The most significant new source is the Milgram Archive at Yale University. This archive contains Milgram’s unpublished papers, correspondence, tran- scripts, audio recordings, and notebooks related to the Obedience research. Beginning with Blass (2004), a number of researchers have scoured this archive and in many cases have raised new questions about the ethics, reliability, and validity of the Obedience research (Gibson, 2013; Nicholson, 2011a; Perry, 2013; Russell, 2010, 2014). Interpretations among these scholars vary, but at the most general level all agree that Milgram’s published accounts are not the definitive or final version of what transpired over the course of the Obedience studies. The published accounts represent a partial and in some cases idealized version of what transpired. Thus, if we want to get at “what actu- ally happened” in Milgram’s work we must go beyond the received narrative as estab- lished by him and consider the fascinating and often troubling inconsistencies, misrepresentations, private thoughts, and participant reactions to be found in the various archival documents. There are several key themes emerging over the past decade that are reflected in the papers in this special issue. Standardization Much of the compelling nature of Milgram’s work derives from its status as a scientific experiment. In his book Obedience to
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