Description
Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority are amongst the most influential and controversial studies in the history of psychology. Purporting to show how easily people can be led into immoral acts simply by virtue of following the orders of an authority figure, the studies – conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s – required participants to administer what they believed to be potentially dangerous electric shocks to someone who they thought was another participant. The experiments have prompted numerous debates on theoretical, methodological, moral and ethical grounds that reaches far beyond psychology to take in disciplines ranging from philosophy to management studies, history to criminology. Their impact has also reached beyond academia, with a cultural resonance reflected in multiple references in popular music, film and television. Yet our received view of the studies, and their implications, has undergone a radical shift in the last 15 years or so as a result of engagement with the wealth of materials from the studies available in Milgram’s archive. Drawing in particular on audio recordings of the experimental sessions, this talk will complicate the idea that participants in Milgram’s lab were following orders in any meaningful sense, as well as showing how the procedure adopted by Milgram and his colleagues required a great deal more flexibility than was previously appreciated. These observations are discussed in terms of their impact on conceptual understandings of obedience, as well as their wider implications for how we think about the practice of experimental psychology.| Period | 29 Jan 2026 |
|---|---|
| Held at | University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom |