In Their Own Words: Explaining Obedience to Authority Through an Examination of Participants' Comments

Abstract

The authors examined data generated during a replication of Milgram’s obedience studies to address some lingering questions about those studies. In Study 1, judges coded comments participants made during experimental and debriefing sessions. Participants who refused to follow the experimenter’s instructions were significantly more likely to express a sense of personal responsibility than those who followed the instructions. Participants who expressed concern for the well-being of the learner exhibited a greater reluctance to continue the procedure than did those not expressing this concern. However, whether participants expressed concern for the learner was not related to whether they ultimately continued the procedure. Study 2 looked at participants' reactions to each of the experimenter’s four prods. The further along the prod sequence the experimenter went, the less likely participants were to continue the procedure. This pattern challenges interpretations of the obedience studies based on the notion that participants were following orders.