Works
- Behavioral Study of Obedience, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963
- Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, 1974
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Obedience to authority. Instructed by an experimenter to give what they believed were increasingly painful shocks to another person, 26 of 40 subjects in the first study continued to the maximum of 450 volts. In the 1974 book, Milgram reported many variations and argued that people acting under a legitimate authority come to see themselves as carrying out its wishes and no longer as responsible for their own acts. Caveat: Gina Perry's archival study, Behind the Shock Machine (2012), reports that experimenters departed from the script, that many subjects doubted the setup, and that obedience varied widely across the variations, with most subjects disobeying in many of them. The 65 percent figure comes from one condition.
What it explains
Milgram explains why people inside a hierarchy will carry out actions they would not choose, when the instruction comes from someone they accept as legitimate and responsibility seems to rest with that person. The variations show that obedience falls when authority is divided or its legitimacy questioned.