Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Studies: A Critical Review of the Most Influential Explanatory Accounts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1960 Stanley Milgram wondered if ordinary people would, as many Germans did during the Holocaust, obey higher orders to harm innocent people. Soon after, he ran the New Baseline experiment: at the behest of a scientific authority, 65 percent of subjects inflicted what appeared to be potentially lethal shocks on another person with a mild heart condition. Although, to date, there is no widely accepted explanation that can account for this finding, three theories continue to attract a disproportionate amount of attention: the Incredulity Hypothesis, Agentic State, and Engaged Followership. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of how Milgram invented his basic procedure and then use the insights gained from his journey of discovery as a foundation from which to critically review these three explanatory accounts. Succeeding this critical review, a lesser well-known theory will be presented; one that is supported by Milgram’s original results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".