From New Haven to Santa Clara: A historical perspective on the Milgram obedience experiments.

Abstract

This article traces the history of obedience experiments that have used the Milgram paradigm. It begins with Stanley Milgram's graduate education, showing how some aspects of that experience laid the groundwork for the obedience experiments. It then identifies three factors that led Milgram to study obedience. The underlying principles or messages that Milgram thought could be extracted from his experiments are then presented, and the evidence in support of them is assessed. Jerry M. Burger'srecent replication of Milgram's work--its place in the history of obedience research and its contribution to furthering the understanding of destructive obedience--is then examined.

The use of virtual reality in the study of people’s responses to violent incidents

“…Milgram's series of experiments carried out mainly in the 1960s – the whole collection is described in depth in Milgram (1974) – examined the conditions under which an authority figure might persuade ordinary members of the public to carry out actions that would harm a stranger. The scenario is very well-known, and nearly 50 years after the original experiments, there is still substantial reference to the original work which in spite of being highly controversial, has had a major impact on social psychology – for example (Benjamin and Simpson, 2009; Blass, 2009) two of the six papers in the January 2009 issue of the American Psychologist journal devoted to Milgram's experiments. The basic paradigm was a supposed word-pair learning experiment, where the learner was given an electric shock of increasing voltage each time he chose the wrong word as being paired with a cue word.…”

Meta-Milgram: An Empirical Synthesis of the Obedience Experiments

“…Scholars continue to discuss whether Milgram demonstrated the capacity for evil in everyday people, the roots of the Holocaust, or the ethical limitations of psychological research. Arguments continue on the nature of authority and the meaning of obedience within Milgram's paradigm [1] and how the study's findings should be theorized [2]. Attempts have been made to replicate it with mixed results [3], [4] and the original data have been re-examined [5].…”

The relationship between the Personal Ethical Threshold and workplace spirituality

“…Card 2005;Moberg 2006;Wines 2007;Zimbardo 2007;Pinto et al 2008;Blass 2009). As Milgram (1974) concluded, when "they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority" (p. 6).…”