The Obedience Experiments Milgram conducted his obedience experiments from 1961-1962 at Yale University, and published his first academic paper reporting his findings in 1963. The reaction was almost instantaneous, with Baumrind's (1964) critique and Milgram's (1964b) response setting the tone for decades of debate and research. As Kaposi (2017) has suggested, the reaction to the obedience experiments can be loosely divided into two 'waves'. A first wave of reaction involved important ethical, methodological and conceptual debates, and can (again, loosely) be said to have lasted until the 1980s. Subsequently, there was something of a hiatus, with a relative paucity of workespecially empirical workin the 1990s. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, there was a reawakening of interest in the experiments, stimulated in part by the increasing availability of material from the experiments in Milgram's archive. In Chapters 1 and 2 I will provide an overview of this work. In Chapter 2 I will focus on the 'new wave' of critique, commentary and analysis. First however, the present chapter will review the initial wave of post-Milgram scholarship, as well as providing a summary of Milgram's experiments themselves.In reviewing Milgram's experiments and the first wave of extensions, replications and critiques, the aim is not to be comprehensive but rather to survey the main themes and arguments that are apparent in this rich literature. Arthur G. Miller (1986) provided the definitive account of the first 20 or so years of scholarship provoked by Milgram's studies in his comprehensive and scholarly book, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. Miller, of course, has his own position on the experiments, and it would not be unfair to describe him as essentiallythough not uncriticallyof the view that Milgram's studies were, and remain, valuable and important contributions to psychology and the wider social sciences (for a restatement and updating of his position, see Miller, 2016). Regardless, however, of one's own take on the obedience experiments, Miller's (1986) book remains a valuable resource.
