Observing Obedience: How Sophisticated are Social Perceivers?

Abstract

How does the general public understand the behavior of Milgram's teachers—those participants who ostensibly tortured an innocent stranger? In our social perception analysis, we contrast two research traditions that attempt to answer this question. On one hand, lay dispositionism argues that people make harsh, person‐focused judgments of Milgram's teachers. On the other hand, a mental state account suggests that perceivers integrate information about social situations and agents’ behavior to infer the mental states of others. Mental state inferences then, in turn, drive social judgments of others. We review the theory of lay dispositionism, its application to the Milgram experiments, and several limitations of the theory. We then offer an alternative mental state account and support this view with recent studies on the Milgram experiments, and extensions to everyday behavior explanation. A final section considers the research and policy implications of our analysis.

50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram's Obedience Experiments

“…Significant progress has been made however. As the contributions to this issue demonstrate, we now better understand what it must have been like for participants to take part in Milgram's studies (Millard, 2014), the factors that contributed to their obedience (Burger, 2014;Russell, 2014) or disobedience (Gibson, 2014;Haslam et al, 2014), the way we need to understand participants' obedience (Ent & Baumeister, 2014;Miller, 2014) and how it is understood by observers (Monroe & Reeder, 2014). There is also a growing body of work providing a much needed theoretical account of Milgram's findings (see Reicher et al, 2014; see also Reicher et al, 2012), and a clearer articulation of how Milgram's findings can (and cannot) provide explanations for the Holocaust (Einwohner, 2014;Overy, 2014;Rochat & Blass, 2014;Staub, 2014).…”