Power From the Ground Up: Respecifying Performative Power as First Overt Resistance in Milgram’s Lab

Abstract

The interdisciplinary Stanley Milgram renaissance of the past two decades has fundamentally shifted debate about the most controversial social psychological experiments of the 20th century. A new angle, with implications for the philosophy of social psychology, is widespread interest in the conditions of possibility of his work. Social ontology (or historical ontology), of various styles, can bring into focus contingent features of “obedience to authority” and other classic experiments in North American social psychology. In this Milgram issue of Philosophia Scientiæ, my contribution is to show how an empirical focus on social interaction (EMCA: ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) can help illuminate—“from the ground up”—power in Milgram’s lab and resistance to continuing the experiment. First, I present power as a multidimensional feature of human sociality, highlighting its performative aspect. Milgram’s lab setting forced and constrained Teachers to exercise agency in starkly contrasting ways, either as exercising power over the Learner (complying with the Experimenter) or against the Experimenter (resisting him). Second, I propose that, like morality, performative power may be understood in terms of foreground and background (Gestalt figure and ground), with both sides of the phenomenon being empirically grounded and demonstrably oriented to in interactants’ concrete practices. Third, I respecify performative power as the detailed practice of Teachers resisting continuation of the experiment. Using a large collection of transcripts of Milgram’s archived audio-recordings, I analyze instances of Teachers’ first (earliest, lowest shock level) overt resistance, an aspect of Teacher resistance hitherto unstudied systematically. This section shows precisely how the resistance of both Disobedient- and Obedient-outcome Teachers first appeared: as a phenomenon of talk-in-interaction displaying sequential organization and various recurrent forms. Studying both outcome groups (rather than just one) demonstrates that resistance was common not only among Disobedient but also Obedient Teachers. Overall, the article shows the value of EMCA as a style of social ontology well suited to investigating power’s relationship to social psychological knowledge claims, and to reconstructing the presuppositions of classic North American social psychology.