The price of obedience and the price of knowledge.

Normalizing trust: Participants’ immediately post‐hoc explanations of behaviour in Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments

“…Although many considered assessments of the ethics of Stanley Milgram's classic and controversial research on ‘obedience to authority’ have been offered (Baumrind, ; Kaufmann, ; Nicholson, ), little is currently known about how the hundreds of research participants themselves oriented to the moral significance of their actions. With the ongoing resurgence of interest among social psychologists in interpreting and explaining social behaviour in Milgram's experiments (Burger, , ; Haslam, Reicher, Millard, & McDonald, ; Haslam, Loughnan, & Perry, ; Haslam, Reicher, & Birney, ; Hollander, ; Perry, ; Rochat & Blass, ; Russell, , ), it is striking that so little is currently known about how participants justified their actions.…”

Conformity, Obedience, Disobedience: The Power of the Situation

“…Without it, Baumrind expected a sensitive individual to remain hurt and anxious for some time, and a cynical subject to become even more alienated and distrustful. Similar critics and concerns for the welfare of subjects who served in the Milgram's experiment were expressed in the following years by several other scholars (Kaufmann, 1967;Mixon, 1972).…”

Generalized Agency Problems

“…Most recently, Burger (2009) reproduces Milgram's finding stopping at 150V (see Packer, 2008) and excluding anxious subjects -with both alterations designed to avoid causing subjects lasting psychological harm -a major criticism of Milgram's initial experiments (Baumrind, 1964;Fischer, 1968;Kaufmann, 1967;Mixon, 1972). Milgram's follow-up interviews suggest this discomfort afflicted his peers more than his subjects, for "the vast majority of participants not only were glad they had participated in the study but said they had learned something important from their participation and believed that psychologists should conduct more studies of this type in the future" (Burger, 2009, p. 2).…”