Abstract

Almost universally, analysts interpret Milgram’s data as demonstrating that social forces are responsible for the high level of obedience. This paper attempts to show that this conclusion is wrong. By utilizing the natural break in Milgram’s experiments which occurs just beyond the learner’s first demand to be released, I argue that his paradigm conflates two very different and incompatible situations. I divide them into what I call the persuasion phase and the after-capitulation phase. I argue that while social forces can legitimately be said to direct obedience in the first phase, it is primarily the coercive influence of threat that controls obedience in the second. This threat is the ever-increasing responsibility and blame for the cumulative torture of an innocent co-participant that the subjects would have to assume up to the level of their disobedience. If they quit after already inflicting considerable pain, they demonstrate that they had the power to disobey all along. They are then trapped into obeying to the end if they are to deflect blame to the authority and persuade themselves that they are not responsible, since they were following orders and had little control over the process. Recognizing the dual nature of Milgram’s experiments allows one to draw different conclusions from his data and to see their ethical and social implications in an entirely new light.