In 1963 Stanley Milgram’s ‘Behavioural study of obedience’ showed that from a sample of 40 American men aged between 20 and 50 years, 65 per cent of participants were willing to inflict potentially life threatening shocks to another innocent person (Dixon, 2012). Milgram’s interest in obedience was influenced by World War two war crimes such as the holocaust and sought to identify how ordinary people could commit atrocities. Milgram’s experimental approach within a cognitive social psychological perspective produced quantitative data using two forms of dependent measure to identify subjects as either defiant or obedient when in the presence of an authority figure. Stephen Gibson, through his 2011 rhetorical analysis of Milgram’s research sought to shift the focus from why people within the Milgram experiment obeyed to instead explore how a substantial minority disobeyed. This essay, along with Stephen Gibson’s rhetorical analysis of Milgram’s obedience experiment will seek to highlight how rhetorical analysis challenges the validity of experimental research on obedience.
Gibson’s 2011 rhetorical analysis provides a very different perspective on obedience and was developed looking at how people within Milgram’s experiment were disobedient, the defiant other 35 per cent of the sample, compared to Milgram who sought to identify why people obey (Dixon, 2012). Gibson adopted a discursive perspective to analyse the transcripts of the interactional exchanges between Milgram’s authority figure and participants in his experiment. The ontology of cognitive social and discursive psychological perspectives differ greatly as cognitive social seeks general laws about the individual with measurable cause-effect relationships whilst discursive assumes that the individual and the social world are founded through discourse and social practices. Through the discursive perspective Gibson is able to reflect on the discourse and language that takes place intersubjectively between the experimenter and participant to identify the role of the experimenter within the experiment and unlike Milgram, acknowledges social influence. Gibson’s production of qualitative research on social influences cannot be garnered from the cognitive quantitative perspective challenging how the statistical result of 65 per cent obedient was achieved.
A key point within Gibson’s analysis is the significant role of the experimenter as being of far greater importance than Milgram acknowledges within the results and discussion. Milgram’s research focus was on destructive obedience and the experiment designed to illicit behaviour from participants that contravenes their normal behaviour and conscience and to relinquish agency to a perceived authority (Dixon, 2012). Milgram noted the requirement for methodologically controlled prods to be incorporated within the experiment as standardized responses to be given in sequence by the experimenter to inquiries or acts of defiance from the participant; however as noted by Gibson the authority figure often deviates from the set of prods and participates in more flexible discourse with the participant. Analysis of the rhetoric between experimenter and participant shows that their interaction involved negotiation and variation out with Milgram’s control as the participant sought to extricate themselves from the experiment. This challenges the validity of Milgram’s experiment of obedience due to the inconsistencies that can arise out with the experimental methods of variables and deviations and the uncontrolled for implications of physical and verbal interactions. Gibson identified the experiment as being more complicated than Milgram’s research report suggests and as such questions the established view that the experimental procedures were standardized (Gibson, 2011).
Gibson, in his reinterpretation of Milgram’s experimental trials, highlighted that social influence was achieved in and through language and demonstrating via discursive analysis that it was not only what was said but how (Dixon, 2012). The prods used by the experimenter were designed by Milgram as orders in an attempt to elicit obedience, however through rhetorical analysis Gibson concludes that the prods instead take on the form of an argument designed to convince and persuade (Gibson, 2011) Participants used the prods as an opportunity for negotiation and discourse with the experimenter. The example of prod 4 ‘You have no other choice you must go on’ (Milgram, 1963) is representative of an ineffective order-like prompt as many participants were able to negate the statement as being only an opinion and not a fact therefore participants were able to demonstrate that they did have choice and employed agency as a way out of the experiment. Gibson’s reinterpretation is in contrast to Milgram’s portrayal of individuals entering an angentic state within a power related agency-structure dualism; that is individuals who are in the presence of strong situational pressures enter a psychological state and become passive and helpless and give over personal control to an authority figure (Milgram, 1963). Gibson places emphasis on the agency side of agency-structure dualism and demonstrates how participants make active use of rhetorical strategies to resist authority. This challenges the validity of the experiment as the rhetorical element of the negotiations was fundamental to dis/obedience.
The absence of experimental standardization does not detract from the significance of Milgram’s obedience experiments. The knowledge produced by Milgram in 1960’s America is situated within a time, place and culture context different to the current times. Milgram’s historical findings cannot be extrapolated across time however the concept of obedience to authority and the ability for people to submit against their normal behaviour has become part of mainstream psychology. The cognitive social approach by Milgram was embedded and situated within the psychological perspectives of the time prior to the discursive perspective favoured by Gibson. As such, the knowledge produced by Milgram is a quantitative reflection of the geographical, temporal and contextual influences and are situationally specific.
Milgram carried out 18 further studies varying the independent variable and was able to identify situational factors which promoted higher levels of obedient behaviour. Despite Milgram’s study being situated in the 1960’s the experiment has been replicated many times and continues to produce the same basic pattern of results as shown in the paper The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know About Obedience to Authority' by Thomas Blass (Blass 1999). This demonstrates that although criticised for the potentially unethical treatment of participants and the non-natural environment of a laboratory, Milgram’s work was not just relevant historically situated in post-war America but has real world applications in seeking to identify why people continue participate in destructive obedience (Dixon, 2012).
**meaning of obedience
In conclusion, although the majority of participants within Milgram’s experiment were obedient, it is the high number of Milgram’s participants who managed to extricate themselves from the experimental situation that provide the avenue to a very interesting reinterpretation of the 1963 experiments. The strengths within the discursive perspective allow for exploration of the fundamental role of language and meaning with emphasis on the individuals own approach. Rhetorical analysis provides another layer of analysis that was not accessible to Milgram of the time to explore how participants displayed the capacity and inclination to tentatively start arguing with the experimenter (Gibson, 2011). Gibson’s focus on the procedural aspects of the experiment and the interaction between the experimenter, participant and learner, brings to the fore that the mainstream view of the experimental procedure as being highly standardized needs to be revised. By highlighting the limitations of the cognitive approach within the Milgram experiment it provides further scope for the discursive perspective and rhetorical analysis to be applied to other finding of cognitive laboratory experiments for reinterpretation. Furthermore, existing analyses of the dynamics of obedience in Milgram’s (1974) experiments tend to be concerned with the occurrence (or lack of occurrence) of a psychological shift as a precursor to disobedience (Gibson, 2012). Tellingly, the present analysis points to the importance of rhetorical processes in both sustaining and challenging authority (Gibson, 2012