Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View

The book's central claim is that ordinary people, when placed in a legitimate authority structure, will obey commands to harm an innocent person to a degree that contradicts their own moral standards. Milgram's explanation is the 'agentic state': when individuals enter a hierarchical situation, they cease to see themselves as autonomous agents acting on their own conscience and instead become instruments executing another person's wishes. In this state, responsibility is transferred upward to the authority figure, freeing the individual from guilt. Milgram argues this transformation is not a defect of character but a universal feature of social organization, and he contends it explains why roughly two-thirds of subjects continued shocking the learner to the maximum 450 volts .

In the standard baseline condition, approximately 65 percent of subjects progressed to the maximum 450-volt shock despite the learner's increasingly desperate protests . Milgram interpreted this as evidence that situational pressures overwhelm individual moral resistance when a legitimate authority is present. He emphasized that subjects were not sadists; many showed visible distress, sweating, trembling, and nervous laughter, yet continued because the experimenter asserted responsibility. Milgram argued the experiments revealed a 'capacity for man to abandon his humanity' when merging into institutional structures . He also noted that the obedience rate varied dramatically across conditions—from near-total obedience when the learner was unseen to only 10 percent when peers rebelled—demonstrating the power of immediate situational variables.

Milgram explicitly framed his experiments as empirical support for Arendt's thesis in Eichmann in Jerusalem that ordinary people can commit atrocities not from sadism but from thoughtless compliance with authority . He cited Arendt's observation that Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat doing his job, and argued his experiments demonstrated the same phenomenon in controlled conditions: average Americans could be brought to inflict serious harm simply by following instructions. This linkage gave the experiments enormous cultural resonance, fusing psychology and history into a single narrative about the roots of atrocity. However, Milgram later pulled back from the strongest version of this claim, conceding that his subjects lacked the goal of harming the victim, unlike the perpetrators of the Holocaust .

Nestar Russell's analysis of Milgram's personal archive at Yale revealed that Milgram engaged in extensive pilot testing to identify what he called 'the strongest obedience situation' . He discovered that removing all sight and sound of the learner produced virtually universal obedience, which he deemed counterproductive because it prevented his paradigm from 'scaling obedient tendencies.' He therefore settled on auditory feedback alone. Other deliberate design choices included replacing the final shock label 'LETHAL' with the ambiguous 'XXX,' removing a Nazi-sounding pledge to obey, increasing the number of shock levels to exploit foot-in-the-door compliance, and carefully selecting actors: a 'mild and submissive' man as the learner and a 'stern' and 'intellectual looking' man as the experimenter .

The agentic state theory has been widely questioned, even by scholars sympathetic to Milgram's empirical contributions. Stephen Gibson notes that many of Milgram's most enthusiastic supporters are not convinced by the theoretical explanation . S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher have developed an alternative 'engaged followership' account, arguing that participants in the experiments did not blindly follow orders but actively identified with the scientific mission and believed they were contributing to a worthy cause . On this view, people harm others not because they become passive instruments but because they come to believe what they are doing is right. This reassessment aligns with historians' revisions of the Nazi perpetrator literature, which emphasizes ideological commitment rather than mere bureaucratic compliance.

The New York Times review by Peter Singer was largely negative, describing the book as a 'woeful and lamentable performance' that reeks of moralizing despite Milgram's claim to study obedience 'with the aim of understanding rather than judging' . The reviewer criticized Milgram's characterizations of subjects as contemptuous and his theoretical language as empty reification. Milgram also faced sustained criticism from Dannie Abse, whose book The Dogs of Pavlov argued that the experiments were ethically indefensible and scientifically unnecessary . In his replies, Milgram defended the experiments by citing post-experimental questionnaires showing 84 percent of subjects were pleased to have participated, but critics noted he did not engage the fundamental ethical questions raised .