Stanley Milgram's Destructive Obedience

Milgram (1963) claimed that destructive obedience is not a consequence of moral weakness or an evil character; rather it is a response to a particular set of situational factors. Evaluate this statement.

In order to evaluate this statement it is important to first understand what Milgram meant. This essay will first consider what is meant by destructive obedience and briefly look at Milgram’s work. It will then look at what is inferred by situational factors, focusing on conformity, socialisation, obedience to authority and group dynamics and what Milgram termed the agentic state. The essay will consider the work of Asch and Zimbardo to cross reference and build on Milgram’s work. In conclusion it will evaluate the statement and why Milgram’s
His work was inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann; a Nazi official charged with planning and instigating Hitler’s Final Solution. Milgram’s research aimed to answer why a person may act in this way, whether it was inherent evil or if it was simply obedience to authority. His work investigated under what circumstances ordinary people would act on instructions which would potentially harm others (Hogg and Vaughan 2010). In this situation destructive obedience can be seen as the instance when the outcome of obedience has the potential to harm others.

Milgram’s experiment created a test situation whereby a person would act as a teacher and question a pupil on word association, for every wrong answer given the teacher would administer a level of electric shock. The level of shock was clearly labelled as such and increased for each wrong answer given:
This is developed further by Hogg and Vaughan (2010) who describe people as simply doing their job. This is a rather simplistic view of obedience, considering the levels of analysis; as it does not take into account situational factors other than a person’s role, thus making it an intra-individual analysis (Hunter, 2013). In order to evaluate Milgram’s (1974) statement on the causes of destructive obedience one must take into account situational factors such as culture, identity, and history to reach a more in-depth level of analysis. Milgram (1974) said that the reasons why people obey or indeed disobey are complex, which is why he conducted his experiment (Milgram 1974). His research has been replicated and re-analysed over the years by others; in different countries and using different sample groups (Hogg and Vaughan, 2010). Most have drawn similar conclusions that people will obey authority even when it may be destructive to others, but the extent to which a person will obey depends on the given situation (Hogg and Vaughan, 2010). Reicher and Haslam (2011) found when re-analysing Milgram’s original experiment that participants did argue and disobeyed, which indicates that Milgram’s statement that