Copy the page URI to the clipboard
Kaposi, David
(2020).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12369
Abstract
This paper contests what has remained a core assumption in social psychological and general understandings of the Milgram experiments. Analysing the learner/victim’s rhetoric in experimental sessions across five conditions (N= 170), it demonstrates that what participants were exposed to was not the black-and-white scenario of being pushed towards continuation by the experimental authority and pulled towards discontinuation by the learner/victim. Instead, the traditionally posited explicit collision of “forces” or “identities” was at all points of the experiments undermined by an implicit collusion between them: rendering the learner/victim a divided and contradictory subject, and the experimental process a constantly shifting and paradoxical experiential-moral field. As a result, the paper concludes that evaluating the participants’ conduct requires an understanding of the experiments where morality and non-destructive agency were not simple givens to be applied to a transparent case, but had to be re-created anew – in the face not just of their explicit denial by the experimenter but also of their implicit denial by the victim.
Viewing alternatives
Download history
Metrics
Public Attention
Altmetrics from AltmetricNumber of Citations
Citations from DimensionsItem Actions
Export
About
- Item ORO ID
- 69228
- Item Type
- Journal Item
- ISSN
- 0144-6665
- Keywords
- Milgram experiments; rhetoric; social identity; experience; morality; agency
- Academic Unit or School
-
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) > Psychology and Counselling > Psychology
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) > Psychology and Counselling
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) - Copyright Holders
- © 2020 The British Psychological Society
- Depositing User
- David Kaposi