Obedience and Responsibility

Milgram's theory of obedience was tested with 93 subjects in three variations of the ‘obedience’ paradigm. The amounts of compliance in shocking a victim were higher in a baseline condition than in Milgram's experiments and, as expected, lower in a self-decision and in a modelling de-legitimization condition. However, compliant subjects did not consistently disown responsibility for their behaviour in shocking a victim. The data of these experiments did not support Milgram's theory that obedience is an agentic state in which a person no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument of an authority figure. Objections are raised regarding Milgram's interpretation of the subjects' behaviour in the shock experiments and the relevance of these experiments to wartime atrocities.