Milgram’s Shock experiment is a fallacy

When is social science going to bury a fallacious darling instead of keeping it artificially alive? Perhaps after reading this.

Way back in 1961, Milgram devised an experiment to test how far people would obey an authority figure to administer increasing electrical shocks to an innocent learner for making mistakes. Right up to the point where these shocks were deemed to be lethal. The disquieting outcome of the original study was that a shocking 65% of the participants went all the way to the alleged lethal maximum of 450 Volt. A disconcerting finding that has been reproduced a number of times in multiples settings over the last half-century.

Milgram concluded that the majority of the volunteers were capable of abhorrent deeds when pressured to do so by an authority. His conclusion has received a lot of criticism on how to interpret the outcome. Don Mixon argued that trust in the experimenter is key. Furthermore, he postulated that expecting experimental safeguards would lead the volunteers to assume that they did not harm the learner. Stephen Reicher and colleagues reinterpreted the outcome as a display of the power of social identity-based leadership to induce active and committed followership. And recently, Jacob Appel reframed the result in his post Rethinking the…