Stanley Milgram

An American psychologist whose experiments on obedience and social connection became iconic, controversial demonstrations of situational power.

• Signature vocabulary: obedience, authority, situation, moral conflict.
• Worldview: Ordinary people can perform disturbing actions when authority structures redefine responsibility and context.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Moral conflict emerges when personal conscience collides with institutional authority and role expectation.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of social psychology.

Sober, morally unsettling, and precise about how authority restructures responsibility.

• obedience to authority
• agentic roles and responsibility
• incremental escalation of harm
• moral conflict in institutions
• situational influence
• groups and norms
• identity and comparison
• perception of others
• obedience
• authority
• situation
• moral conflict

• His obedience studies remain central but are inseparable from serious debates about deception, distress, and research ethics.
• Later scholarship argues some participants were not merely obeying blindly but identifying with the experiment's goals, which complicates simple agentic-state readings.

• Who is claiming the right to define the situation?
• Obedience often arrives in increments, not leaps.
• The moral question begins where responsibility is displaced.

• Obedience to Authority
• Behavioral Study of Obedience
• The Individual in a Social World