Bi-lingual issue (French/English), edited by Dr. Raphaël Künstler (University of Toulouse II), Prof. Pascal Ludwig (Sorbonne University) & Dr Anna C. Zielinska (University of Lorraine)
Since the publication of “Behavioral studies of obedience” in 1963, and then of “Obedience to Authority” in 1974, the experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the early 1960s has provoked many lively debates. The opening of his archives by Yale University (Blass 2002), the partial replication of the experiment (Burger 2009), interviews with former “guinea pigs” or collaborators (Perry 2012), as well as the more general context of the replicability crisis in experimental psychology (Ritchie 2020) have triggered a revival of these debates.
On the basis of these new data, several aspects of Milgram’s experiments have been reexamined: their experimental protocol, which does not exactly match Milgram’s account of it (Gibson 2019); the decision not to include in the interpretation interviews in which subjects claimed not to have been fooled by the device designed to deceive them (Perry, Brannigan & alii 2018); the lessons to be learned from the behavior observed (Burger, Girgis & Manning 2011; Reicher, Haslam & Smith 2012); the usefulness of these findings in explaining the behavior of ordinary perpetrators during genocides, and in particular the Shoah (Russell & Gregory 2015; Roth 2022); the moral legitimacy of the device itself (Perry 2012). Moreover, all of these investigations converge on the question of whether the crisis of reproducibility affects experiments on authority and, if so, to what extent. As Stuart Ritchie’s (2020) cautious treatment of the Milgram case in his review of the reproducibility crisis shows, this question remains open.
The fact remains that debates around one of the founding and paradigmatic works of experimental social psychology ultimately call into question the very value of this discipline or at least the direction it should take. Augustine Brannigan goes so far as to call for “the end of experimental social psychology” (Brannigan, 2017, p. 141) in this regard. Finally, both Milgram and the psychologists and philosophers following in his wake interpreted the astonishment that his results aroused as a symptom of adherence to a mistaken anthropology. The situationist research program thus aimed to understand what this error is, where it comes from, and how to rectify it (Ross & Nisbett 1991; Doris 2005; Sabini & Silver 2005; Roth 2022). The subsequent interrogation of Milgram’s results thus also calls into question the value of this philosophical program.
The authority experiments were based on epistemological and ontological presuppositions that conditioned their design and interpretation, and that have thus far rarely been drawn out and directly discussed. For example, by designating his task as an “experiment on authority”, Milgram presupposed the existence of a concept of authority that would apply to the experiment in question, but about which he remained confused, because he was theoretically eclectic, relying as much on Hannah Arendt as on cybernetics (Milgram 1974). Stephen Gibson (2019) thus looked for a concept that could adequately describe what was actually taking place during the experiment and suggested that the Foucauldian concept of power was more suitable than the concept of authority.
To take another example, Milgram’s explicit goal was not only to reproduce in the laboratory an ordinary relationship of subordination, but to simulate the administrative and social structure that made possible the implementation of the extermination of the European Jews (Milgram 1963; Milgram 1974; Blass 2002). Against the prejudice according to which historical events are non-repeatable singularities, he thus presupposed the possibility of solving experimentally some of the explanatory problems that plague historians.
In order to contribute productively to current debates on the value of Milgram’s experiments, and more generally of social psychology, it is necessary to identify the presuppositions, theoretical consequences, and justifications of the experiments: in itself a philosophical task, in which this thematic issue invites us to engage.
The issue has three main aims:
1. First, to reconstruct the philosophical conceptions that underlie the experiments on authority; whether, for example, Milgram conceived of the participants’ motivations for action in terms of causes or reasons; whether he believed that the motivations for our behavior are directly accessible to consciousness; whether he attributed free will to his subjects; how he conceptualised (explicitly or implicitly) authority; what was his philosophy of history, etc. Such a reconstruction can be achieved via textual analysis, but also by retracing an archaeology: after all, Milgram at least partially adopts experimental devices invented by his predecessors, such as Kurt Lewin or Solomon Ash, and to adopt an experimental device is to inherit its presuppositions.
2. The issue also aims to discuss these philosophical presuppositions, whether to defend them or to contest them, from multiple perspectives. For example, the philosophy of historiography may ask whether the historian really needs psychology (Colligwood 1946; Stueber 2006; Lenclud 2013) and, if so, in what form. Christopher Browning’s (1992) decision to use the results of experimental psychology to account for the transformation of ordinary Germans into mass murderers as well as the discussion opened by this decision (Roth 2022) are particularly relevant from this perspective. The philosophy of the humanities meanwhile might ask whether Milgram’s experimentation overcomes methodological dichotomies between behaviorism and hermeneutics, behaviorism and cognitivism, between explanation and understanding, or the dichotomy between nomothetic and idiographic sciences. The foundation of genocide studies questions the role that experimentation should and could play, especially if applying the results is supposed to make it possible to anticipate and prevent the implementation of genocidal policies.
Philosophers of action might question the conception of human agency that underlies Milgram’s project, as well as the way he represents the relationship between an individual and his situation. Social ontology could question the nature of the social entities on which Milgram experiments, and the ability of these in vitro entities to adequately represent in vivo social entities, whether those populating ordinary or genocidal societies; or, following Gibson’s (2018) work, social ontology could question the role that argumentation plays in the social interactions simulated by the social psychologist’s protocol (Allouche & Künstler 2022). Finally, Milgram’s work could be examined from the perspective of moral philosophy, asking, for example, whether one should conclude from Milgram’s ability to manipulate his subjects that they should not be held responsible for their actions.
3. The final aim of the issue is to discuss what philosophical lessons in moral philosophy (Jouan 2012), ethics or meta-ethics (Lemaire, Desmond & Turmel 2019) can and should be drawn from this work, or from that of experimental psychology in general, taking into account recent challenges.
We invite proposals for papers exploring the following three avenues:
– What is the place and role of Milgram’s experiment in the history of psychology? What does Milgram owe to his predecessors and what do his successors owe him?
– What are the presuppositions that condition the design and interpretation of Milgram’s experiments on authority? To what extent does questioning these presuppositions change the interpretation of the experimental results? Does Milgram’s experiments really show what it claims to show?
– To what extent is Milgram’s experiment, and more generally experimental psychology, capable of raising or solving anthropological, social, political, moral problems?
Content of the issue
- Nestar Russell & Raphaël Künstler — “Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Studies: a Critical Review of the Most Predominant Explanatory Accounts”
- Pascal Ludwig “Pourquoi les perpétrateurs obéissent-ils ? »
- John Doris, Laura Niemi, Edouard Machery, « True Believers. The Incredulity Hypothesis and the Enduring Legacy of the Obedience Experiment”
- Megan Birney, Stephen Reicher, Alex Haslam — “Obedience as ‘Engaged Followership’: a Review an Research Agenda”
- Nestar Russell “Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Studies: an Ethical and Methodolgical Assessment”
- Matthew Hollander « Power from the Ground Up. Respecifying Performative Power as First Resistance in Milgram’s Lab.”
- Elodie Boissard — “Le climat affectif dans le dispositive de Milgram”.
- Irlande Saurin — “Système ou contrôle ? Milgram face à ses limites : le rôle de la cybernétique dans l’analyse de l’obéissance à l’autorité ».
- Emilie Caspar — “How can people commit atrocities when they follow orders? From qualitative interviews with former genocide perpetrators to neuroscience research”