Morality in the Making of Sense and Self: Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the New Science of Morality

This book offers a new explanation of obedience and defiance in Milgram's lab. Examining one of the largest collections of Milgram's original audiotapes, Hollander and Turowetz scrutinize participant behavior in not only the experiments themselves, but also recordings of the subsequent debriefing interviews in which participants were asked to reflect on their actions. Introducing an original theoretical framework in the sociology of morality, they show that, contrary to traditional understandings of Milgram's experiments that highlight obedience, virtually all subjects, both compliant and defiant, mobilized practices to resist the authority's commands. By illuminating the relationship between concrete moral dilemmas and social interaction, Hollander and Turowetz tell a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about morality-and immorality-in the making of sense and self.

This volume offers a new explanation of obedience and defiance in Milgram's lab. Examining one of the largest collections of Milgram's original audiotapes, Hollander and Turowetz scrutinize participant behavior in not only the experiments themselves, but also recordings of the subsequent debriefing interviews in which participants were asked to reflect on their actions. Introducing an original theoretical framework in the sociology of morality, they show that, contrary to traditional understandings of Milgram's experiments that highlight obedience, virtually all subjects, both compliant and defiant, mobilized practices to resist the authority's commands. By illuminating the relationship between concrete moral dilemmas and social interaction, Hollander and Turowetz tell a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about morality - and immorality - in the making of sense and self.

"The book contributes to social psychology's Milgram paradigm and the sociology of morality by offering an original theory of the emergence of moral dilemmas in social interaction. Taking Milgram's notorious "obedience" experiments as a case study of morality in interaction, it argues that Milgram's "obedient" and "defiant" behavioural outcomes should be understood in terms of the tension between participants' moral obligations to the confederate Learner and their institutional obligations to the confederate Experimenter. Using the theoretical and methodological approach of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the book analyses a large number of archived audio-recordings of Milgram's experiments to support this argument. It is organized in three parts: Part I (Chapters 1-2) introduces the project on Milgram and morality, situating it in relevant literatures and advancing an original theoretical framework for understanding the Milgram paradigm and the sociology of morality. Part II (Ch 3-5) focuses on the experiment itself, applying the theoretical framework to analyse morality in interaction. Part III (Ch 6-8) examines recordings of the post-experiment debriefing interviews that Milgram conducted with participants immediately after each session, addressing current debates relevant to the study of morality and Milgram and offering a new explanation - "doing ordinariness" - for obedient and defiant behaviour in Milgram's lab. Overall, in centring the constitutive orders of social interaction that made the experiment possible in the first place, as well as the participants' own reasons, justifications, and accounts for their actions, the book tells a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about justice - and injustice - in the making"--