Morality in the Making of Sense and Self: Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the New Science of Morality 0190096047, 9780190096045

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Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and the New Science of Morality M AT T H EW M . HO L L A N D E R JA S O N T U R OW E T Z

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Hollander, Matthew M., author. | Turowetz, Jason, author. Title: Morality in the making of sense and self : Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments and the new science of morality / Matthew M. Hollander, Jason Turowetz. Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023004924 (print) | LCCN 2023004925 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190096045 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190096069 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social psychology. | Social psychology—Experiments. | Ethics—Social aspects. | Social interaction. | Milgram, Stanley. Classification: LCC HM1033 .H725 2023 (print) | LCC HM1033 (ebook) | DDC 302—dc23/eng/20230209 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004924 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004925 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents Preface 

Introduction: Morality and Milgram 

vii

1

PA RT I .   T H E M O R A L O R D E R O F I N T E R AC T IO N 1. Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm 

15

2. Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 

36

PA RT I I .   M O R A L I T Y I N M I L G R A M’ S L A B : I N T E R AC T IO N DU R I N G T H E E X P E R I M E N T 3. The Sequential Organization of Resistance in Milgram’s Lab 

57

4. Forms of Milgramesque Resistance 

89

5. Self-​ and Other-​Attentive Resistance 

116

PA RT I I I .   C U R R E N T D E BAT E S : I N T E R AC T IO N I N T H E P O ST E X P E R I M E N T I N T E RV I EW 6. Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors 

143

7. Milgram, Science, and Morality 

177

8. Conclusion 

202

Appendix 1. Data and Methodology  Appendix 2. Audio Transcribing Conventions  Notes  References  Index 

217 219 221 235 251

Preface Whether in Tibet or Timbuktu, Rome or Mecca or Amazonia, morality has always played a key role in shaping human experience, one tightly interwoven with culture, identity, values, and beliefs. The English word “morality”—​in the limited sense of pertaining to behavior as good (right, correct, worthy, virtuous) versus bad (wrong, incorrect, unworthy, vicious)—​expresses a universal concept or distinction shared perhaps by all languages, whether modern or ancient. Long before the earliest written use of concepts like “morality” and “humanity” in religious and administrative contexts, oral cultures stretching far back into prehistory distinguished between good and bad action. For many dozens of millennia, groups of Homo sapiens understood themselves as connected to but also differing from other types of beings: other groups of people, ancestors, spirits and divinities, animals and plants, mountains and bodies of water, etc. Morality—​doing things well or badly, correctly or incorrectly, generously or selfishly, appropriately or inappropriately—​was perceived anthropomorphically, as extending to many types of entities (e.g., a tale about an animal or divinity acting badly). Today, our globalized, interconnected world radically differs, of course, from that of small hunter-​and-​gatherer groups forming all human existence prior to the transition to agriculture. However, morality remains a crucial component of the bedrock of human experience and practice across the globe. Doing things in the “right” way, after all, covers all human teaching and learning from infancy and primary socialization (e.g., pronouncing “Mama” correctly) to all other forms of socializing, learning, and training (e.g., harvesting the rice paddy correctly). What philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called “masters” of a cultural “form of life” (e.g., parents) ceaselessly demonstrate, instruct, observe, and correct in detailed ways precisely how social “novices” (e.g., children) behave. Today, scientists regard behavior as amoral for nonhuman animals, with the likely exception of some other hominid species (Neanderthals?), as well as (here a much bigger “perhaps”) a few additional primates (chimpanzees?) or other mammals (orcas? dolphins?) displaying, if not morality, “culture” (in the sense of taught and learned behaviors and traditions varying within the species from group to

viii Preface group). As many global religious and philosophical traditions have long asserted, though in idiosyncratic ways: humans are relatively undetermined by instinct and must perform a great deal of childhood teaching and learning. We are in this sense “free.” Morality is what distinguishes us from (other) animals. Early modern Western science, with its own style of opposition to anthropomorphism, inherited European traditions of philosophy and theology that considered morality as a defining feature of humanity, like walking upright and having hair (Socrates’s definition of “Man” as a featherless biped). It is no surprise, then, that in the definitive emergence and institutionalization of European social science in the 19th century, morality was considered a topic of major importance. This view was shared across a wide spectrum of modern political sympathies, from communists like Karl Marx to laissez-​faire liberals like Herbert Spencer. With today’s re-​ emergence of social and behavioral science research on morality, following several decades of eclipse in the late 20th century, perhaps the pertinent question for research today is not “Why is morality important?” but rather “Why did social scientists ever consider it unimportant?” Like the water in which we swim or something right in front of our noses that requires special effort to see, morality is deeply bound up with our humanity. Certainly, given the explosion of morality research since the turn of the 21st century in social science, neuroscience, and psychology, the time is ripe not only for fascinating advances in the science of morality but also for interdisciplinary dialogue, to which we view the present sociological study of morality and the Milgram obedience experiment as a contribution. We would never have been able to complete this project without the support of many people and institutions over the past decade. Jointly, we thank the publishers who granted us permission to use previously published materials in this book: Chapter 3 reproduces material from “Situated Moral Practice: Resisting Authority in Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiment,” Turowetz, Jason, and Matthew M. Hollander, in Gandhi’s Wisdom, pp. 207–​226. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2022. Chapter 4 reproduces material from British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 54, Hollander, Matthew M., “The Repertoire of Resistance: Non-​ Compliance with Directives in Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments,” pp. 425–​ 444, doi:10.1111/​bjso.12099. Copyright (2015). Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons.

Preface  ix Chapter 5 reproduces material from Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 79(4), Hollander, Matthew M. and Douglas W. Maynard, “Do Unto Others . . .? Methodological Advance and Self-​Versus Other-​Attentive Resistance in Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments,” pp. 355–​375, doi:10.1177/​ 0190272516648967. Copyright (2016). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. Chapter 6 reproduces material from (1) British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 56, Hollander, Matthew M., and Jason Turowetz, “Normalizing Trust: Participants’ Immediately Post‐Hoc Explanations of Behaviour in Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments” (2017), pp. 655–​674 and (2) British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 57, Hollander, Matthew M., and Jason Turowetz, “Multiple Compliant Processes: A Reply to Haslam and Reicher on the Engaged Followership Explanation of ‘Obedience’ in Milgram’s Experiments” (2018), pp. 301–​309. Chapter 7 reproduces material from Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 81, Turowetz, Jason, and Matthew M. Hollander, “From ‘Ridiculous’ to ‘Glad to Have Helped’: Debriefing News Delivery and Improved Reactions to Science in Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments” (2018), pp. 71–​93. Likewise, we acknowledge the insightful criticism of two anonymous OUP reviewers that greatly helped to improve the manuscript. Nearing the finish line, we received additional crucial feedback—​from Anne Rawls, Doug Maynard, Waverly Duck, Clemens Eisenmann, and Jakub Mlynář—​ that significantly improved both the substance and the presentation of our argument. Editor James Cook provided exceptional support and guidance throughout the process, knowing when to take action and when to give us time to work. Emily Mackenzie Benitez provided additional welcome support. Of course, the final responsibility for the book remains our own. Lastly, we would like to note that both of us contributed equally to the writing of this book, and that the order in which our names appear is alphabetical. Matt’s personal acknowledgments: Throughout his career, Doug Maynard has tirelessly pursued the highest standards of scholarship, instilling that sense of stubborn quest in his many students. Over my many years in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison, he guided and helped me in ways I am only now appreciating. Doug originally suggested to me (around 2010) the idea of using conversation analysis to study interaction in the Milgram experiment, a project that became my dissertation. Thanks also to the other excellent professors and researchers I had the good fortune to learn from and work with at UW: especially Ceci Ford, John Delamater, Mara

x Preface Loveman, Pam Oliver, Chad Goldberg, Junko Mori, Joan Fujimura, Felix Elwert, and Manish Shah. A 2011 dissertation development grant from the National Science Foundation enabled me to purchase copies of 117 recordings from the Milgram Archive at Yale University, as well as to hire undergraduate transcriptionists at UW. Cynthia Ostroff helped me navigate bureaucratic channels in connection with the Yale Milgram Archive. The UW Sociology Department and the UW Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies both awarded me travel money to present my research on Milgram at conferences of the American Sociological Association and the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Finally, my parents—​Rosalie Otters and James Hollander—​have always been there for me in my life’s twists and turns, and have been a profound source of inspiration, love, energy, and encouragement. Mom’s decision to go back to school in her 50s and complete a PhD in sociology strongly influenced my quarter-​life crisis decision to enter that discipline from the unlikely field of jazz guitar. Dad’s avocational interest in mathematical sociology and wide-​ranging conversational brilliance have been just as influential. My sister, Rachel, and her surfer guy, Brian Brooks, have also played key roles in shaping my sense of identity and life direction. An additional big thanks to Tod Van Gunten, the Chris Chambreau family (Heather, Chris, Jasper, Robin), James Benson, Abe Sorber, Francis Deck, the Madison Jazz Orchestra, Michael BB, Dan and Karen Schwarz, Moses Wolfenstein, Angela Barian, Jason Turowetz, David Schelly, Bob Thomas, Kate Knudson, María Azocar, Gina Longo, Rob Chiles, and Rahul Mahajan. Y por último, pero no por eso menos importante, a Samuel, Iliana y Samy les mando todo mi cariño y afecto. Nora, te amo “mucho por mucho” con todo mi corazón. Jason’s personal acknowledgments: Like many people, I first learned about the Milgram experiments in an introductory psychology course in college. I remember being fascinated and disturbed by the results and wanting to learn more about what actually went on in Milgram’s lab. As it turned out, Matt shared that interest, and as he started to research the Milgram experiments for his dissertation, we began having many long discussions about the interactions on the recordings he had acquired from the Yale Archive and what they could and could not tell us about the real-​world atrocities Milgram sought to explain. This eventually led to a collaboration that focused on the debriefing interviews Milgram held with his participants immediately after each session of the experiment, which we drew upon to

Preface  xi explain why participants, especially those who became categorized as “obedient,” acted as they did. Several papers later, we made the acquaintance of James Cook, which led to a book contract with Oxford that eventuated in this monograph. It is my hope that scholars of Milgram and of morality will find something of value in its pages. Doug Maynard and Anne Rawls have been important sources of advice, encouragement, and constructive feedback over the course of this project. As in Matt’s case, Doug was my advisor at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison. It was from him that I first learned about ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and he continues to be a valued colleague, mentor, collaborator, and friend. The several years I spent working with Anne Rawls at the Garfinkel Archive in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and collaborating on various projects deeply influenced my thinking about the interaction order tradition in sociology in ways that are evident throughout the book. I am grateful for her candid feedback on the manuscript, for her friendship, and for all I have learned from her. I am also grateful for the feedback and friendship of Waverly Duck, Clemens Eisenmann, and Jakub Mlynar, who read and critiqued portions of the manuscript and helped improve it considerably. Whatever shortcomings remain are, of course, Matt’s and my own. Finally, I am thankful for the support and encouragement I received from family and friends over many months of writing and revising. Thanks to my parents, Allan and Gail; my brother, Mark; and my sister, Lianna, for always being there through thick and thin. Thanks too to Gina Longo, Rahul Mahajan, Rob Chiles, David Schelly, Jeff Dennis, and Lisa Jackson for their friendship and support. Last but certainly not least, thanks to my wonderful wife, Sabrina, and our daughter, Violette, who was born during the writing of this book and has brought me inestimable joy each day since.

Introduction Morality and Milgram

On November 24, 2019, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard Spencer submitted his letter of resignation to President Donald Trump, following Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper’s call for Spencer to step down.1 The resignation capped weeks of tension between Spencer and Trump over their divergent views on a putative war crime by a SEAL commando accused of murdering “an injured, sedated 17-​year-​old ISIS prisoner, photographing himself holding the head of the corpse by the hair and sending the photo to friends . . . [and] randomly shooting two Iraqi civilians: a girl walking with her friends on a riverbank; and an unarmed elderly man” (Wikipedia, n.d.). Faced with Trump’s insistence on intervening on behalf of the commando, Spencer resisted, holding that the case should be dealt with in terms of the normal procedures of military law. Spencer’s letter states that “unfortunately it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me, in regard to the key principle of good order and discipline. I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”2 In his reaction, New York Senator Chuck Schumer echoed this nod to the civil disobedience tradition and the democratic right to dissent: “Secretary Spencer did the right thing and he should be proud of standing up to President Trump when he was wrong, something too many in this administration and the Republican Party are scared to do” (Cooper, Haberman, and Philipps 2019). The Spencer-​Trump confrontation dramatically illustrates the ongoing, real-​world relevance of obedience to morally doubtful authority, the social process Stanley Milgram (1933–​1984) claimed to reproduce and control in the most famous (and notorious) social psychological lab experiments of the 20th century.3 The setup of Milgram’s experiments, which he conceived in terms of civil disobedience,4 has become well known: Milgram invited subjects, who were ordinary men and women from the New Haven Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0001

2 Introduction community, into his Yale lab for what he told them was a study of learning and memory. The subjects were assigned the role of Teacher and instructed by an Experimenter to shock a fellow participant, the Learner—​ who, unbeknownst to the Teacher, was a confederate of the Experimenter and was not actually receiving any shocks. As the experiment proceeded, the Learner began to cry out in pain and demanded to be released from the shock apparatus. The Experimenter responded by instructing the Teacher to ignore the Learner and continue with the experiment. In the most widely publicized condition of the experiment (there were 23 conditions in total), Milgram (1963, 1974) found that fully 65% of Teachers completed the experiment, continuing to shock the Learner even after he had stopped responding and, as far as they knew, had lost consciousness or something worse. For 60 years, the classic Milgram paradigm in social psychology has served as a touchstone in psychology, sociology, and global intellectual and popular culture, powerfully introducing generations of students to the concept of destructive obedience to authority and the Holocaust, and inspiring research scientists (Brannigan 2013; Griggs 2017; Mastroianni 2002; Pozzi et al. 2018) to investigate its basis. Likewise, Milgram remains central to ongoing debates about the nature of social psychological knowledge (Brannigan 2021; Gergen 1973), the ethics of deceiving human subjects (Cook and Yamagishi 2008; Hertwig and Ortmann 2008), and the role of institutional review boards (Masters 2009). Given the ubiquity of hierarchical, authority-​subordinate relationships across the gamut of social institutions in virtually all societies, it is easy to see why Milgramesque obedience has so fascinated the world (Russell 2019). The process seems potentially omnirelevant, not only to politics, but also to healthcare, the military, family and kinship, education, formal organizations (bureaucracy, administration), religion, science, criminal justice, work and employment, etc.5 In any of these institutional contexts, given the right circumstances and irrespective of individual attributes (personality, character), will people tend to obey immoral commands and contribute to unethical tasks rather than follow conscience? What social psychological process(es) operate(s) in such situations? How exactly are nonscientific, traditional, ordinary-​language compliance explanations—​formulated in terms of morality, honor, loyalty, fear, trust, tradition, duty, or truth—​erroneous or incomplete? What scientific and “modern” explanations are warranted? Despite Milgram’s significance, for decades researchers took his account of his research procedures and findings at face value. It is only in the past

Introduction  3 15 years that scholars have begun to extensively explore Yale’s Milgram archive housing his papers, audio recordings of his experiments, and other materials (Gibson 2019). Consequently, a curious feature of older Milgram research and commentary is the tendency to rely on secondary sources, such as Milgram’s publications or commentaries by other authors, rather than primary-​source archival materials. Recently6 this pattern has changed, with a “Milgram renaissance” signaling (and in turn generating) widespread scholarly interest that is international and cross-​disciplinary (Kaposi 2022). Contemporary Milgram paradigm research is methodologically diverse and innovative, and often provides or incorporates new archival findings challenging received wisdom about Milgram’s experiments. This book contributes to the Milgram renaissance by treating the Milgram experiment as an empirical case study of morality in an actual, concrete situation of social interaction: Milgram’s lab. Despite occasional commentary and analysis (Brannigan 2021, 53–​54; Kaposi 2017; Pigden and Gillet 1996; Russell and Gregory 2011), in retrospect the connection of Milgram to morality has been a serious blind spot in the Milgram literature. Until now, there has been no sustained, book-​length attempt to link Milgram with research on morality per se, despite the important connection. A main reason is the Milgram paradigm’s traditional focus on obedience to authority as the phenomenon of interest. Notwithstanding older debates challenging the obedience interpretation (Mixon 1989; Orne and Holland 1968) and criticizing Milgram’s (1974) “agentic state” theory purporting to explain obedience (Mantell and Panzarella 1976), it is only recently that the focus on obedience has fundamentally shifted to alternative interpretations of participant behavior.7 Especially starting with Reicher and Haslam’s seminal “After Shock” article (2011), recent scholars have challenged themselves to rethink Milgram’s agentic state theory, as well as what social psychological process(es)—​if not obedience—​the experiment exhibited (Kaposi 2022). Recent emphasis on active participants rather than passive subjects has especially highlighted the opposition to continuing the experiment demonstrated by both Disobedient and Obedient outcome groups, resistance obscured and downplayed in Milgram’s publications (Gibson 2019, 3; Hoffman, Myerberg, and Morawski 2015; Kaposi 2017, 2020; Perry 2012).8 However, although the recent focus on agency and resistance is certainly welcome, it has not connected to the bigger picture of morality per se. This has been a serious missed opportunity because research on morality has exploded in the last two decades, with important developments

4 Introduction in neuroscience, psychology, and sociology generating widespread academic and popular interest (see Chapter 1; see also Abend 2013; Baker 2020; Hitlin and Vaisey 2010, 2013). Accordingly, in addition to Milgram’s experiment, the other major topic of this book is the social character of morality. Just as the Spencer-​Trump confrontation illustrates a Milgramesque situation of commands conflicting with conscience (Milgram 1974, 2), so it also exemplifies moral dilemmas in social life. Despite morality’s central importance in everyday life and social institutions, its nature remains hotly debated by scientists. Certainly, Spencer’s confrontation with Trump had something to do with morality: with the rule of law versus authoritarian power; with right versus wrong behavior; with moral principle versus political loyalty; with personal and professional honor; with nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. But what, exactly? Why did Spencer act as he did? What made his actions possible? By contrast, what led others to “fall in line”? Morality is a far-​reaching topic of study, with borders shading off into the unknown. Even the most theoretically sophisticated of today’s scholars of morality don’t provide definitive answers about its features and outlines, as it applies to social life. Steven Lukes, for instance, points to the need for greater clarity on the genus “morality”: “What is the diversity of morals a diversity of?” (Lukes 2010, 558). A primary thesis of this book is that key conceptual and empirical difficulties in the scientific study of morality, its many strengths notwithstanding, stem from presupposing what needs to be explained: that identities and situations have a moral character in the first place. Following Durkheim ([1893] 1984), Garfinkel (1967), Goffman (1983), and Rawls (1987), we argue that identities and situations achieve their moral character in interaction: the interaction and its constitutive requirements for making self and meaning come first and must be the primary unit of analysis. It follows that moral arguments that treat identities, situations, and meanings as antecedent to interaction rather than as its products are in an important sense circular, a point Durkheim ([1893] 1984) makes in his classic critique of moral philosophy and which we explicate in detail in the pages that follow.

The Argument of the Book This book develops an interactional approach to the study of moral action through a novel analysis of the Stanley Milgram “obedience” experiments. In

Introduction  5 the social sciences, morality is usually conceived in terms of values (Bellah et al. 1985; Inglehart and Baker 2000; Stets and Carter 2011), attitudes (Baker 2020; Hitlin and Pinkston 2013), beliefs and intuitions (Vaisey 2009, Vaisey and Miles 2014), identity (Hitlin 2008) and disposition (Vaisey 2009), and norms prescribing right and wrong (Haidt 2012; Swidler 2001). The operative model is one of actors encountering preexisting situations that are taken to present moral dilemmas, and then making sense of them based on values, beliefs, rules, conscious and unconscious cognitive schemas, and norms, and forming lines of action accordingly. Hitlin and Vaisey (2013, 60) put it succinctly: “Sociological studies of moral action seek to understand how moral variability between persons interacts with the moral meanings of situations to influence human conduct.” The problem with these approaches is that they do not take into consideration the role of social actors in creating and/​or resolving the moral character of situations. That is, they tend to take the moral character of identities and situations for granted, rather than explaining (1) why those identities and situations have moral implications in the first place, (2) how such identities come to get their moral character from the situations in which they are achieved, and (3) what that moral character consists of (what it is that makes it “moral”). By contrast, our position is that interaction is central to how identities and situations achieve their meaning and moral character, and therefore to any explanation of that achievement. In accordance with the interaction order tradition in sociology (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1983; Rawls 1987), we argue that any social order is in some sense an order with moral implications that depends on constitutive practices grounded in moral commitments and obligations. For interaction to work, constitutive practices and expectations must be shared by all participants; there must also be reciprocity and a commitment to the pursuit of mutual understanding (Rawls 1987, 2010).9 Where these ordinarily tacit moral criteria are not satisfied, trouble arises, and in the absence of remediation, the interaction can fall apart, threatening the very possibility of self and meaning; alternatively, the interaction may continue, but at the cost of harm to the participants (Rawls and Duck 2020). Garfinkel called such moral criteria Trust Conditions; Goffman referred to them as Working Consensus. The Milgram case provides a powerful illustration of this argument and its consequences. Milgram classified Teachers who continued to obey as Obedient and those who refused as Disobedient. However, he devoted conspicuously little attention to the fact that all Teachers, those classified

6 Introduction as Obedient and Disobedient alike, resisted the Experimenter to some degree. We argue that through these acts of resistance, which tended to immediately follow the Learner’s negative reactions to the shocks, Teachers in both outcome groups displayed at least some recognition of interactional trouble. What separated the Obedient from the Disobedient Teachers was (1) whether they made the moral implications of the trouble explict, and if so, (2) whether they managed to sustain that treatment in the face of the Experimenter’s directives to continue and assurances that the Learner was not really being harmed. Teachers categorized as Obedient ultimately went on with the experiment despite the trouble. In doing so, they placed an accent on the aspect of Trust Conditions that required reciprocity with the Experimenter. They “went along to get along,” so to speak, even though fulfilling their interactional obligations to the Experimenter, which included an expectation of deference to his authority, meant ignoring the Learner’s complaints, as well as creating the illusion of reciprocity with an Experimenter who was not granting them reciprocity in return. In contrast, Teachers categorized as Disobedient prioritized the aspect of Trust Conditions that required reciprocity also with the Learner and consequently began to view their commitments to the Learner and Experimenter as contradictory. These Teachers treated the Experimenter as not fulfilling his interactional obligations to themselves and the Learner, which would require him to both address their concerns and remedy the Learner’s complaints. Disobedient Teachers, in other words, explicitly treated the trouble as moral trouble requiring the restoration of ordinary interactional reciprocity conditions, and persisted in doing so. Two examples—​one Obedient and the other Disobedient—​may serve to illustrate these points. In the first, Teacher 0213 (whom Milgram would eventually categorize as Obedient) has been administering shocks to the Learner every time he gets an answer wrong, per the experiment’s protocol. He has now reached 150 volts on the shock generator. To this point, he has responded to the Learner’s negative reactions to the shocks with delay, hesitation, and sighing/​groaning. Such actions are resistive, display recognition of trouble, and tacitly mark a violation of interactional expectations. But they do not explicitly treat the trouble as a moral problem, and when the Experimenter does nothing in the pauses left open for him by the Teacher’s delays and hesitations, the Teacher goes on performing the experiment. When he flips the 150-​volt switch, however, the Learner’s

Introduction  7 reaction shifts from pain cries (e.g., “OOH!”) to protest. As the Teacher provides the correct answer, “white horse,” the Learner shouts, “Let me out of here! I won’t be part of this experiment anymore! I refuse to go on! Let me out!” The Teacher now hesitates, pausing for nearly three seconds and perhaps waiting for the Experimenter to intervene. Instead, the Experimenter ignores the Learner and in a matter-​of-​fact way directs the Teacher to “Please continue.” Again, the Teacher hesitates, emitting an audible “mm” and waiting another two seconds. But when the Experimenter still does nothing, the Teacher continues the experiment, reading the next word series, “Sad, face, music, clown, girl,” and joining the Experimenter in ignoring the trouble. Now consider the way Teacher 0210, whom Milgram categorized as Disobedient, responds to the trouble. Like his Obedient counterpart described above, this Teacher has reached the 150-​volt mark with only minimal resistance. He has oriented to a problem with the Learner’s reaction to the shocks but has not yet explicitly treated the trouble as moral trouble. But after the Learner’s vociferous protests at 150 volts—​the same ones he produced in the first example—​this Teacher reports to the Experimenter, “He [i.e., the Learner] wants to refuse to go on.” Here again, the Experimenter ignores the Learner’s complaints and the Teacher’s response, instructing him to “Please continue.” This Teacher, however, now responds, “No I better not then. I’m not gonna do this if he refuses.” The Teacher is explicitly treating the trouble as having moral implications: the Learner refuses to go on, and the Teacher will not continue against the Learner’s will. Unlike his counterpart in the first example, this Teacher emphasizes his reciprocity obligations to the Learner and implies that the Experimenter should do the same. There ensues a lengthy exchange between Teacher and Experimenter, with the Experimenter stating, “It is absolutely essential that you continue” and reassuring the Teacher that the Learner will suffer “no permanent tissue damage”—​reiterating a claim he made before the start of the experiment that the shock machine is calibrated to pose no danger to humans. But the Teacher remains steadfast in his refusal, objecting that the experiment is “cruel” and shouting to the Learner through the wall, “YOU IN PAIN?” The standoff finally ends with the Experimenter stopping the experiment. As these examples illustrate, both Obedient and Disobedient Teachers attended to interactional trouble, and both engaged in forms of resistance. But whereas for the Disobedient Teachers the trouble became a serious and explicitly articulated moral dilemma, for a majority of Obedient ones it was

8 Introduction largely treated as ordinary trouble of the sort that could very well occur during a normal, if uncomfortable, scientific experiment. In other words, though members of both outcome groups marked trouble in their turns, they dealt with its moral implications differently, with the Disobedient Teachers eventually refusing to go on and the Obedient ones continuing to cooperate with the Experimenter and accepting (or at least not challenging) the working definition of the situation as essentially benign. The outcome of the experiment was hugely different depending on what they did. But if the Obedient Teachers accepted the working consensus that the situation was essentially benign, why did they do so? What reasons did they give? Drawing on the accounts these Teachers produced in postexperiment debriefing interviews with the Experimenter, we find that a majority10 (72%) claimed that they did not think the Learner was “really” being harmed. Following Sacks (1984), we argue that in this respect, they were doing being ordinary, which involved searching for and finding ordinary features of the experiment to support their understanding of it as a benign study of learning and memory. That is, they actively found ways to support their preconceptions about the experiment: rather than question the Experimenter’s competence or motivation, they reasoned that he knew what he was doing and would not knowingly place the Learner in danger. In doing so, they displayed an “ordinary cast of mind” (Sacks [1964–​1972] 1992), which took for granted the essential ordinariness of the situation and assumed that future events would bear out their assumption that, despite appearances to contrary, there was in fact no moral problem to resolve. As it happened, that assumption would turn out to be correct (the Learner was not actually being harmed), though they had no way of knowing this for certain during the experiment. As they explain to the Experimenter why they did what they did, we can hear on the recordings that many Obedient and Disobedient Teachers alike are clearly upset, an observation Perry (2013) also makes in her own analysis of the interviews. And yet, on a follow-​up survey they filled out several weeks later, many of these same Teachers would report that they were “happy to have been of service” to Milgram (Haslam et al. 2015). While this fact has been adduced as support for engaged followership theory, which claims that Obedient Teachers complied because they identified with the Experimenter and the scientific enterprise, missing is an explanation of what changed between the end of the experiment and the survey that Milgram administered months afterward. We argue that the explanation lies in the debriefing process itself, specifically the affective labor (cf. Hardt 1999) Milgram performed

Introduction  9 to change Teachers’ feelings about the experiment and the moral significance of their actions, for which he and the Learner took varying degrees of responsibility while emphasizing the experiment’s scientific importance. Accordingly, to the extent that Teachers did identify with the Experimenter, that identification would have typically occurred after the experiment, not during, and therefore cannot explain why they acted as they did. The Milgram renaissance of the past 15 years has fundamentally transformed our knowledge about what happened in Milgram’s lab, especially as it pertains to explaining Obedient behavior. In building on and challenging this research, we recover the constitutive orders of interaction that made the experiment possible in the first place, centering Teachers’ own practices, reasons, and accounts to tell a new, empirically grounded story about Milgram: one about morality (and immorality) in the making of sense and self.

Chapter Summaries We conclude this introduction with a summary of the book’s chapters. The book is divided into three parts as follows: Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) sets up the book and its argument. Chapter 1 situates our study of Milgram and morality with respect to scholarship on Milgram and the science of morality, with particular focus on what is often called the new sociology of morality (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). We argue that our interaction order framework highlights concrete resistive practices that have been underspecified and understudied in the Milgram paradigm, while furnishing a perspicuous case study of morality in interaction that illustrates the value of our analytic approach for the new sociology of morality. Chapter 2 presents our interaction order framework at length, arguing that morality in interaction in Milgram’s lab emerged out of the situated conflict between Teachers’ incompatible interactional obligations to the Experimenter and Learner. Following Rawls (1987), we argue that sense and self are the central moral goods produced in interaction; if they cannot be made, neither can any of the other goods that moral discourse describes (e.g., honor, loyalty, honesty, benevolence). When one or more participants in an interaction is denied the reciprocity and recognition required to make sense and self, the situated selves of all coparticipants may be harmed, with

10 Introduction the most vulnerable parties often bearing such harm disproportionately. The Milgram case provides a powerful illustration of this point: in addition to the apparent harm suffered by the Learner, many of Milgram’s Teachers experienced acute stress, confusion, and anxiety as they were denied reciprocity by the Experimenter, whose own situated identity was threatened in turn when Teachers refused to comply with his directives. Part II (Chapters 3–​5) focuses on Teachers’ resistive actions during the experiment and the institutional context in which they occurred. Chapter 3 provides a detailed description of the design of Milgram’s experiments and the interactional sequences, especially directive-​response and complaint-​ remedy, whereby Teachers performed resistance. The chapter also provides a concise overview of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), which, in addition to informing our interaction order framework, form the basis for our empirical analysis of the Milgram data. Chapter 4 presents our analysis of six forms of resistance recurrently displayed by Teachers. We show that, contrary to the impression frequently given by Milgram’s publications, all Teachers resisted to varying degrees, and that what ultimately distinguished the two outcome groups was not the fact of resistance, but its explicitness and duration. Whereas most Obedient Teachers were what we call maximally Obedient—​in that they exhibited relatively little resistance overall—​even these Teachers marked interactional trouble with resistive practices like delays, hesitations, disfluencies, imprecations, and nervous laughter that hindered the progress of the experiment. Most Obedient Teachers, however, did not go beyond such acts of tacit resistance to explicitly formulate the trouble as a moral problem. Chapter 5 concentrates on the composition of Teachers’ resistive turns, with a focus on how they made explicit the moral implications of the trouble. Here, we distinguish two types of resistive practice, self-​and other-​attentive resistance, which formulate the trouble in terms of either the Teachers’ own difficulties with continuation (self-​oriented) or the Learner’s suffering (other-​ oriented). While self-​ oriented practices are indirectly about the Learner, in that such statements as “I can’t continue” effectively imply that the speaker cannot continue shocking the Learner, other-​oriented practices directly topicalize the Learner’s situation. We show that while Disobedient Teachers perform both types of resistance more frequently than do their Obedient counterparts, and members of both outcome groups perform

Introduction  11 other-​ oriented resistance more frequently than self-​ oriented resistance, Disobedient Teachers most clearly distinguish themselves by resisting more forcefully and consistently, and by using two subtypes of other-​oriented resistance—​Golden Rule accounts and letting the Learner decide—​that are rarely or never used by Obedient Teachers. Part III (Chapters 6–​8) focuses on the interactions between the Teachers and Experimenter that occurred in the debriefing interviews that took place immediately after the experiment ended. Chapter 6 analyzes Teachers’ postexperiment accounts for their behavior during the experiment. Based on these accounts, we argue that a majority of Obedient Teachers obeyed the Experimenter’s directives because they trusted that he would not allow the Learner to come to harm. We also contrast our own explanation with the recently proposed theories of engaged followership and rhetorical persuasion. Chapter 7 examines the affective work Milgram devoted to designing a “high impact” experiment that attempted to balance maximal realism with experimental control. We argue that Milgram sought to create strong emotional reactions to the experiment among Teachers, and then subsequently to modify those reactions during his postexperiment debriefing interviews. Upon revealing that the Learner was not harmed after all, and in some of the later debriefings informing Teachers that the Learner never even received shocks in the first place, Milgram—​usually through the Experimenter, but sometimes himself—​worked to transform the moral meaning Teachers assigned to the experiment and their behavior. We show that these efforts were largely successful, with Teachers shifting their attitudes toward the experiment from negative or ambivalent to positive over the course of the debriefing interviews. Chapter 8 concludes the book with an evaluation of the relevance of Milgram’s findings for understanding genocide, the real-​ world atrocity he ultimately hoped to explain. We argue that the comparison is inappropriate, since a majority of of Milgram’s Obedient Teachers did not believe they were really harming the Learner. This is not to say that their actions were not in fact morally problematic, but that insofar as they did not think they were hurting anyone, they differ in a crucial way from the perpetrators of genocide, who know they are harming their victims but believe themselves justified in doing so. By contrast, as they performed the experiment, a majority of Milgram’s Obedient Teachers did not believe there was any harm to justify—​no serious moral violation that needed to be justified in terms

12 Introduction of such abstractions as “the greater good,” “the national interest,” or (pace engaged followership theory) “the scientific enterprise.” We also distill the implications of our interaction order argument for the sociology of morality, summing up the lessons about resistance and moral action that Milgram’s experiment can teach us.

PART I

T HE MOR A L OR DE R OF IN T E R ACT ION

1 Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm Our study of morality and Milgram begins by reviewing the psychology and sociology of morality. We emphasize how both fields have traditionally neglected the study of ordinary, everyday morality as a social interactional phenomenon. To bring our own interaction order approach into sharper focus, we critique three influential exemplars in what has been called “the new sociology of morality” (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013): the well-​known contributions of Ann Swidler, Stephen Vaisey, and Gabriel Abend. Next, we review the Milgram paradigm in social psychology, discussing the original experiments and the older and newer Milgram literatures. Finally, we propose that these two bodies of scholarship have important lessons to learn from each other. The sociology of morality calls attention to the social production of moral meanings, actions, situations, and identities, all of which are indispensable for understanding the Milgram experiments and which the Milgram literature has, in large part, neglected. At the same time, the Milgram experiments provide a perspicuous illustration of how moral meanings, actions, situations, and identities are products of interaction, rather than its antecedents, a point that sociologists of morality have yet to take fully onboard.

The Psychology and Sociology of Morality Although debated for millennia across the globe, morality remains a topic that today’s scientists admit they are only beginning to understand. We’ve already seen social theorist Steven Lukes’s question: “What is the diversity of morals a diversity of?” (Lukes 2010, 558). That is, what do facts about moral diversity tell us about human morality as such? Other unresolved, basic questions: Is morality best “understood” via engaged practice (e.g., religious behavior), rather than detached reflection and empirical inquiry? Insofar as an empirical science of morality (versus conceptual philosophy or theology) is possible, how should neuroscience, psychology, and social science conceptually carve up the territory, using what research methods? Was Durkheim Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0002

16  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self wrong or right that social science is essentially science of morality? How do we avoid or minimize question-​begging: circular reasoning about morality and moral situations? A central difficulty is morality’s heterogeneity: it consists of multiple elements, overlapping but not reducible to one another. Some psychologists and sociologists define it in terms of moral judgments: right versus wrong, permissible versus impermissible (Haidt, Koller, and Dias 1993; Hauser 2006). Other researchers treat it as moral values (Stets and Carter 2011). However, the conceptual complexity only begins from there. Abend (2013, 183) observes that, at different times and places, moral inquiry has embraced moral goods and conceptions of “the good”; “the supererogatory” (action surpassing duty); “the ethics of being” (the kind of person believed worthy of respect, admiration, value); “thick concepts” (like integrity, virtue, heroism); and “morality in action” (moral behaviors). Obviously, no one scientific research enterprise can address all or even several of these diverse facets, and this book makes only qualified claims about the bigger picture of morality in our study of morality-​in-​interaction in Milgram’s lab. Faced with such heterogeneity and diversity, psychologists and sociologists have taken distinctive routes in the science of morality. For much of the 20th century, psychologists studied morality in developmental terms. Thus, in pioneering, landmark studies of children’s cognition, Jean Piaget (1932) focused on, among other things, the growth of moral reasoning. Among the many researchers Piaget influenced was Lawrence Kohlberg, whose stage conception of moral development became paradigmatic in the postwar years (Kohlberg 1981). For Kohlberg, as people grow, they develop more advanced forms of moral cognition: beginning with concrete, particularistic modes of reasoning, the average person increasingly evolves more abstract, universalistic moral criteria and cognitions. However, not all people attain the same level of moral development: some never advance much beyond particularism, even though they evince some measure of abstract reasoning. This notion of a distribution of moral development in a population—​and that the level of development may predict actions—​appears in Milgram as well (1963, 1974),1 though he contextualized it in experimentally manipulated situational variables. Kohlberg’s work has been challenged on several grounds. One of these critiques—​that the stage schema privileges “masculine” forms of reasoning with deontological and utilitarian bents over “feminine” ones emphasizing particularistic relationships (Gilligan 1982)—​ has become known as “ethics of care,” a perspective that informs the feminist

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  17 scholarship on which we draw in Chapter 7. To Gilligan’s conceptual challenge to Kohlberg, we can add an empirical one: people’s level of moral development has not been found to predict or adequately capture actual behavior (Blasi 1980). While Kohlberg’s stage development theory has undergone modifications (e.g., Aquino and Reed 2002; Blasi 1984) and continues to be influential, it is no longer the dominant approach in moral psychology (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). Since the turn of the century, that mantle has been worn by brain-​behavior research in cognitive science and neuropsychology. Today, moral psychologists pursue the cognitive neuroscience of moral reasoning, using neuroimaging technology to correlate individuals’ judgments about right and wrong with discrete brain and nervous system structures and interrelationships. Recent studies of the “moral brain” (Decety 2015) have proliferated, with modern neuroimaging technology providing unprecedented access to the nervous system’s inner workings. This approach frequently places subjects in scanners and presents them with hypothetical moral dilemma scenarios, asking what is the right or appropriate or permissible, etc., course of action, or what they “would do” under given circumstances. Subjects’ responses are then correlated with brain structures and regions that become activated during the task. Contemporary research in moral psychology has been extensively reviewed (Abend 2013; Appiah 2008; Haidt 2012; Hauser 2006). Regarding limitations, Abend (2013) makes several compelling criticisms: Moral psychology tends to conflate moral judgment with other conceptual facets of morality, presuming or implying that the former either encompasses the latter or is more important than them. The judgments are of “thin” moral concepts, such as right and wrong, which can be answered impersonally, rather than “thick” ones involving valuation of moral goods and conceptions of the good life. Scenarios are unrealistic, requiring no affective investment from subjects. The relationship of lab findings to real-​world behavior is unspecified or underspecified. People’s moral lives don’t consist of discrete, independent choices, but are shaped by moral narratives and ways of life that are irreducible to artificial decisions displayed in the lab. To be sure, some neuropsychologists have asked these questions, pursuing real-​ life implications of their findings. For example, Haidt (2012) has conducted influential studies of the relationship between brain function and political preferences and behavior. But, by and large, the import of psychological moral judgment research remains unclear. More detailed specification

18  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self is needed of the scope and generality of researchers’ claims: of the kinds of “moral things” they putatively illuminate (Abend 2013, 182; Hitlin and Vaisey 2010, 2013). In contrast to psychology, sociology of morality has located its intellectual roots in Martineau (1838), Marx (1843–​44, 1845: see Marx and Engels 1972), Durkheim ([1893] 1984, [1912] 1995), Lévy-​Bruhl (1905), and Weber (2004), among others (Abend 2008, 2010). Sociologists criticize the individualistic orientation of moral psychologists, favoring their own focus on social determinants of moral behavior, beliefs, and values: relationships between, on the one hand, individual and collective morality and, on the other, social variables like race, class, gender, religion, political preference, and region (Hitlin 2008). Hitlin and Vaisey’s (2013) detailed overview distinguishes between classic and recent sociology of morality, emphasizing that the field has returned to U.S. prominence after nearly disappearing during the 1960s–​ 1980s reaction against Talcott Parsons and functionalism. These authors present the “new sociology of morality” under three (slightly overlapping) headings: research on (1) moral typologies and classifications, (2) sources of moral variation within and across groups, and (3) morality in action. The first kind of sociology of morality examines how people classify moral phenomena. A classic example is Bellah et al.’s (1985) Habits of the Heart, which, among other things, identified differences between Americans viewing the world instrumentally versus expressively. Also in this category is research on how actors create and maintain moral boundaries: for instance, between and within social-​economic classes (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Lamont 1992) or between “decent” and “street” behavior in impoverished African American neighborhoods (Anderson 2000). The second kind of sociology of morality examines the operation of “macro factors like nation, class, and religion in shaping moral orientations” (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013, 58). Studies include large-​N, cross-​cultural research examining correlations between values and economic, political, and cultural variables in different countries. An example is Inglehart and Baker’s (2000) work with the World Values Survey. Also included are investigations of how moral meanings evolve and transform—​such as Healy’s (2006) research on the changing meaning of being a blood and organ donor—​and how such transformations relate to conflict within social fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Given our focus on social action and interaction, our main interest is Hitlin and Vaisey’s third kind of sociology of morality, “morality in action” (2013,

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  19 60). As with moral classifications, here the work of Pierre Bourdieu has been influential, such that scholars like Vaisey (2009) and Lizardo (2017) integrate Bourdieu’s notion of habitus with recent work in cognitive psychology, particularly that concerned with the dual processing model of cognition (Kahneman 2011). The model posits that cognition occurs at two levels, one automatic and unconscious, the other conscious and accessible to discursive thought, and that much of our behavior is driven by level-​one processes operating outside of level-​two conscious awareness. In a series of groundbreaking experimental studies, psychologists such as Haidt (2001, 2012) have shown that moral reasoning is strongly influenced by emotionally charged intuitions about what is morally right and wrong. When presented with a situation that violates those intuitions, subjects automatically respond with strong negative reactions, subsequently rationalizing them using normative moral vocabularies. Much recent research in the sociology of morality is strongly influenced by such work, which it extends by seeking the social and cultural bases of our moral intuitions. Thus, research by Miles (2014, 2018), Vaisey (2009), Vaisey and Lizardo (2010), and Vaisey and Miles (2014) has investigated how cultural and moral schemas, internalized in actors’ habitus through socialization, influence their behavior, even if unconsciously. (See below for more on Vaisey.) Also in Hitlin and Vaisey’s third category is social psychological research on the moral self (e.g., Hitlin 2008). Influential here is identity theory (Burke 1980), which holds that individuals seek identity verification—​a match between their internal self-​concept and external circumstances—​and that personal identities (including moral ones) are made salient when “activated” by situational factors. For example, Stets and Carter (2011) report that where subjects’ moral self, as measured using survey questions, was out of sync with their behavior on a subsequent laboratory task, they experienced negative emotions. This line of research offers important insights into moral selfhood as subjectively experienced, its relationship to other personal identities, and its behavior correlates. However, Hitlin and Vaisey (2013) note the limitation of its reliance on thin moral concepts and on hypothetical vignettes (“a friend of yours is drunk and wants to drive home”).

From Morality in Action to Morality in Interaction Psychologists and sociologists of morality can claim many achievements, not least of which is having brought centuries of abstract moral theory

20  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self down to earth with the empirical tools of modern experimental and social science. However, we think a major limitation shared by both disciplines is the tendency to anchor claims about morality in individuals—​in brains, survey responses, or unconscious motives—​rather than in situations. Both disciplines focus on individual attributes (whether personal or social) and/​ or actions, rather than the interactional settings where moral phenomena like values and judgments are actually made relevant and consequential. Yet these interactional settings are, to borrow a phrase from Goffman (1967), “where the action is.” Such settings are the real-​world site where moral things are constituted and become real. Accordingly, it seems to us that adequate theorizing of moral action must begin with the interactions through which moral selves and situations are produced: to paraphrase Goffman (1967, 3), not with people and their moments, but rather with moments and their people. As noted, we advocate pluralism in science, and find much to value in neuroscientific, psychological, and sociological approaches to morality. Each provides myriad new insights into this complex subject, and even possibilities for interdisciplinary integration (Vaisey 2009, 2021). However, we want to insist that foundational limitations in these fields be squarely faced if the science of morality is to advance. There are tradeoffs in any research enterprise; a key advantage of our approach is its ability to overcome the widespread inability of morality research to conceptualize and analyze social interaction. Accordingly, this book offers promising tools for new inquiries into moral praxis that are interactional, embodied, and situated. Chapter 2 presents our theoretical framework at length, but we need to say more here to clarify our position. Sociologists of morality have rightly, we think, criticized psychologists for their narrowly individualistic conception of moral reasoning and action: notwithstanding important strengths such as experimental control and elucidation of evolutionary and physiological dimensions of morality. Sociologists have also demonstrated the importance of social factors in explaining the moral views and decisions of individuals and groups. Nevertheless, significant vestiges of individualism continue to characterize much recent sociological research on morality (Abend 2013; Bostyn, Sevenhant, and Roets 2018). This is because most researchers focus on the actor’s point of view (or on unconscious motives) and how it results in certain actions, choices, and evaluations. In place of psychology’s asocial individuals, sociology posits social, and socialized, actors with collective or demographic attributes—​race,

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  21 class, gender, etc.—​that influence or cause outcomes of interest. However, as in psychology, the emphasis is on predicting or explaining the actions, choices, judgments, etc., of discrete individuals, albeit with social-​level as well as individual-​level variables. This is true even where the focus is on group behavior, since this behavior is operationalized through the aggregation of discrete cases. Research questions are often formulated in terms of predicting what person-​case n will do in situation w, given social attributes x, y, and z, or at the group level, what cases n1 +​ n2 +​ n3 +​ n4 +​ n5 +​ . . . nX will choose, value, endorse, etc., contingent on factors x, y, and z. Aggregation can be achieved statistically, or by treating particular individuals (interviewees, informants, etc.) as representative of a larger group. Either way, though, the actor’s point of view (or unconscious, or nonconscious habitus), whether alone or in the aggregate, is the focal object.2 Regarding situations, sociologists tend to view these separately, or as separable, from actors. Research often presents discrete actors confronting one another in situations that interact with, but are conceptually separate from, their occupants (e.g., Hitlin and Vaisey 2013, 60). On this view, we can treat individuals and situations independently, at least in principle, and specify their respective contributions to human conduct, conceptualized as an outcome category or dependent variable. Situations are reduced to causal stimuli that activate or make salient, to varying degrees, personal dispositions, identities, and schemas, which then translate into lines of action (e.g., Burke 1980; DiMaggio 1997; Stets and Carter 2011). Or situations may be conceptualized in less positivistic terms, for example, as familiar contexts that are matched to habitus, giving actors an intuitive “feel” that other actors may lack for skillfully handling situations (e.g., Bourdieu [1979] 1984). Likewise, ethnographic and interview-​based research on moral classification and meaning typically concentrates on moral actions—​such as boundary formation, framing, and valuation—​overlooking how these concepts are actually made relevant and consequential in interaction. Since moral objects are social objects, and social objects are assembled in interaction, we cannot adequately grasp their import or the processes by which they are produced without looking to the actual situated encounters where participants produce moral objects and considerations. Missing, then, in much sociology of morality is an account of the situated process by which actors make moral phenomena—​including values and judgments—​ relevant and consequential in interaction. Interactional processes do not simply mediate between preexisting entities: the process by

22  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self which actors engage one another is not merely connective, but constitutive of their situated selves; and not just their selves, but the situation too. This is not to say that actors don’t bring their personal traits—​biographies, preferences, values, dispositions—​to their interactional encounters. Rather, each encounter imposes its own relevance constraints and involvement obligations independently of such traits, while at the same time creating an interactional context in which they may become socially relevant, contingent on local particulars of the situation (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1964). Accordingly, we cannot properly understand moral actions until we examine them in the interactional settings where persons assemble moral objects, including sense and self. Such assembly (production, construction, recognition) requires cooperative work by two or more parties adhering to tacit rules that, because they are publicly available, observable, and accountable, cannot be found in the private cognitions or personal traits of individuals. Rather, moral objects are created based on shared, publicly witnessable practices and commitments grounded in the interaction order of a society (Rawls 1987). For these reasons, recent trends in the sociology of morality, such as importing ideas like dual processing from cognitive psychology, can only take us so far toward illuminating moral action. What is needed, in our view, is an alternative approach that does not treat cognition as generative of action but rather, in the tradition of George Herbert Mead (1934; cf. Joas 1996), C. W. Mills (1940), and other interactionists, as a phase of action embedded in the structures of interaction. It is here that cognitions become socially relevant and procedurally consequential for social outcomes (Edwards 1997; Schegloff 1996). In sum, a principal task of this book is to respecify moral action in terms of interaction.3 While our ambitions are relatively modest—​after all, we focus on a single setting (Milgram’s lab in 1961–​1962), and one that is in many respects unusual, at that—​our approach is, we think, an important counterbalance to dominant assumptions and current limitations in the science of morality.

Three Exemplars in the New Sociology of Morality To further set the stage for our interaction order approach, here we review three exemplary lines of research in the new sociology of morality. Though recent research does not necessarily adopt these approaches uncritically

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  23 (e.g., Barnard 2016; Vaisey 2021), they (with Pierre Bourdieu) have arguably set much of the terms of contemporary debates in sociology about morality. Limitations of these approaches remain key weaknesses of sociology of morality today (Abbott 2020; Luft 2020). We associate each line of research with a descriptive label and an exemplary scholar: (1) morality as justification, which we identify with the work of Ann Swidler; (2) morality as tacit cognition, identified with Stephen Vaisey; and (3) morality as conceptual background, identified with Gabriel Abend. In what follows, we first provide an overview of each body of work, followed by a constructive critique (Problems and Prospects) that helps situate our own argument.

Morality as Justification In her highly influential work on the relationship of culture, values, and social action, Swidler (1986, 2001) draws on classical and contemporary pragmatist sources to argue for a conception of morality as ex post facto accounts and justifications that actors produce for their actions. Following Mills (1940), she argues that actors base accounts in a “vocabulary of motives” that furnishes acceptable or reasonable reasons for lines of action. She positions herself in opposition to the conception of values that was dominant in the postwar decades and associated with the thought of Talcott Parsons.4 According to Swidler and other critics of Parsons (e.g., Heritage [1984] 2013; Lizardo 2016; Wrong 1961), the Parsonian theory of values posits that actors internalize value dispositions through socialization and later act on these values in interaction. On this view, values behave like causal agents, and actors are reduced to mere “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel’s [1967] term) who passively comport with them. Interaction is treated as an epiphenomenon of underlying value orientations, and values seem to “leap from the social system straight into the individual’s psyche and back out” (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003, 736) with no account of the intermediary processes by which this occurs. By contrast, Swidler conceives of actors as creative agents using values as resources for making sense of and justifying actions. Values are part of a “cultural toolkit” that actors draw from to construct repertoires of action that can be adapted to various situations. These repertoires are grounded in cultural scripts, which model types of action and modes of justification, and culture-​bound schemas and frames that actors learn and then use to define

24  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self situations and decide on lines of conduct. According to Swidler (2001), culture is “weakly coherent,” meaning that instead of deriving from an underlying code or set of principles—​the position popularly attributed to Parsons and propounded, in modified form, by Geertz (1973) and Alexander (2003)—​it is made up of overlapping elements that can be combined in diverse, locally relevant ways to motivate and account for practices. Swidler (2001, 2008) argues that we know more culture than we can say in words, a point also made by Giddens’s (1984) distinction between “practical” and “discursive forms” of action, but that this culture does not cause us to act as we do; rather, it constitutes tacit know-​how that is differentially activated across situations. Overall, Swidler understands the relationship of agency and structure as one of structured constraint. Institutions and other structures shape the ways that actors use culture by cueing or otherwise making relevant specific cultural repertoires in particular settings (cf. DiMaggio 1997). In this way, the weakly coherent, fragmentary pieces of culture that make up the society can be made to cohere at the local level. But in no sense do these pieces of culture determine or cause action; instead, they provide tools that actors make use of to explain to themselves and others why they acted as they did. Culturebound schemas and frames shape how situations are perceived and engaged, with vocabularies of motive and cultural scripts providing the moral language in which socially acceptable accounts can be formulated.

Morality as Tacit Cognition Recent work on morality as cognition grows out of dissatisfaction with the Mills-​Swidler approach to moral beliefs and actions. According to Vaisey (2008, 2009), Swidler has an externalist conception of culture and values, one that locates the source of moral (and other) action outside of individuals themselves. “While one’s internalized repertoire of cultural knowledge or skills may impose limits on the range of possible actions, the new view of culture places the impetus for action outside the person” (Vaisey 2008, 606). Vaisey calls Swidler’s externalist approach the “new view” of culture to contrast it with the older, internalist view of culture commonly associated with Parsons and Weber, which he calls the “Socratic model” because it conceives of actors as deliberators whose “beliefs about good and evil, right and wrong, worthy and unworthy that they have internalized from

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  25 their societies . . . motivate the choice of some actions over others” (Vaisey 2008, 604; cf. Lizardo 2017). Vaisey argues that neither of these approaches is adequate to the task of explaining why people do what they do. That is, Swidler and others in her tradition can explain how actors account for their actions after the fact, but they have little to say about why they take those actions in the first place. Vocabularies of motive might furnish actors with explanations for their own behavior, but these folk accounts are not enough for analytical purposes. Sociologists, according to Vaisey, want to know why actors really act as they do, which means going beyond folk explanations to the mechanisms that drive social action. In an influential American Journal of Sociology article, Vaisey (2009) advocates a cognitivist approach to morality, culture, and values. Drawing on research in cognitive psychology, he argues for a “dual processing model” of cognition and social action. This model originates in the work of Daniel Kahneman (2011) and has antecedents in the philosophy of language (e.g., Ryle’s [1949] distinction between knowing how and knowing that) and of science (e.g., Polanyi’s [1958] 1962 distinction between tacit and declarative knowledge). As noted earlier, the model (in its most basic version) posits that cognition occurs at two levels: “level one” cognition happens outside of conscious awareness, whereas “level two” cognition is accessible to consciousness. Much work in experimental psychology has shown that actors are often not aware of their reasons for behaving as they do. For example, experimenters have devised ways to influence level-​one cognition that effectively bypass subjects’ conscious awareness (e.g., through subliminal messaging) but nonetheless tacitly affect their actions (see Wilson [2004] for a review). Yet, when subjects are asked to give accounts for why they acted as they did, their explanations show that they are unaware of the effects unconscious processes had on their behavior, so that the reasons they give for their actions do not reflect their real reasons for engaging in those actions. Vaisey and others (e.g., Lizardo 2017) have applied this model to social action, as noted, arguing that our motives for acting as we do operate largely outside our conscious awareness and so do not show up in the accounts we produce. It follows that when Swidler asks actors to give reasons for their actions, those actors are not providing the real reasons for their actions, but rather socially acceptable accounts drawn from a vocabulary of motives. Such accounts might name folk mechanisms as causes, but these are different from actual causes, which according to Vaisey reside in the organization of the brain and nervous system. For Vaisey, people internalize

26  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self tacit moral values and dispositions through socialization, a process that occurs largely outside of conscious awareness. These dispositions shape the level-​one cognitive processing that generates behavior, for which we then produce level-​two declarative accounts. In short, Vaisey posits that motives are not mere resources for making sense of social action but are in some sense causal mechanisms that generate actions outside of ordinary awareness.

Morality as Conceptual Background A third exemplar, which we associate with the work of Abend (2014), problematizes the other approaches by stepping back and asking what we mean when we talk about moral goods. Abend notes that different disciplines—​psychology, philosophy, sociology—​have differing conceptions of morality that correspond to different ways of studying it. He draws on ordinary language philosophy to identify the presuppositions that underlie different research programs, arguing that we need to explain where moral goods come from and what the universe of moral goods properly consists of before we can answer the questions that have historically concerned scholars of morality. We need also to establish the scope conditions of approaches to morality, specifying what they can address but also what they necessarily leave out. And he reminds us that not all goods are moral goods: some goods are moral, some are not, and which goods are deemed moral varies across time and place. Whereas Swidler and Vaisey take the existence of moral goods for granted, Abend urges us to ask where these goods come from in the first place. Abend’s conceptualization of morality is multifaceted, positing a historically situated moral background of shared, taken-​for-​granted assumptions and expectations against which everyday practices and moral discourses take shape. He distinguishes three foci of moral inquiry—​practices, beliefs, and the moral background—​arguing that while the background has largely been ignored by other scholars, it is crucial, as it underlies both moral practices and beliefs/​norms. For this reason, he distinguishes “first-​order morality” from “second-​order morality,” arguing that practices and beliefs/​norms belong to the first order while the background constitutes the second order that makes the first order possible.

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  27

Problems and Prospects Despite their differences, Swidler and Vaisey share key assumptions about the relationship between individual and society. Although Swidler focuses on accounts while Vaisey focuses on neuropsychological mechanisms, both subscribe to what we described earlier as an individualistic conception of social action. On this view, traceable back to Auguste Comte (Rawls 2005; Turowetz and Rawls 2021b), society emerges through an aggregation of individual actions; the focus is on the individual and their interpretation of reality, and the problem is to explain how separate individuals manage to coordinate their actions to produce social order. Vaisey and Swidler’s conceptions of social and moral action share this dualistic view of self and society. They begin by separating agency from structure, and then ask how individual agents operate under conditions of structured constraint: what structural “cues” trigger or activate or make relevant schemas and scripts? How do agents understand and respond to institutionalized rules and norms, and how are these responses influenced, either by hidden motives or by cultural repertoires? A major problem with this way of proceeding is the risk of circularity: by not specifying the constitutive work through which the moral character of identities and situations is produced in the first place, it assumes precisely what needs to be explained. Regarding Vaisey’s cognitivism, we agree with recent critiques of moral intuitionism for its failure to adequately take situational variation into account. For instance: The features of situations shape judgments and actions as each situation contains its own meanings and expectations, sometimes even built in the process of interaction itself. Even our social identities are situationally situated as different aspects of our selves can be rendered more or less relevant depending on features of the situation. (Luft 2020, 4)

Moral cognition, whether conscious or not, is always situated moral cognition.5 This means that theory and analysis of moral behavior require close examination of the context of its occurrence, where context is necessarily created by two or more people in interaction: be it on the street, in a survey interviewer-​respondent conversation, or elsewhere.

28  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self For such reasons, our approach analyzes the reflexive relationship between “situationally situated” identities and the situations they inhabit, how context is created in interaction, and how problems of moral relevance and meaning are worked out by participants in real time. As Chapter 2 explains in detail, we follow Rawls (1996), Garfinkel (1946, 1963, 1967), Goffman (1983), and Durkheim ([1893] 1984, [1912] 1995) in inverting the usual (Western) conception of the self–​society relationship so that the social comes first.6 This means, among other things, that there are no moral agents apart from moral situations: in constituting situations as moral, actors simultaneously constitute themselves and one another as moral agents. Insofar as cognition has a role to play here, it is one that is thoroughly embedded in interaction. Accordingly, we would intervene in Swidler and Vaisey’s debate by resituating it in nonindividualistic, noncognitivist terms that emphasize what actors do together to make sense, self, and situation, as opposed to emphasizing the contents of actors’ minds or the social structures they inhabit. When we do this, dualisms like structure-​agency, material-​ideal, and subject-​object dissolve, as it is no longer a question of relating two different kinds of things—​individuals and societies—​but explaining how both arise through a common process, interaction. Turning to Abend, we’ve seen that a distinguishing feature of his approach is its treatment of morality not only as a resource for analysis but also as a topic of inquiry in itself. Abend asks what we mean by “moral goods,” how we come to constitute some objects as moral and others as amoral. In this respect, his approach resonates with ours. However, whereas his method for answering this question, and the model of society on which it is based, prioritizes accounts and concepts over practices, ours puts practices front and center. That is, rather than granting concepts and accounts a certain precedence over the practices they describe and account for, we follow Durkheim ([1893] 1984, [1912] 1995) in viewing concepts/​accounts as subordinate to and parasitic on practices. Moral concepts are social objects that arise through shared practices, and to the extent that they are institutionalized, it is because actors continually do the work of institutionalizing them. Once they are made, they need to be continually remade, or they cease to exist. Concepts describe, generalize, and rationalize practices (provide warrants and grounds for them) but do not generate practices. What needs to be explained, we think, is how it is that we have moral objects about which concepts and discourses can be produced. Moral concepts—​whether in a first-​order foreground or second-​ order background—​are not generative of moral objects. They can reflexively

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  29 elaborate those objects, certainly, but it is interactional practices that create objects in the first place.7 Because Abend’s (2014) moral background is conceptual, it follows that he privileges concepts over practices. In this respect, his approach has much in common with Michel Foucault’s early “archaeological” period, in that it seeks to specify something like the epistemes—​which include the very criteria for distinguishing true from false, right from wrong, good from bad, and so forth—​that action necessarily presupposes and instantiates in practice. This approach has the advantage of specifying the scope conditions of moral inquiry in time and space, allowing for a description of what morality is and can be under particular socio-​historical circumstances. But it also creates new problems. In particular, it reifies morality into two hierarchical levels, raising questions about how concepts (higher level) relate to practices and beliefs (lower level). Another problem is infinite extend-​ability: there is no a priori reason to stop at a “second order” that governs first-​order content—​ why not posit third-​, fourth-​, or nth-​order conditions (and subconditions)? In the end, although Abend rightly problematizes other approaches’ unreflective treatment of morality (i.e., their failure to articulate its character and conditions of possibility), we do not think he fully succeeds in articulating an alternative. Our interaction order approach, by contrast, does present such an alternative, grounding morality in constitutive interactional requirements for making sense and self (Rawls 1987) and explaining how situations and identities achieve their moral character. We elaborate this argument at length in the next chapter, where we describe the interaction order tradition and its approach to moral action in detail. For now, we turn to the other major body of scholarship that we are concerned with in this book: the Milgram paradigm.

The Milgram Paradigm Our study of morality and Milgram treats his experiment as an empirical case study of morality in an actual, concrete situation of social interaction: Milgram’s lab. Many overviews of the Milgram paradigm in social psychology have been published. Here, we provide a selective review to orient nonspecialist readers in this literature (see Gibson 2019, Chapters 1–​2, for more extensive review).

30  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self The original “obedience” experiments occurred in 1961–​1962 at Yale University, where Milgram was a newly hired assistant professor.8 The basic design was influenced by his experience in graduate school in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. There, he worked as an assistant to visiting professor Solomon Asch, who had conducted now-​classic social psychological studies of conformity in judgment in the 1950s. As Milgram recognized, [Asch’s] influence is certainly apparent in my work. I particularly admire his technique of systematic experimental variation. We differ in that he is concerned with judgments, cognitions, and the realm of thought. My own interests center on the social act as the crucial observational focus. (quoted in Blass 2004, 67)

Throughout his career, Milgram remained committed to this situationist perspective in social psychology, one that focused on morally charged actions: electroshocking an innocent person versus Asch’s subjects’ reporting on line lengths (Benjamin and Simpson 2009). His strong cultural (though not religious) identification as a Jew, together with his late 1950s dissertation research on cross-​cultural conformity and desire to better understand the events of the Holocaust, provides a further backdrop to his creation of the obedience research paradigm (Russell 2011). Although Milgram developed 23 conditions in which he manipulated variables such as proximity of Learner to Teacher, presence of Experimenter, and number of Teachers (Perry et al. 2020), the situational constant was a confederate Experimenter directing the Teacher to deliver increasingly severe electroshocks to another participant (the confederate Learner). Contrary to what Teachers were led to believe, no shocks were actually delivered to the Learner. After pilot runs in 1960–​1961, almost 800 individual trials comprising the 23 conditions were conducted during 1961–​1962, Milgram’s second year at Yale, with adult participants—​ mostly men, but using women for one experimental condition—​aged 20–​50 from New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut.9 Milgram published a variety of findings dealing with relationships between the variables (e.g., proximity) and rates of obedience (see Chapter 3 for more on the experimental conditions). The most general result was that Teachers—​largely irrespective of individual characteristics such as level of education, age, socioeconomic status, personality and disposition, and gender—​displayed a far greater propensity to fully obey the Experimenter (representing “malevolent authority”) by delivering the shock generator’s

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  31 maximum current of 450 volts than either pilot subjects or psychiatric experts had predicted (Milgram 1963, 1974).10 However, recent archival research has challenged the credibility of Milgram’s findings. For instance, although he suggested (1963) that about 65% of Teachers ended as Obedient, Perry (2012, 10) reports an overall disobedience rate of at least 60% (only 40% Obedient), using Milgram’s own data. Similarly, Perry et al. (2020, 97) find only 44% Obedient overall. Following the 1963 paper, controversy erupted with newspaper headlines and editorials, Yale’s psychology faculty dividing on the ethics of the project, and Baumrind’s (1964) ethical critique in the American Psychologist.11 Along with similar concerns about controversial practices in medical research, the outcry and subsequent debate contributed to the rise of the institutional review board (IRB) as a formal and permanent institution in American universities mandated to protect the welfare of human research subjects and preempt legal threats to universities’ reputations and resources. Milgram received both widespread praise for the ingenuity of his research and sharp criticism for alleged callousness toward the participants. He published several responses (Milgram 1964b, 1974: appendix) and was formally or informally defended by leading social psychologists such as Roger Brown, Muzafer Sherif, and Gordon Allport (his dissertation chair at Harvard). The “Milgram paradigm,” then, refers to the social psychology of obedience to authority, a primarily experimental and psychological research area that was effectively initiated by Milgram’s experiments, his series of papers on this research (1963, 1964a, 1965a, 1965c, 1967), and his Obedience film (1965b) and book (1974).12 Despite the fame of this work, the ethical controversy over the research that began with Baumrind’s (1964) critique prevented the kind of widespread experimental development of Milgram’s approach that characterized other pioneering midcentury social psychological experiments, as conducted, for example, by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, and others. Although the Milgram literature is large, many of its empirical contributions have faced the obstacle of having to creatively rework the original experimental design for ethical reasons. There is a correspondingly great deal of conceptual discussion and controversy over the internal and external validity of the original experiments and their ethics. Several partial replications, however, were carried out in the United States, Australia, Jordan, and Germany, with the results generally corroborating Milgram’s original findings. Miller (1986) provides a thorough survey of this early

32  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self literature. Milgram himself, who died in 1984, left the development of obedience research to others after the publication of his 1974 book, having moved on to other areas of interest in social psychology. In 1995, a special edition of the Journal of Social Issues was dedicated to Milgram studies. Relevant to our book are featured papers by Andre Modigliani and François Rochat, at the time both at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, focusing on social interaction, defiance, and resistance in Milgram’s lab.13 This focus stood in stark contrast to the almost uniform emphasis on Obedient outcomes at the time, and to a more general tendency in the Milgram paradigm to neglect the lived experience of Milgram’s Teacher-​participants and their concrete practices for engaging in the experiment.14 In those papers and others (e.g., Rochat and Modigliani 1995, 1997), these authors demonstrated a sensitivity to the interactional and sequential dimensions of resistance, pointing out that such attention is uncharacteristic of the Milgram literature and, indeed, of social psychology in general: The paradigm routinely used in social psychology to analyze social behavior has led us to overlook some important factors that shape the outcome of confrontations between authorities and subordinates. In particular, it has led to overlooking the dynamically evolving features of the encounter itself. (Modigliani and Rochat 1995, 108)

Empirically, Modigliani and Rochat (1995) performed a content analysis on 34 sessions (plus two others) from Milgram’s Condition 23, in which the experiment was relocated from Yale University to a shabby office in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Inquiring into the temporally developing nature of obedience and defiance, they found support for their hypothesis that “the sooner in the course of the experiment a subject begins to show notable resistance, the more likely he will be to end up defiant” (107). The investigation yielded six types of increasingly strong resistance to authority displayed by the subjects (115). Although our analysis of forms of resistance in the experiment (Chapter 4) reworks such categories, based as it is on a much larger and more detailed collection of recordings and transcripts, we are indebted to Modigliani and Rochat and their prior efforts in this area. Likewise, our analysis of the relationship between type of resistance and early versus late timing of resistance builds on these authors’ work. However, despite their commendable

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  33 attentiveness to the details of the situation experienced by Milgram’s subjects, they admit that their research is “based on limited transcripts” of the original sessions (Rochat and Modigliani 1995, 209). In Parts II and III, we seek to overcome this limitation by using a much larger database of transcripts and the more fine-​grained methodology of conversation analysis (see Chapter 3), which allows us to address what Modigliani and Rochat (1995, 109) called “diverse patterns of interaction . . . mutually generated by the experimenter and subject,” and how “the outcome of an experimental trial is jointly constructed through a dynamic and emergent process.”

The Milgram Renaissance The last 15 years have seen renewed interest in the Milgram paradigm by a younger and international cohort of researchers, with original contributions by Gibson (2013b), Perry (2013), Reicher and Haslam (2011; Reicher et al. 2012), Russell (2011), and others. A 2009 issue of American Psychologist featured Jerry Burger’s paper on his 2006 two-​condition partial replication of the experiment, the first such replication in the United States in several decades (Miller 2009), with paper-​length commentaries by a variety of veteran contributors such as Blass (2009), Elms (2009), and Miller (2009). More recently, several other journal special editions have centered on contemporary Milgram research and commentary (e.g., Theory & Psychology 2015, British Journal of Social Psychology 2018). Whereas the overall thrust of older studies in the Milgram paradigm—​ starting with Milgram (1963) and predating Burger’s 2006 replication—​was to abstract, if not eviscerate, Teachers’ practices (especially resistance: Gibson 2013a; Modigliani and Rochat 1995; Perry 2013) from their situated origins in order to make visible global patterns of “obedience to authority,” the Milgram renaissance has featured a variety of cross-​discipline methodological approaches, often serving revisionist purposes vis-​à-​vis the traditional paradigm’s conventional wisdom. In addition to experimentalists replicating or innovating within the classic paradigm (Burger 2009; Dolinski and Grzyb 2016; Dolinski et al. 2017; Reicher, Haslam, and Smith 2012), archivists have reconceptualized the evolution of Milgram’s experiments (Russell 2011), analyzed many audio recordings documenting experimental behaviors (Gibson 2013a; Hoffman, Myerberg, and Morawski 2015; Kaposi 2017) and postexperiment debriefing interviews (Gibson et al. 2018; Perry

34  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 2013; Turowetz and Hollander 2018), and interviewed former participants (Parker 2000; Perry 2013). Moreover, new theories of Milgramesque behavior have emerged (Gibson 2019; Hollander and Turowetz 2017; Reicher and Haslam 2011; Russell and Gregory 2011), challenging older explanations (Milgram 1974; Mixon 1989; Orne and Holland 1968). Of the new theories of Milgramesque behavior, the most prominent has been “engaged followership” (Reicher and Haslam 2011). Haslam and Reicher challenge Milgram’s “agentic state” explanation of Teachers’ compliance with the Experimenter’s commands. Whereas Milgram posited that Obedient Teachers became instruments of the Experimenter’s will, passively conforming to his directives, Haslam and Reicher argue that, to the contrary, these Teachers were engaged followers of the Experimenter who actively colluded with him. According to the theory, rooted in the social psychological paradigm of identity theory (Reicher and Hopkins 2001), Obedient Teachers complied with the Experimenter because they identified with him, his aims, and/​or the scientific values he embodied. Thus, for Haslam and Reicher, cognitive processes of identification explain Obedient compliance. We address engaged followership at length in Chapter 6, where we argue that although it can account for the actions of a minority of Teachers, it cannot explain those of the majority, who we find complied because they trusted that no real harm would come to the Learner. More generally, we argue that no single, existing theory of Milgramesque behavior can fully account for Teachers’ actions, and that in the end, the evidence points to there having been multiple processes of compliance at work.

Conclusion This chapter has situated our project in relation to two bodies of research: the science of morality (especially the new sociology of morality) and the Milgram paradigm. Though these areas have not previously engaged one another in detail, we propose that they have much to learn from each other. The sociology of morality has demonstrated the centrality of social meanings, identities, and situated practices for explaining morality and moral action. To the extent that Milgram scholars have addressed these matters, they have done so largely through a psychological lens, neglecting the irreducibly social and interactional dimension of moral cognition and conduct (an exception is Gibson 2019). Among other things, this has meant

Moral Science and the Milgram Paradigm  35 overlooking the fundamentally social competencies involved in performing actions like complying with and resisting directives, the relational and sequential organization of those actions within the experiment, and how in designing them, Teachers oriented to (competing) social and interactional obligations to the Experimenter and the Learner. Thus, we think the sociology of morality offers a valuable corrective to the narrowly psychologistic emphasis of much of the Milgram paradigm. At the same time, however, we have observed that sociologists of morality have tended to neglect the constitutive role of interaction in producing the moral character of situations. The Milgram experiments are instructive in this regard: the interactional trouble produced by the experiment, and the ways Teachers managed it, constitute a perspicuous example of how situations and identities achieve meaning and moral character. In particular, close analysis of the experiments shows precisely how a situation may come to have moral implications in the first place, how those implications arise within the turn structure of interaction, and how outcomes depend on whether participants explicitly treat them as moral problems. In treating the situation as a moral problem, participants constitute themselves as moral agents; conversely, in ignoring or rationalizing the trouble, participants risk the very possibility of sense and self—​the central moral goods of interaction—​leaving themselves open to accusations of immorality. This reflexive relationship between moral identities and situations, in turn, points to a central theme of this book: interaction is not merely a secondary relationship among preexisting identities, meanings, and situations, but rather the very site of their production, and so must be central to any viable explanation of these phenomena. In the chapters to follow, we aim to contribute to both the sociology of morality and the Milgram renaissance through a detailed analysis of moral action in the interactional context of Milgram’s lab. The next chapter provides a detailed exposition of the interaction order tradition in which our argument is grounded, as well as introducing core ideas from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis—​Trust Conditions, accountability, sequentiality—​on which we elaborate further in Chapter 3.

2 Morality in the Making of Sense and Self As in the civil disobedience tradition (e.g., Antigone, Thoreau, or Gandhi), Milgram’s experiment centered on a moral dilemma between compliance with institutional directives and conscientious resistance (Turowetz and Hollander 2022).1 Many participants indeed treated the situation as morally salient, especially those who ended with the Disobedient categorization, but also numerous Obedient ones. Accordingly, it is striking that few social psychologists have made extensive connections between Milgram’s lab and the science of morality (but see Kaposi 2017; Pigden and Gillet 1996). A crucial reason for this oversight, we think, is an ongoing blind spot in much social psychology regarding the moral obligations that underlie human social interaction. In Milgram’s lab, explication of the relationship between the moral requirements of the interaction order and social action is essential for further insight into a setting that so many participants treated as morally charged. Likewise, better understanding of Milgramesque behavior has important implications for the social scientific study of morality. Milgram’s experiment dramatically illustrates the trouble that arises when fundamental interaction order obligations to recognize and support the selves of fellow interactants come into conflict with the demands of an institutional activity. Moreover, the experiment demonstrates the socially dependent character of moral problems: situations have moral implications if the achievement of sense and self—​the central moral goods constituted through interactional practices—​is threatened. In such cases, something of moral value is at stake. This is true even if the participants do not explicitly formulate the threat to sense and self as a moral problem, as opposed to, say, an ordinary trouble. Much social scientific research on morality runs into problems of circularity by treating actors and situations apart from interaction, such that they attempt to explain interaction in terms of its products (see Introduction and Chapter 1). Our position, by contrast, is that self, situation, and moral meaning are assembled in interaction. In other words, interaction is not a process that brings separate entities—​self, meaning, situation—​into relation Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0003

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  37 with each other in variable ways, but rather the vehicle through which those entities are created as recognizable social facts. This is not to say that nothing exists outside of interaction, but that such things, be they symbols, cultural objects, or concepts, arise from interaction instead of preceding it, and only achieve definite social meaning when they are “pulled down” into interaction (cf. Rawls and Turowetz 2019a), so to speak, and made sense of (and with) across a sequence of turns. Accordingly, our interaction order approach to Milgram’s experiment shows how moral issues were implicated in the interactional processes of achieving sense and self among the Teacher, Learner, and Experimenter, and how Teachers’ ways of dealing with these issues mattered greatly for the outcome of the experiment. Our argument about morality in Milgram’s lab is as follows. The Teacher and Learner initially collaborated with the Experimenter to perform the experiment, with the Teacher reading word pairs and shocking the Learner when he failed to remember them correctly. However, as the Learner began to cry out in pain and protest, tension emerged between the Teacher’s orientation toward an obligation not to harm the Learner, on the one hand, and an obligation to perform the experiment, on the other. This tension, we argue, reflects a fundamental incompatibility between (1) the Teacher’s interactional obligations to the Learner, which include mutuality and reciprocity and require that the Learner’s complaints be remedied, and (2) their interactional obligations to the Experimenter, which, in addition to reciprocity and mutuality, include an expectation of deference to his authority. These two sets of obligations proved to be mutually exclusive: prioritizing reciprocity with the Experimenter meant ignoring the Learner’s complaints, while prioritizing reciprocity not only with the Experimenter but also with the Learner—​with all participants in the interaction—​meant resisting the Experimenter. Faced with this contradiction, each Teacher responded with a mixture of compliant and resistive practices that prioritized either the one set of obligations or the other. In the process, Teachers’ ways of coping with Milgram’s experimental design (discussed at length in Chapter 3) of increasing shock levels and scripted actions by Learner and Experimenter gradually became categorizable as either Obedient or Disobedient. The Teachers whom Milgram categorized as Obedient were those who for the most part accepted, or at least did not overtly challenge, the working definition of the situation as an ordinary, benign study of learning and memory in which no one was really being harmed. These Teachers oriented to interactional trouble, but most did not explicitly treat that trouble as a moral

38  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self problem. In postexperiment debriefing interviews (see Part III), a majority of Teachers would go on to explain that, despite their misgivings, they acted as they did because they trusted that the Experimenter was competent and would not allow harm to come to a subject. If the Experimenter assured them that the Learner was not being harmed—​as he did before the experiment when explaining that “the shocks may be painful but there is no permanent tissue damage,” and again during the experiment when Teachers expressed concern about the Learner’s wellbeing—​they believed they could take him at his word. By contrast, the Teachers whom Milgram categorized as Disobedient were those who ultimately would not or could not make sense of the incongruity they experienced. Rather than defer to the Experimenter, they repeatedly marked his failure to meet his interactional obligations to the Learner and themselves through sustained acts of resistance. Unlike most Obedient Teachers, the Disobedient ones explicitly treated the trouble as a moral problem, displaying their unwillingness or inability to continue in the face of the Learner’s protests and ultimately refusing to go on with the experiment. In doing so, they constituted themselves as moral actors and the experiment as an immoral violation of basic interaction order commitments. In sum, whether Teachers were categorized as Obedient or Disobedient depended on the turn-​by-​turn interaction among Teacher, Experimenter, and Learner. More specifically, the outcome depended on whether Teachers explicitly treated the Milgram scenario as morally problematic and, if so, how successful their resistance was in countering the Experimenter’s directives to continue. Those Teachers who ended as Disobedient prioritized their moral obligations to the Learner and Experimenter over their interactional obligations to the Experimenter alone. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we present the interaction order framework for our analysis of what occurred in Milgram’s lab. Drawing on classic scholarship by Durkheim, Goffman, and Garfinkel, and its more recent extension by Rawls and others, we elaborate the argument sketched above and in the book’s introduction regarding the interaction order, its grounding in Trust Conditions, its relationship to the moral order of a society, and its specific relevance for understanding the actions of Milgram’s participants. Second, we describe the sequential context of situated moral practice in Milgram’s experiment and the emergence of what many Teachers treated as a serious moral dilemma. Third, we further explicate the moral order that underlies everyday interaction within a society. Following

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  39 Turowetz and Maynard (2010, 504), we distinguish between the underlying morality of interaction, which consists of the tacit moral expectations that pervade everyday life within a given society, and morality made evident in particular interactions, which arises when members of that society make violations of those expectations explicit by invoking rights and wrongs, obligations, entitlements, blame, and so forth. That is, they openly orient to a breach of Trust Conditions. Finally, we illustrate these points empirically with an example from Milgram’s lab.

Morality and Interaction: The Interaction Order Tradition in Sociology In this section, we elaborate our interaction order framework and its connection to the specific questions about Milgram and morality addressed in this book. Interaction orders consist of shared ground rules and practices to which participants orient and display their commitment as they cooperatively assemble social objects (Goffman 1983; Rawls 1987, 2022). Unlike natural objects—​for example, rocks, molecules, earthquakes—​which exist apart from human action and are on a fundamental level indifferent to it, social objects, including sense and self, must be cooperatively constituted through the practices of two or more participants in interaction. As such, mutual commitment to the ground rules of an interaction order is a moral imperative, since without it sense and self—​the central moral goods produced and supported by an interaction order—​cannot be achieved. Garfinkel (1963) called basic interaction order requirements Trust Conditions, and Goffman (1959) called them Working Consensus (Turowetz and Rawls 2021a). In any society, members expect one another to display a commitment to Trust Conditions as they engage in the constitutive practices—​such as requesting, questioning, answering, offering, inviting, assessing, and accounting—​necessary to produce social objects, ranging in scale from mundane greeting exchanges to categorical identities like race, class, and gender. Violating such expectations produces interactional trouble, and that trouble has moral implications. This does not mean that participants will necessarily formulate the trouble as a moral problem, but however they deal with it, if it is not resolved and a mutually intelligible working consensus is not achieved, the interaction can quickly fall apart, leading to confusion and in some cases outright hostility. Where mutual commitment to an

40  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self interaction order is lacking, or where parties cannot (e.g., due to incompetence) or will not (e.g., due to disinterest or discriminatory bias) fulfill their involvement obligations (Goffman 1971; Rawls 1990), interactions may fail dramatically, and with them the possibility of mutual understanding. Such failures are potentially damaging to the selves of participants, and people hold one another accountable for preventing them. Extending the work of Garfinkel (1967, 2002) and Goffman (1959, 1967), Rawls (1987, 1990, 2010, 2022) has elaborated the interaction order’s theoretical bases and implications. She has also traced its origins to Durkheim’s ([1893] 1984) Division of Labor in Society. In that and later work, Durkheim sets out a theory of society as composed of social facts, including self and meaning, made cooperatively in interaction. Whereas philosophy has traditionally posited the individual as the foundation of society, Durkheim turns this view on its head, arguing that society is a prerequisite for the existence of individuals, and that a shared commitment to ground rules and practices—​ social contract—​necessarily precedes the creation of formal agreements and cooperative courses of action (Rawls and Turowetz 2019a, 2019b). It follows that social interaction, rather than the actions of individuals—​or their attitudes, beliefs, etc.—​must be the primary unit of analysis. Likewise, Durkheim ([1912] 1995) locates the origin of beliefs, symbol systems, and categories of thought in collective social practices. His study of the religions of traditional societies is dedicated to showing that systems of belief and classification arise from shared ritual practices, and that these systems must be remade at regular intervals to keep existing. In other words, beliefs and representations must be explained in terms of practices, not vice versa. Importantly, such practices do not require or derive from any prior consensus of beliefs, values, or symbols, but rather from mutual commitment by society’s members to interaction order conditions or ground rules (Rawls 1996; Rawls and Turowetz 2019a). Durkheim ([1893] 1984) argues that in modern “organic” societies characterized by pluralism and heterogeneity, social solidarity and coherence are achieved not through sameness—​as in traditional societies—​but through the difference and specialization epitomized in the division of social labor. Because members cannot depend on shared values and traditions, meaning must be made on the spot in any given interaction, and always for “another first time” (Garfinkel 1967, 7). For this reason, mastery of practices for making meaning and self, and a commitment to using them appropriately,

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  41 is especially crucial in modern societies: they are the glue, so to speak, that binds the society together (Rawls 2005). According to Durkheim, although the absence of shared values makes modern societies more fragile than traditional ones, it also makes them more dynamic, creating opportunities for innovation and equality that do not exist where novelty and creativity are treated as threatening the shared values of the group. But for these possibilities to be realized, it is necessary that situated collective practices, and not customs, traditions, or folkways, serve as the basis for social solidarity. The division of social labor must be permitted to achieve its own self-​regulating equilibrium. Inequality, argued Durkheim, is inimical to this process: unless individuals can meet as equals and engage one another on the basis of local relevancies, as opposed to trans-​situational identities—​with the power imbalances those identities often entail—​modern societies cannot realize their potential and will succumb to various “abnormal” states (see Durkheim [1893] 1984, 310–​28, on “Abnormal Division of Labor”). By contrast, where equality and inclusivity prevail, Justice can be achieved. Durkheim ([1893] 1984, 315–​16, emphasis added) puts it thus: If societies attempt—​ and they should attempt—​ to eliminate external inequalities as much as possible, it is not only because the undertaking is a noble one, but because in solving this problem their very existence is at stake. For they cannot continue to be sustained unless all their constituent parts are solidly linked, and solidarity is only possible on this condition. Thus we may predict that doing justice will become still more absolute as the organized type of society develops.

Rawls (2005) argues that what Durkheim means by Justice is equivalent to what Garfinkel (1963) means by Trust Conditions and Goffman (1959) by Working Consensus,2 and that Durkheim was describing the interaction order—​albeit without empirical specification of the practices involved—​ in his argument about the constitutive requirements of modern societies. Building on Goffman’s (1959, 1964, 1983) writings in particular, Rawls (1987) distills and elaborates four key aspects of the interaction order, which we summarize here and illustrate with respect to the Milgram experiment. First, self does not simply exist but must be “continually achieved” in interaction (Rawls 1987, 136). This means that selves and identities exist only insofar as they are recognized and affirmed by others. One can attempt to

42  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self project any identity one likes, but it will have no social reality unless others ratify it. Or as Goffman (1967, 85) puts it: While it may be true that the individual has a unique self all his [sic] own, evidence of this possession is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labor, the part expressed through the individual’s demeanor being no more significant than the part conveyed by others through their deferential behavior toward him.

Second, the constraints composing the interaction order—​that is, our obligation to recognize others’ selves and make sense together—​“define not only the interaction order but may also resist and defy social structure” (Rawls 1987, 136). This point is especially critical to the argument we make in this book. While the interaction order, as the primordial domain of face-​to-​face sociality, is often conflated with social structures such as the workplace, polity, family, and so forth, they are in fact distinct, with the latter being parasitic upon the former. That is, the institutional structures that permeate the fabric of everyday life grow out of and depend upon the workings of the interaction order (Drew and Heritage 1992). Social structures make practices accountable in characteristic ways—​for example, in terms of normative role relations between employer-​employee, teacher-​student, leader-​follower—​ such that a boss may accountably direct a worker to perform a task that she would not have the authority to direct them to perform in a nonwork setting. It matters that the person in charge is issuing these directives as an employer, teacher, or leader, as opposed to just anyone “off the street.” That said, the practices themselves (e.g., of directing and complying, questioning and answering, etc.) are rooted in the interaction order. Institutions and other social structures facilitate the organization and ordering of practices, but do not create them.3 Wilson (1991, 27) puts the matter succinctly in describing social structures as consisting of “matters that are described and oriented to by members of society on relevant occasions as essential resources for conducting their affairs and, at the same time, reproduced as external constraining social facts through that same social interaction.” While institutional structures are thus “loosely coupled” (Goffman 1983) to the interaction order, they are not coextensive with it. And because institutions incorporate status hierarchies that allocate differential control over sanctions, their operations can come into conflict with the reciprocity requirements of the interaction order in which they are grounded. For

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  43 example, normative rules in institutional settings may prevent an employee from protesting or questioning a boss’s directive—​that is, initiating repair and soliciting the kind of feedback required for mutual understanding—​ and so compel her to go along with orders that make no sense to her or that she finds morally problematic. This is not to say that institutions necessarily create inequality: insofar as institutional practices align with the reciprocity requirements of the interaction order, it is perfectly possible for persons in asymmetric roles (e.g., boss-​employee) to avoid compromising one another’s selves. However, problems in mutual understanding and sensemaking arise when participants in an institutional setting use their role and its prerogatives as a basis for refusing reciprocity and mutuality to others. In Milgram’s lab, we find the Experimenter using his status as director of the experiment as a resource for making Teachers’ actions accountable4 in institutional terms. For example, he invokes the structural requirements of the experiment to pressure Teachers to comply with his directives. Insofar as Teachers deferred to the Experimenter and his invocation of normative requirements, they created the illusion of reciprocity with someone who was denying reciprocity both to them and to the Learner. This meant going along as if everything made sense, in effect creating the appearance of sense from nonsense. In this respect, Obedient Teachers were like subjects in an experiment conducted by Garfinkel (1967, 79–​94) who were instructed to seek advice for personal problems from someone who they were told was a psychotherapist. When the “psychotherapist” answered all their questions with what were in fact random yes/​no responses, the subjects nonetheless managed to make sense out of the answers they received by searching for and finding evidence of a pattern that confirmed their preconceptions about the therapist’s identity and motives. As Garfinkel (1967, 94) puts it: Through the work of documenting—​i.e., by searching for and determining pattern, by treating the adviser’s answers as motivated by the intended sense of the question, by waiting for later answers to clarify the sense of previous ones, by finding answers to unasked questions—​the perceivedly normal values of what was being advised were established, tested, reviewed, retained, restored; in a word, managed.

Obedient Teachers similarly maintained “the perceivedly normal values” of the Experimenter’s actions: many took his competence and benign motives

44  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self for granted, along with the ordinariness of the interaction, and expected that later events—​for example, definite confirmation that the Learner was not in any real danger—​would clarify the sense of the Experimenter’s directives and resolve the apparent contradiction between what he and the Learner were telling them. Third, “interaction is conceived of as a production order wherein a commitment to that order generates meaning” (Rawls 1987, 136–​37). In a nutshell, without a mutual commitment to an interaction order, shared meanings cannot be achieved. Either interactions will fail to generate meaning and self or they will appear to do so, but at the cost of excluding the people or groups denied access to the resources (e.g., status, wealth, social networks; cf. Turowetz and Rawls 2021a, 3–​4) required for full participation in the interaction. This is another important point for the argument we make about Milgram’s lab. An interaction can appear to succeed—​to achieve a recognizable objective or progress without falling apart—​even where participants have not been achieving mutual understanding and reciprocity requirements are not satisfied, for example when there is evident trouble but participants are unable or unwilling to give one another the feedback necessary to repair misunderstandings. In an unequal interaction (e.g., involving racial discrimination or gender bias), one or more participants might be made into someone they are not but not be able to rectify this because coparticipants cannot be counted on to perform the repair process. The participant may be sanctioned for speaking up or have their remarks misinterpreted and treated as evidence of incompetence, insubordination, uncooperativeness, etc. (Rawls and Duck 2017, 2020). Thus, participants with less institutional power may feel the need to “go along to get along,” giving the impression that “everything is working just fine” when in reality, the interaction only appears to be working because the experience of one or more participants is being ignored (Turowetz and Rawls 2021a, 4). The Milgram case provides a powerful illustration of this point: in prioritizing the aspect of Trust Conditions requiring reciprocity with the Experimenter, Obedient Teachers accepted—​albeit often in turns marked by hesitations and other signs of trouble—​the working consensus that everything was essentially okay, even as the Learner protested that he was being harmed and the Experimenter ignored his complaints and pleas. Fourth and finally, “persons must commit themselves to the ground rules of interaction for selves to be maintained” (Rawls 1987, 137). The self is fragile; its enactments can easily fail. For this reason, persons protect their

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  45 self by adhering to a tacit social contract with others: they are expected to show “deference” toward the self that is projected by others, and in turn expect such deference toward their own self ’s “demeanor” (Goffman 1967). Persons are expected to and routinely do assume that others are who they appear to be, until and unless evidence to the contrary appears. Further, even when faced with such evidence, they may attempt to reconcile it with what the other has claimed, only concluding that they are not credible when their efforts at reconciliation have exhausted themselves (see Garfinkel 1967). Goffman (1959, 13, emphasis added) describes the obligation to recognize the other’s identity, and accept their self-​presentation at face value, as a moral one: Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him [sic] in an appropriate way. Connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is.

As shown in later chapters, virtually all of Milgram’s Teachers took for granted, at least initially, that the Experimenter was who he claimed to be and that the experiment was a benign study of learning and memory. One of the things distinguishing Teachers ultimately categorized as Obedient from those ultimately categorized as Disobedient was the latter’s eventual refusal to accept that the situation was as it initially appeared; they no longer presumed the Experimenter’s competence, or even benign motives, as evidenced by their successful efforts to stop the experiment.

The Sequential Emergence of a Dilemma in Milgram’s Lab One of this book’s major arguments is that Milgram’s experiment created a strong tension for Teachers between the constitutive requirements of the interaction order, with its demands for reciprocity and pursuit of mutual understanding, and those of the experiment, with its hierarchical organization and expectation that subjects will follow the Experimenter’s directives. This tension emerged over a sequence of interactional turns—​analyzed in detail in Part II—​where Teachers’ expectations about the ordinary character of

46  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self the experiment were breached, producing trouble with moral implications that Teachers had to manage. The result was what Disobedient Teachers, and some Obedient ones, treated as a serious moral dilemma that demanded resolution. When Milgram’s experiment begins, all participants cooperate to constitute the setting as “a study of learning and memory.” Teachers orient their actions toward this objective and expect the other participants, Experimenter and Learner, to do so as well. The Teacher expects that their coparticipants share their orientation to Trust Conditions, such that they can take the “morality of appearances” (Goffman 1959, 12–​13) for granted and presume that everyone is who they say they are and that they are acting in ways that are consistent with their situated identities. The Teacher thus takes for granted that the Experimenter does not intend to harm the Learner and that he would intervene if the Learner or Teacher experienced undue distress. However, as the experiment proceeds, these expectations are increasingly challenged. By the 150-​volt shock level, many Teachers have pointed out the Learner’s distress to the Experimenter, but the latter provides no remedy to the pain cries and protests, instead simply telling the Teacher to proceed with the experiment. The Experimenter offers accounts (scripted “prods”: see Chapter 3) to support his actions, telling the Teacher that even though it may seem the Learner is being harmed, the shocks are not actually harmful, and (if the Teacher continues to resist) that “the experiment requires that you continue.” Consequently, Teachers increasingly find themselves faced with an apparent contradiction between indications that the Learner is being harmed and the Experimenter acting as if nothing is wrong. The situation becomes ever more troubled as the Experimenter continues to ignore his interaction order obligation to Learner and Teacher alike to perform repair and restore mutuality. In the end, many Teachers coped with the situation by going along with the Experimenter’s treatment of the situation as a benign, if uncomfortable, study of learning and memory in which no one was being harmed. Though Milgram designed the experiment to maximally violate that assumption, most Teachers categorized as Obedient—​especially the 75% we describe as maximally Obedient, who displayed very little resistance (see Chapter 3)—​ did not treat the situation as one where moral action was relevant or necessary, or where reciprocity needed to be restored. Nevertheless, for many Teachers in both outcome groups, the strain of reconciling their interaction order obligations to the Learner with their ongoing collaboration with the

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  47 Experimenter was palpable. Milgram (1963, 6) famously highlights this tension in his first published report about the experiment: Many subjects showed signs of nervousness in the experimental situation, and especially upon administering the more powerful shocks. In a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment.

This description, which so disturbed many of Milgram’s colleagues at the time (Baumrind 1964; Blass 2004), memorably illustrates the distress Teachers experienced as they tried to resolve the tension between the Experimenter’s treatment of the situation and the Learner’s reactions to the shocks. Teachers who ended as Disobedient refused to continue accepting the tension, treating it as a contradiction and demanding that the Experimenter cooperate with them to resolve it. When the Experimenter pressured them to go on, they presented themselves as unable or unwilling to do so, resulting in discontinuation. These Disobedient Teachers explicitly treated the situation as having developed in a morally problematic way that called for moral action. To the extent that such participants were “heroes,” their heroism consisted in refusing to “go along to get along,” displaying unwillingness or inability to sustain a working consensus that was increasingly breaking down.

Interaction’s Moral Implications: Managing Threats to Sense and Self in Everyday Life and in Milgram’s Lab As we’ve seen, one longstanding approach to morality in the social sciences and humanities is to begin with a moral dilemma or issue and then ask how individuals cope with it. This is standard practice in psychology and philosophy, but it is also common in sociology, where researchers ask subjects interview or survey questions about their values and attitudes regarding moral issues in the abstract: e.g., euthanasia, divorce, theft, distinguishing right from wrong, etc. (e.g., Baker 2020; Inglehart and Baker 2000; Vaisey 2009). Alternatively, they may present subjects with hypothetical vignettes involving moral dilemmas and ask them what they “would do” or to evaluate what an actor did or “should” do under the circumstances

48  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self (e.g., Knobe 2003; Swidler 2001). In such cases, researchers are not looking to the social situation to find out what makes it morally implicative. The tendency is to assume that morality can be defined independently of particular social circumstances (Durkheim [1893] 1984; Rawls 2009), such that researchers assume a situation has moral relevance and then ask how individuals cope with it. As a result, they do not ask why the situation has moral implications in the first place—​that is, what exactly is being threatened or is at stake—​and consequently also fail to consider how the moral character of the situation (as “good,” “bad,” etc.) is an achievement rather than a given. Likewise, we have observed, following Garfinkel (1967, 35), that a social order is always in some sense a moral order. Actors have a moral obligation to make sense and self together—​an obligation that is moral because sense and self are moral goods that cannot exist without it—​which requires orienting to the same constitutive practices and expectations as others and holding them (and oneself) accountable for doing so. That is, to be engaged in interaction is to be engaged in an enterprise that rests on moral commitments to others and to the situation, and which produces outcomes with moral (or immoral) implications, whether participants recognize them as such or not. In everyday situations, such commitments, which form the bedrock of social order, remain tacit features of the seen but unnoticed background of ordinary conduct and discourse. Following Turowetz and Maynard (2010, 504), we describe these moral commitments as the underlying morality of interaction, as distinct from moral issues made evident in particular interactions, which arise when the moral order of interaction is violated. The morality of interaction becomes visible in the trouble such violations produce, specifically in the ways participants mark it through practices that range from implicit to explicit: from hesitations, delays, and disfluencies to overt formulations of moral issues that invoke claims about rights, wrongs, entitlements, obligations, responsibility, blame, etc. In the course of everyday life, most trouble is quickly repaired, so that the need for a moral commitment to interaction order obligations remains largely tacit/​implicit. But where repair is not performed or is not successful, the trouble interferes with the making of sense and self, threatening the interaction and the situated identities of its participants in ways that are more likely to be made evident. This is a serious problem, because if sense and self cannot be made, neither can any other social objects, including those to which traditional moral goods and values—​all of which presuppose the existence of sense and self—​may pertain. Accordingly, when the

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  49 expectations on which participants depend for achieving sense and self are violated, it can produce confusion, anxiety, and consternation. It can also lead participants to question their grasp of the rules, of the situation, of who their coparticipants are and what they are doing together—​in short, their competence. When interactional trouble is not immediately repaired or repair is not feasible, participants are confronted with a threat to sense and self that they must somehow manage. In such cases, they may explicitly treat the trouble as a moral problem. Alternatively, they may treat the trouble as an ordinary problem, rather than a moral one, and attempt to continue the interaction without explicitly acknowledging any threat to sense-​and self-​ making—​or even deny that there is a threat to sense and self at all. When this happens, the interaction may continue, but at a cost to the selves of the participants.5 A key difference between Milgram’s Obedient and Disobedient Teachers was which of these alternatives they chose in response to the threat to sense and self that confronted them. Teachers in both outcome categories marked interactional trouble in the form of delays, hesitations, and disfluencies—​ trouble that resulted from violations of the underlying morality of interaction and was embodied in the Learner’s negative reactions to the shocks. What is distinctive about the Obedient Teachers is that the moral implications of the trouble they so marked remained largely tacit: following delays, hesitations, and disfluencies, most quickly returned to cooperating with the Experimenter, implicitly accepting (or at least not challenging) the working consensus that everything was essentially okay and that the trouble was nothing out of the ordinary. Even among the minority of Teachers whom we call “minimally Obedient” (see Chapter 3) because they did explicitly treat the trouble as a moral problem, we find participants eventually dropping their objections and returning to “business as usual,” even if reluctantly. The actions of the minimally Obedient Teachers illustrate an important point about moral resistance in the Milgram setting: it was not enough to explicitly treat the trouble as a moral problem at any given point in the interaction. To be categorized by Milgram as Disobedient, that treatment had to be sustained over a series of turns in which the Teachers treated their obligations to the Learner and Experimenter as contradictory and resisted continuation. In this respect, Disobedient Teachers distinguished themselves from their Obedient counterparts in both the frequency and content of their resistance, particularly some of the accounts they produced for refusing to continue the experiment.

50  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self For example, it was overwhelmingly Teachers categorized as Disobedient rather than those categorized as Obedient who accounted for their resistance in classically moral terms (see Chapter 5). Some invoked the Golden Rule: [If] “I was sitting over there I would hope that the teacher would not go up above this point” (0311, Disobedient, transcript lines 400–​401; see below and Chapter 5). Others invoked a more general moral imperative: “I refuse on moral grounds (0.2) to continue. (0.3) because it is painful for him” (2032, Disobedient, lines 247–​49). Against the Experimenter’s insistence that the trouble was benign, Disobedient Teachers came to treat it as a moral issue: what was happening was not right, and the Learner’s distress required immediate remedy.

An Example: “I Would Hope That the Teacher Would Not Go Up Above This Point” While we present detailed empirical examples in later chapters, here we provide a discussion of the “Golden Rule” example referenced above to illustrate our argument about moral action in the Milgram setting. In doing so, we make use of conversation analysis (CA), which we discuss at length in the next chapter and which constitutes our primary approach to data analysis in this book. For present purposes, we can describe CA as the study of audio/​ video recordings of naturally occurring interaction that makes use of close observation and specialized transcription techniques to adduce the tacit rules and procedures participants use to assemble recognizable social actions (Clayman and Gill 2009). Our example involves an ultimately Disobedient Teacher who is being asked to give a “105 volt” shock to the Learner and is resisting doing so (he previously delivered a 90-​volt shock). At this point, the Learner (L) has already produced response cries (45V, 90V, “Ow!”) that suggest he finds the shocks painful. The Experimenter (E) directs the Teacher (T) to continue (“Please continue,” line 1), and after the Teacher resists (line 3), the Experimenter states, “Well, it is absolutely essential that you continue” (line 5). (Note on transcription: underlined words indicate vocal emphasis; colons indicate syllable stretching; numbers in parenthesis indicate pauses timed in tenths of a second; an equals (=​) sign indicates a turn that is latched to the immediately prior one.)

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  51 (1) [0311 Disobedient, 90V, 386]6 1 E: Please continue 2

(0.2)

3 T: We:ll, (0.5) Uh we’re getting up to a lot of voltage. 4

(0.4)

5 E: Well it is absolutely essential that you continue. 6

(0.5)

7 T: Well it may be essential but this man over here is 8

getting a pretty good shock in the arm every time.

9

((turns to L))

10

(0.9)

11 E: Well y:es this is part of thee thing uh experiment=​ 12

He has got to be uh (0.2) uh receive a punishment

13

you see.

14

(0.5)

15 T: Yeah I know. But I think ninety volts is enough 16

punishment.

17

(1.7)

18 T: I was sitting over there I would hope that the 19

teacher would not go up above this point,

20

((turns to L))

In response to T’s report that they are “getting up to a lot of voltage” (line 3), E insists on the necessity of continuation (line 5: “absolutely essential”). The design features of E’s turn are common in exhibits of disagreement or disaffiliation: in everyday conversation, a well-​preface at the beginning of a turn often signals disaffiliation with an immediately prior turn (Schegloff and Lerner 2009), as does format-​tying—​repeating parts of the target turn (here T’s repetition of E’s well)—​a practice commonly employed in arguments (C. Goodwin 2006). We can also observe that E’s “absolutely essential” formulation may attempt to make T’s actions accountable (i.e., intelligible, warrantable) in terms of the structural requirements of the experiment, which include an interactional obligation to defer to E and comply with his directives. It matters here that E is not speaking as just anyone, but as the person in charge of the activity about which T is complaining; under the circumstances, he can claim entitlement to define what is essential for the experiment, direct T and L to continue, and expect them to do so—​none of which he could do if he were just anyone “off the street.”

52  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self At lines 7–​8, T responds with another well-​prefaced turn, which reports on the state of “this man” (L). In topicalizing how the experiment is causing the suffering of another human being, T displays an orientation to his and E’s interaction order obligations not to harm L. As such, he treats the situation in moral terms—​as one in which continuation would potentially harm L. Notably, he also acknowledges his interactional obligation to E (“Well it may be essential . . . ,” line 7) but hearably prioritizes his commitment to L over his commitment to the activity in which he and E are engaged. Following a silence at line 10, E counters (lines 11–​13) with a turn that minimally acknowledges T’s objection (“Well yes . . . ”) but then invokes the requirements of “thee experiment,” phrasing them in the imperative mood (“he has got to . . . ”). In effect, E reasserts that the structural requirements of the experiment take precedence over any discomfort the participants may be experiencing. Again, T responds by acknowledging the requirements of the experiment (“Yeah I know . . . ,” line 15) followed by a challenge (“ninety volts is enough punishment”). Finally, after getting no response from E (line 17), T invokes a version of the Golden Rule ([If] “I was sitting over there I would hope . . .”). In this exchange, we can see T’s orientation to the contradiction between his interactional obligations to L and his interactional obligations to E leading to open disagreement between himself and E. T’s interaction order obligations to L require that he treat L as a fellow self to whom he owes reciprocity (Goffman 1967; Rawls 1987). The interaction order’s demand for reciprocity openly conflicts with E’s insistence, in the name of the experiment, that T continue to administer shocks regardless of L’s well-​being. We can also see how the situation is constituted as an explicit moral problem through T’s practices and the responses he receives. By acknowledging L’s suffering and displaying empathy (invoking the Golden Rule: see Chapter 5), T is treating the interaction as morally problematic in a way that challenges the definition of the situation in play. Were E to accept T’s challenge, he would be required to take remedial action by attending to L and/​or stopping the experiment. Instead, E counters that L’s suffering is a necessary part of the experiment, which can only succeed if L “receive[s]‌a punishment” (line 12). Later in the interaction (not included in transcript), E will insist that the shocks are not “really” harmful. We will have much more to say about these matters in later chapters. For now, we can observe that Teacher and Experimenter are orienting to two competing relevancies, the Learner’s well-​being versus the needs of

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self  53 the experiment; that these relevancies are increasingly incompatible; and that the moral character of the situation is achieved through the concerted practices of all participants.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have developed our argument about morality and Milgram. Building on the work of Durkheim, Garfinkel, Goffman, and Rawls, we described the constitutive involvement obligations of the interaction order and the problems that can arise when social structures conflict with them. Drawing on Rawls (1987, 2010) in particular, we argued that the Milgram scenario created a stark tension between the moral requirements of the interaction order and structural requirements of the experiment, forcing Teachers to choose between two incompatible lines of action: attending to the Learner versus going along with the Experimenter. In the end, Teachers’ categorization as Obedient or Disobedient depended on (1) whether they explicitly treated the situation as morally problematic and, if they did, (2) their ability to sustain that orientation in the face of the Experimenter’s treatment of the situation as an ordinary experiment of learning and memory. Consideration of these divergent lines of action and their consequences drives home our fundamental point that the moral character of any situation is a social phenomenon that must be achieved in and through interactional processes. In Milgram’s lab, Teacher and Experimenter could (and frequently did) appeal to the protocols and requirements of the experiment to justify actions that appeared to harm a fellow participant. All too often, Teachers suppressed or ignored interaction order obligations to the Learner as they rationalized the pursuit of experimental ones. This is an instructive example of how social structures can impinge on interaction order requirements: when participants in an interaction prioritize institutional or categorical identities (Teacher, Experimenter) over their interaction order obligation to treat coparticipants with reciprocity, the achievement of sense and self is threatened and all may be harmed, though the brunt of the harm tends to be borne by the most vulnerable parties. We see this in everyday situations where categorical identities such as race, class, and gender interfere with reciprocity requirements, producing trouble that is then rationalized and justified in terms of those same categories, often at the expense of those in socially marginal positions (e.g., racial

54  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self minorities, low-​income people, immigrants, the mentally ill) (see Maynard and Turowetz 2022; Rawls and Duck 2020; Turowetz and Rawls 2021a). The interactions in Milgram’s lab developed over an extended sequence of turns in which lines of compliance and resistance were built up gradually, rather than all at once. Accordingly, we must attend to the turn structure of interaction to explain precisely how acts of resistance and compliance, which all participants displayed to varying degrees, culminated with Teachers prioritizing reciprocity either with the Experimenter exclusively or with all participants, including the Learner. In Part II, we explore these themes in detail. In particular, we will investigate at length the forms of resistance that Teachers enacted and further clarify their relation to situated moral action. Our aim will be to demonstrate an analysis of Milgram’s lab that treats interaction as the primary unit of inquiry and explanation, one that grounds compliance, resistance, and morality in the concerted conduct of all parties to the situation.

PART II

MOR A L IT Y IN MI LG R A M’S L AB: IN T E R AC T ION DU R I NG T HE E X PE R IM E NT

3 The Sequential Organization of Resistance in Milgram’s Lab Resistance by Teachers to the Experimenter’s directives is central to our analysis of moral action in the Milgram experiments.1 This is because we have been treating Milgram’s experiment as a case study in the sociology of morality: resistance in the institutional setting of the experiment marks interactional trouble that has moral implications—​though as we have seen, not all Teachers explicitly treat the trouble in moral terms. In resisting, Teachers orient to the Learner’s negative reactions to the shocks as a problem for immediate continuation, and thereby threaten the experiment’s “progressivity” (“action responses that further the project underway”: Schegloff 2007, 58). Resistance is thus (virtually always) a response to the Learner’s reactions, in the form of pain cries and protests that make remedy relevant and may orient to the potential relevance of responsibility and blame for pursuing either continuation (the Experimenter’s projected course of action) or remedy (the Learner’s projected course of action). Resistance has been widely commented on in the Milgram literature (Kaposi 2022). Yet, despite its pervasiveness across the experiments, virtually all previous analyses of resistance have overlooked the details of its sequential organization.2 Because resistance is achieved in and through those details, neglecting them has yielded an incomplete picture of the nuanced ways in which Teachers successfully or unsuccessfully challenged the Experimenter. The present chapter treats Teachers’ resistance as a situated accomplishment grounded in the turn organization of three-​party interaction among Teacher, Learner, and Experimenter. Here and throughout the book, we specify that turn organization and the practices for its accomplishment using conversation analysis (CA), an approach to analyzing social interaction that is grounded in ethnomethodology (EM) and employs audio and video recordings of naturally occurring interactions, along with specialized transcripts that capture their granular details, to identify tacit rules and procedures to which actors orient as they collaboratively assemble social Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0004

58  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self phenomena. Accordingly, as a preliminary to our treatment of resistance, we provide a succinct overview of EM and CA that should make it easier for readers unfamiliar with these approaches to follow the details of our argument. The chapter also provides a detailed description of the institutional context—​Milgram’s lab—​where resistance took place, and in terms of which it must be analyzed. That context, which formed the background against which the experiment progressed, was an ongoing accomplishment by and for the participants, who continually renewed it as they performed their assigned tasks in interaction with coparticipants and nonhuman media, including the shock generator, the printed list of word pairs, and symbols of authority such as the Experimenter’s lab coat and his Yale affiliation (cf. Gibson 2019, 115, 121, 154). However, as the interaction became increasingly troubled, its context became more and more ambiguous, with Teachers struggling to make sense of what was happening and whether their actions were harming the Learner. The way they made sense of this ambiguity would prove decisive for the outcomes they eventually achieved. The chapter is organized as follows. First, we provide the reader with an overview of EM and CA (for comprehensive treatments, see Stivers and Sidnell 2012; Turowetz, Hollander, and Maynard 2016). Next, we introduce the Milgram archival data analyzed in Parts II and III of the book. We then describe the institutional context of the Milgram experiment, including its 23 conditions, the script Milgram’s confederates followed and how it was amended over time, and the experiment’s sequential organization. Finally, we discuss resistance, the counter-​resistance brought to bear on it by the Experimenter, competing sequential relevancies to continue or discontinue, and patterns of when (at what voltage level) Obedient versus Disobedient Teachers mobilized resistance. In the process, we set up our analysis in Chapter 4 of distinct forms of resistance, and in Chapter 5 of self-​versus other-​attentive resistance.

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis In this section, we build on our discussion of ethnomethodological concepts from the previous chapter, where we described the relevance of Trust Conditions and accountability to the interaction order tradition in sociology and the study of morality. In particular, we describe EM’s overall

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  59 stance on the relationship between behavior and cognition and its themes of accountability, reflexivity, and indexicality. We then provide a short primer on CA, our primary approach to data analysis in this book, that explains its basic methodological precepts and should help readers follow the analysis to come. Originating in the work of sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1946, 1948, 1963, 1967), ethnomethodology is the study of shared practices through which a society’s members produce social order and intelligibility, both in everyday and in institutional settings. These practices, which Garfinkel termed ethnomethods (or members’ methods), are used to assemble the social facts—​ in Durkheim’s ([1893] 1984) sense (see Garfinkel 2002)—​composing a given society. Mastery of them is necessary for being considered a competent, bona-​fide member of that society. As with Wittgenstein (1958), and in contrast to cognitivist theories of sociality deriving social phenomena from individual minds, ethnomethodology focuses on the “scenic” (Garfinkel 1963, 190), publicly available, observable, and reportable features of members’ procedures for making sense together. In other words, EM locates meaning in shared, locally organized practices, rather than private mental states. This is not to deny the existence or importance of such states—​ethnomethodology is not a variant of behaviorism (Coulter 1983, 1989)—​but rather to emphasize that their social significance depends on how they are made relevant and consequential in situated interactions (Suchman 2007). Private affective or cognitive states only have social meaning through the ways we witnessably display them in relation to relevant others. We achieve mutual intelligibility in interaction by recognizing and responding to shared enacted practices—​both verbal (e.g., questioning, requesting, complimenting, assessing, promising, inviting, accusing, repairing, etc.) and nonverbal (e.g., gesturing and other bodily practices). To the extent that cognitive or affective states are practically and socially consequential, then, it is as they are displayed in such practices, and not by way of their bare “presence” in individuals’ psyches or brains. Turowetz, Hollander, and Maynard (2016), drawing on Maynard and Clayman (1991), identify three key themes in ethnomethodology: accountability, reflexivity, and indexical expressions. Accountability involves members’ use of accounting practices to provide for the intelligible and warrantable character of social actions—​that is, to make them accountable. As such, it is a pervasive and ongoing concern for members, and “activities whereby members produce and manage settings

60  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those things account-​able” (Garfinkel 1967, 1). This means, among other things, that actors design social actions “with reference to how [they] will be recognized and described” (Heritage [1984] 2013, 140) and are consequently “continuously oriented to the possible ways that one might get into trouble and be held accountable for something one does or says. One is abidingly concerned for ways that one or another’s account can crystalize the intelligibility of some interaction” (Lieberman 2013, 33–​34). One regular occasion for the production of accounts is a breach of Trust Conditions, which can prompt members to produce explanations for what went wrong and why as they attempt to formulate the character of the trouble. Like other descriptive accountings, these accounts for trouble become features of the situation they describe (see reflexivity below). Reflexivity means that any action depends for its intelligibility on its relation to any and every facet of the multifarious practices in which it is accountably embedded. It captures the temporal, sequential organization of interaction whereby actors continually update their understanding of the situation based on immediately prior events and show themselves to have done so. Consider, for example, the turn structure of interaction: each successive turn displays an understanding of what just occurred, providing others with the information they require to take their own next turns, and so forth. Reflexivity entails that the meaning of an action depends on the response it receives, the actor’s response to that response, and so forth, with meanings and situated identities evolving over the course of an interaction. Regarding accountability, with which it is closely connected, reflexivity also entails that Teachers’ accounts about a situation are at the same time constitutive of that situation. All actions, however innocuous, may continually feed back into the situation’s definition—​what it’s taken to be—​with “no time out” (Garfinkel 1967, 7–​9). Finally, indexical expressions are utterances or embodied actions that can only be understood with reference to the context of their production. Linguists have identified several such expressions, including such words as “this,” “that,” “there,” and “here” (Bar-​Hillel 1954). Garfinkel’s innovation was to radicalize the traditional conception of indexical expressions, arguing that all social action is inherently indexical (Heritage [1984] 2013). The meaning of an action, that is, cannot be separated from, and is identical with, the concrete occasions of its production and the responses it receives (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970).

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  61 CA has its roots in ethnomethodology (Maynard 2013; Stivers and Sidnell 2012), and particularly the early collaborations of Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks, who first met at Harvard in 1959, where they both held research fellowships (cf. Rawls and Turowetz 2019a, 2019b). A few years later, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson would join Garfinkel and Sacks in their enterprise. From ethnomethodology, CA takes its focus on how an intelligible, known-​in-​common society is constituted by its members. Conversation analysts use audio and video recordings of naturally occurring activities, along with specialized transcripts of these activities, to study how people use embodied talk and gesture to collaboratively accomplish concrete social actions such as greeting, offering, inviting, and more. Like ethnomethodology, CA regards as empirically demonstrable the following sociologically pertinent claims: (1) people’s actions make situations intelligible, familiar, routine, and recognizable; and (2) social order is produced by and observable for participants in the details of these actions. Maynard and Turowetz (2013, 267) list five methodological precepts of CA: “(1) analyzing utterances as actions, (2) engaging in sequential analysis, (3) analyzing participant orientations, (4) regarding interactional detail as a site of social organization, and (5) using both single and multiple episodes along with deviant cases for analyzing phenomena.” We briefly consider each below: (1)  CA analyzes utterances for the actions they perform. A given utterance can do multiple things, such that its lexical-​grammatical content alone is not enough to specify the action being performed (i.e., the meanings of utterances are indexical). Consider a simple utterance like “Hello.” Depending on the circumstances of its production, it may be initiating or returning a greeting; summoning someone (“Hello?!”); repairing a misunderstanding; naming an object (e.g., a song title); flirting; or being used in an exclamatory fashion (“Hello!”). The point is that without examining “Hello” in its context, we cannot say exactly what it’s being used to do. This same logic applies to entities that, unlike spoken utterances, are conventionally considered “private,” including cognitions, attitudes, beliefs, self-​ concepts, etc. As Antaki (2004, 670) observes with regard to discursive psychology, a close relation of CA: “the central feature of . . . discursive psychology is . . . its rejection of a referential theory of meaning, and an insistence that such classically ‘psychological’ (in the sense of internal and

62  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self mental) phenomena like remembering, wanting, and so forth—​the entire lexicon of mental terms—​are in fact only sensible as matters of external, public business, conducted in talk.” On this view, mental entities do not cause actions, but constitute resources through which actions are accomplished and made intelligible. (2)  One of the main distinctions between CA and other approaches to language is its emphasis on sequential analysis. Utterances (and nonverbal actions) are analyzed for how they respond to the just-​prior turn, and for the conditionally relevant next actions they project (e.g., a question projects an answer as its conditionally relevant next turn). Returning to our “Hello” example, should hello occur in response to a first hello, it could be heard as a return greeting; alternatively, if a phone caller is met with silence when an answerer picks up her phone, “Hello?” would be a way of summoning them and checking that they’re available to speak (Schegloff 1968). (3) Like ethnomethodology, CA is concerned with how participants themselves analyze their interactions. Thus, rather than asking how interactions fit with the researcher’s theoretical schema, conversation analysts investigate participants’ observable analyses of the design and implications of their actions. For example, instead of assuming in advance that a social identity such as gender is relevant to a male-​female interaction, CA examines how, and whether, participants orient to it as a situated object. Stokoe (2011), for instance, analyzes a case where a man performs self-​ repair midutterance, replacing his use of “girl” with “woman,” and thereby orienting to the impropriety of using a problematic gender category. A further example: a researcher investigating how science works wouldn’t begin with categories like “realism” and “constructivism” and ask which concept best describes scientific work; instead, the researcher would ask whether and how scientists themselves display, in their actions, realist or constructivist stances toward their work (Lynch 1985, 1993; see also Latour 1987, who observes that scientists switch stances depending on their audience, objectives, etc.). Combined with sequential analysis, a focus on participants’ orientations provides CA with a “proof procedure” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) for grounding analysts’ claims about data. Specifically, to support an analysis of what a given participant is doing, the analyst must show that the participant themself exhibited that analysis in their actions. Thus, returning to the gender example from Stokoe (2011), we can observe in the data how the man, in performing the repair as he did, was orienting to the relevance of

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  63 gender for the interaction. The proof procedure provides a compelling means of validating CA analyses; indeed, since the convention is for researchers to reproduce the transcripts they analyze (see point 4 below), other scholars can dis/​confirm the validity of a given analysis for themselves. (4) CA has shown that even the smallest utterances, sounds, and gestures, from tokens like “mm hmm” and “uh” to nods, can have significant implications for a given interaction. This is because the participants themselves may notice and orient to these objects, making them (potentially) procedurally consequential for, and relevant to, the interaction’s progressivity (Schegloff 2007). Similarly, pauses, silences, overlapping speech, and voice-​pitch contours can also matter for how an action is understood and responded to. To represent these objects in transcripts, CA uses a specialized notation system developed by Gail Jefferson (1974). And, because the sound files from which transcripts are made may be publicly available (or, at least, playable in research settings), other researchers can check the accuracy and reliability of a given transcript. (5)  CA works with collections of phenomena, where the object of interest occurs in multiple interactions, but it can also focus on single cases (Schegloff 1987; Turowetz 2015). When making collections, a researcher begins with audio and/​or video recordings of one or several interactions. Typically, researchers listen to or watch the recordings repeatedly, with minimal preconceptions about what they’ll find. Engaging in unmotivated observation (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), analysts typically search for emergent patterns in data. As CA researchers search for patterns, they make “normalized transcripts” of their data; as opposed to detailed, CA transcripts, which come later, normalized transcripts look a lot like the ordinary transcripts made by researchers in other qualitative traditions. Alternatively, the researcher might begin with a “vernacular action” (Clayman and Gill 2009), inspecting their data for all instances of that action (e.g., questions that project a yes-​or-​no response: cf. Raymond 2003). Whether the researcher starts from unmotivated observations or vernacular actions, the identification of deviant cases plays an important part in how the phenomenon under investigation is conceptualized. Deviant cases are those that don’t fit the researcher’s conception of a phenomenon. Researchers deal with such cases by modifying their conception to accommodate the deviant case or determining that the case isn’t an instance of the phenomenon after all, and therefore doesn’t belong in the collection. This sort of interplay between data and conceptualization is akin to what Katz

64  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self (1983) calls “analytic induction”—​although, as Clayman and Gill (2009, 130) point out, “in CA, the objective is not causal explanation but an analysis that will encompass a practice’s varying occurrences across a range of interactional contexts and contingencies.” In contrast to the variable-​based, probabilistic approach to data analysis long dominant in the social sciences, EM and CA focus not only on variation but also on uniformities, asking how members assemble social actions and objects that can be seen to vary in the first place. Once the necessary features that make an action/​object recognizable have been established (e.g., features that make a question recognizable as a question and an answer recognizable as an answer), it is possible to ask how the action/​object varies within and across contexts. One can even address variation and its interactional consequences in probabilistic terms, as an emerging genre of quantitative CA has begun to do (e.g., Heritage et al. 2007; Stivers and Majid 2007). However, CA maintains that before operationalizing social actions and objects, it is necessary to understand exactly how they’re cooperatively produced in interaction. A further, more important contrast between CA (along with cognate modes of inquiry, such as discursive psychology: see Potter and Edwards 2001) and probabilistic research methods is that the latter treat the ebb and flow of everyday life as noise, looking for and finding order only in statistical patterns obtained by averaging over innumerable local actions, whereas CA follows Sacks’s ([1964–​1972] 1992) postulate that social order may be empirically demonstrable “at all points” of interactional detail. Over the decades, CA has accumulated massive documentation of such everyday order or patterning in a wide variety of social situations in many world regions and languages. It is precisely this everyday interactional structuring, contingently achieved in myriad local interactions, that makes statistical abstraction possible in the first place: for statistical generalization is just one more of the accounting practices—​albeit a highly specialized one—​constitutive of social life.

Data: Archived Audio Recordings Parts II and III of this book draw upon a large collection of transcribed audio recordings of the Milgram experiments (see Table A.1). The data corpus

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  65 consists of 117 detailed transcripts of sessions from five of the original experimental conditions: 2 and 3 (voice feedback and proximity from the proximity series), 20 (women as subjects), and 23 and 24 (Bridgeport and “bring a friend”).3 Conditions 2 and 3 varied the physical and psychological proximity of the Teacher to the Learner. Condition 20 used women as subjects, rather than men. Condition 23 moved the setting from Yale to an office building in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Condition 24 required the Teacher to shock his accompanying friend or family member. Each session corresponds to one subject: the 117 transcripts document the performance of 117 different subjects. Additionally, one of us (Hollander) transcribed parts of two experiments from the Obedience film (Milgram 1965b), one Obedient and one Disobedient. Neither appears in the audio collection. We refer to these as our two “video cases.” Milgram’s subjects were generally not aware of being recorded, although very occasionally in the postexperiment interviews in the collection they claim they entered the lab expecting everything to be recorded. These archival data, along with published materials (e.g., Milgram 1974), form the basis for our exposition of the institutional context of Milgram’s lab in the sections below.

Milgram’s Experimental Design: The Lab Institutional Setting Descriptions of Milgram’s experimental design have been published by many authors (e.g., Blass 2004; Gibson 2019; Milgram 1974; Miller 1986). Additionally, Blass (2009) and Russell (2011) have contributed important paper-​length discussions of its conceptual evolution, documenting its origins in Asch’s conformity experiments and Milgram’s own dissertation research on cross-​cultural conformity in Norway and France (see Chapter 1). Here, we add necessary detail to Chapter 1’s overview of the Milgram paradigm by discussing the experimental conditions and explanatory variables, the cover story, and how Milgram himself understood the research. Our aim is to minimize repetition of information easily available elsewhere, while still giving nonspecialists enough orientation to see how the five conditions from which our transcripts come—​2, 3, 20, 23, and 24—​fit into the larger picture of Milgram’s obedience project. The following synopsis is peppered with archival details, some hitherto unpublished in the Milgram literature,

66  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self concerning these five conditions. We have gleaned such information from the archived recordings of the experiments and of the postexperiment interviews. The “Milgram obedience experiment,” as this research became known, was in reality a series of experiments. Following several months of pilot studies that he conducted with undergraduates at Yale, Milgram drew subjects from the nonstudent New Haven and Bridgeport populations: ordinary people aged 20–​50 from a wide variety of educational, armed-​service, socioeconomic, and white-​ethnic backgrounds.4 In the debriefing interviews, they describe themselves occupationally as mailmen, insurance adjusters, housewives, engineers, salesmen, machinists, hairdressers, social workers, chemists, nurses, and draftsmen, to name a few. Though the popular summary of Milgram’s findings—​that most people will obey commands by a legitimate authority even if these appear to cause harm to another person—​ is not entirely incorrect, it is simplistic. This view is based on his first and most famous obedience publication (Milgram 1963), which is rather sensationalistic and does not emphasize the role of the changing experimental conditions. What Milgram understood himself to have shown was that situational factors under experimental control directly influence rates of obedience to malevolent authority (Blass 2009; Gibson 2019; Milgram 1974). In some conditions, obedience rates were in fact quite low. To influence obedience rates, Milgram manipulated variables such as the relative proximity of the Learner and Experimenter to the Teacher, the number of Teachers and their positioning in a chain of command, the use of a friend or family member of the Teacher in the Learner role, etc. Furthermore, he realized that some of the variables he tested did not appear to markedly influence obedience rates, such as the gender of Teacher. He argued that his findings showed (1) that only some putative causes or correlates of obedience were effective and (2) that effective variables were generally situational in nature, rather than dispositional or ascriptive (Milgram 1974). Milgram further claimed (1974) to be able to explain his findings with an original evolutionary theory stating that human nature is to be understood in terms of a psychological “agentic state.” That is, Homo sapiens are the products of hundreds of millennia of principal-​agent relationships (to use Darley’s [1995] terminology), and it is fairly easy to induce agentship (followership, obedience, compliance) in most people living today. However, Milgram’s grand evolutionary theorizing has been subjected to widespread criticism and is not generally regarded as

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  67 useful in its original form (Blass 2004; see Chapter 6 for more on Milgram’s theory). Experimental design. Milgram carefully planned his massive study of obedience to authority. As with a hit single-​act play on an extended run (Reicher and Haslam 2011), the two confederate actors (see below) and a host of subjects performed it hundreds of times between the early autumn of 1961 and early summer of 1962. Over the course of these months Milgram treated the original design with some flexibility (see our Chapter 7 discussion of “tinkering” in science). For instance, he introduces (what Gibson [2013b] terms) the “forgotten prod” in Condition 2 and then scraps it, occasionally replacing it in later conditions with (what Gibson [2019, 112] calls) the “no further contact prod” (see below). Notwithstanding these modifications, as well as the design variations reflecting the changing independent variables (the 23 conditions), the overall features of the experiment remained constant. Summarizing the cover story and how the experimental session was structured will contextualize our subsequent analysis of sequence organization in the experiments. First, however, we provide background information about the experimental conditions. The conditions. As noted, the 23 conditions developed out of several pilot studies conducted with Milgram’s undergraduate seminar in his first year at Yale, from 1960 to 1961.5 During this time, he realized that most of his student subjects would fully obey the authority figure’s orders to continue to the end of the shock scale, contrary to the predictions of other students and a group of Yale psychiatrists. He grasped the counterintuitive value of this finding and began to develop ideas about particular variables with which to test his ability to control obedience rates. After securing a more realistic-​looking shock machine, hiring Yale psychology graduate student Alan Elms as his assistant, having Elms rehearse the cover story with John Williams (a New Haven biology teacher who played the Experimenter) and James McDonough (a railroad accountant who played the Learner)—​both of whom Milgram hired for their amateur acting experience—​and receiving many responses to his newspaper advertisement soliciting nonstudent volunteers, the first series of experiments commenced in early fall 1961 in the social interaction laboratory at Yale’s Linsly-​Chittenden Hall (Blass 2009; Elms 2009). Although the total number of experiments was in fact 23 (Perry et al. 2020, 95), Milgram’s 1974 book renumbers and condenses them to 18. Below, we describe these 18 as presented in his book (see also Miller 1986,

68  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 40–​62). Milgram ran 40 subjects in each condition (with some exceptions indicated below). The most famous conditions are the proximity series 1–​4, in which Milgram varied the physical and psychological distance between the Teacher and the Learner. The first condition, “Remote,” features Teacher and Experimenter sitting in the same room while the Learner sits strapped to his chair in an adjacent room where he cannot be seen or heard, with the exception of a single episode of pounding on the wall at 300 volts. Condition 2, “Voice-​Feedback,” increased the psychological proximity of the Learner to the Teacher by having the former complain and demand release at scripted voltages, though he is still in the adjacent room. This variation became the baseline scenario that Milgram systematically modified in subsequent experiments. In Condition 3 (“Proximity”), the Learner sits in the same room as the Teacher and protests as in Condition 2, but more aggressively. Condition 4, “Touch-​Proximity,” required the Teacher to force the Learner’s hand down onto a “shock plate” after the latter refused to continue. In a second series of conditions, 5–​11, Milgram established a new baseline scenario. For Condition 5 (“A New Baseline”) he amended the script of Condition 2: now the Learner mentions having “a slight heart condition” as he is strapped into the electric chair (Miller 1986, 47). Condition 6 (“Change of Personnel”) retained this modified script but used actors other than Williams and McDonough to test the effect of a “ ‘milder-​looking’ experimenter” and a “ ‘rougher-​looking’ victim” (Miller 1986, 48). Condition 7 was “Closeness of Authority” and featured the Experimenter issuing his initial instructions, then leaving the room and interacting with the Teacher by telephone. Condition 8 (originally 20), “Women as Subjects,” was the only experiment in which female subjects participated. In Condition 9 (“The Victim’s Limited Contract”), the Learner had all parties agree beforehand that he is to be released upon demand. However, after the session started the Experimenter reneged, insisting that the Teacher must continue and ignore the verbal contract. Condition 10, “Institutional Context,” moved the experiment from Yale to Bridgeport, where it was held in an office building under the auspices of a fictional commercial research organization, “Research Associates of Bridgeport.” In Condition 11 (“Subjects Free to Choose Shock Level”), the Experimenter directed the Teacher to choose an appropriate shock switch for punishing wrong answers, rather than rising incrementally from 15 to 450 volts.

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  69 A final series of experiments was composed of Conditions 12–​16 (“Role Permutations”) and 17–​ 18 (“Group Effects”). In the role permutation series, Milgram modified Condition 5 by only using 20 (not 40) subjects in each condition. He tested the effects on obedience of the Learner demanding to be shocked, an “ordinary man” giving orders and the subject as bystander, the Experimenter as victim, two Experimenters issuing contradictory commands, and two Experimenters with one as the victim. In the group effects series, Milgram examined group dynamics. Condition 17 had “Two Peers Rebel,” and the response of the third peer, the only actual, nonconfederate subject, was then observed. In the final condition, 18 (“A Peer Administers Shocks”), the Teacher role was divided between a confederate who actually flipped the shock switch and the true subject who performed ancillary tasks such as reading word pairs. As noted, our collection of transcripts consists of experiments selected from Conditions 2 (“Voice-​Feedback”), 3 (“Proximity”), 20 (“Women as Subjects,” renumbered by Milgram as Condition 8), 23 (“Institutional Context,” aka Bridgeport, renumbered as Condition 10), and 24 (the Bridgeport variation that required subjects to “Bring a Friend” or family member; the friend was assigned to be the Learner, then in private was told the true nature of the experiment and asked to play-​act the Learner role). The baseline scenario and cover story. As we’ve seen, the baseline scenarios of Conditions 2 (original baseline) and 5 (modified baseline) were very similar. Both unfolded as follows. The subject (T) arrives at the experiment site, where s/​he meets the Experimenter (E) and another putative volunteer (L). E starts instructing the two about the experiment they have come to volunteer in. He delivers a cover story about conducting psychological research on learning and memory, assigns “randomly” the roles of Learner and Teacher and answers any questions they may have. Following these preliminaries, E leads the subjects to L’s station (often in the adjoining room), where L is strapped to an electroshock chair and instructed in how to respond to word-​ pair questions. This is the point in Condition 5 at which L mentions his heart condition. T is then led back to the main room, seated before the shock machine and word list, and instructed in how to perform his part of the experiment. When T and L are ready, E initiates a “practice lesson” with the announcement, “Learner, your Teacher will now read you the word pairs. Try and remember them. Ready? Begin.”

70  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Data extract 1 illustrates how E directs T to start, and T’s reading of the list of word pairs that L is supposed to memorize in a single hearing (see Appendix 2 for transcription conventions): (1) [0209 Obedient, practice 0V, 1]6 1 E: Ready? (1.2) °Begin° 2        (0.9) 3 T: Stro:ng? (0.6) ar:m. (0.9) black? (0.5) curtain 4     (0.6) .hh pu:re,(0.2) milk? (0.8) wa:rm, (0.4) 5        blanket? (0.8) rough (0.3) wood? (0.9) thi:n, 6        (0.4) pai:nt? (0.9) clea:n, (0.4) ya:rd? (0.7) 7    ri:ght? (0.3) question? (0.8) fai:r (0.2) skin? 8    (1.1) wi:ld 7(0.6) country 9        (9.6) ((papers rustling)) 10 T: (Now) I just go o:n and read strong.=​Right? 11

E:

°That’s correct=​°

12 T: =​Stro:ng? (1.2) back (0.8) a:rm? (0.7) bra:nch? 13   (0.5) push: 14 L:   ((flips switch)) 15    (2.6) 16 T: That’s correct,

Milgram intended the practice lesson to familiarize Teachers with the teaching task before the experimental session proper began with a “second lesson.” The Teacher’s tasks in both lessons are the same. They read to L the entire list of correct adjective-​noun word pairs that L is to attempt to memorize. Then T reads the first question: a word list consisting of an adjective and four nouns, one of which is the right answer. If L responds correctly, T announces this fact and moves on to the next question, as in Example 1 at line 16. If L’s response is wrong, T announces this, delivers the shock punishment, and reads the correct answer. T is then to repeat the teaching sequence until L gets all the answers right. L initially responds with a few correct answers, but most of his answers are wrong (per Milgram’s script) and T must move up the series of shock switches. The machine has 30 switches in all, spaced in 15-​volt increments from 15 to 450. After seven wrong answers, T delivers 105 volts. At this point, E announces that the practice lesson is finished and the second lesson will follow the same procedure but with a new list of word pairs. The experimental

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  71 session that ensues ends with either an Obedient outcome (T goes all the way up the machine and flips the 450-​volt shock three times, after which E ends the session) or a Disobedient one (T successfully opposes a minimum of four directives by E to continue). In either case, E then announces, “I would like to ask both you [T]‌and the Learner some questions.” Postexperiment interview and debriefing procedures. Extensive semi-​ structured interviewing and two types of debriefing (deceptive vs. full: see Chapter 7) followed the experimental session. Box 3.1 shows the immediately postexperiment interview and debriefing script that E used.7 E’s interviews are based on this series of questions. Condition 3 is identical in this respect to Condition 2. By April–​May 1962, the time of female Condition 20, the pie of responsibility question (#8) has been dropped. The female Teachers receive full debriefings, whereas the men in Conditions 2 and 3 get deceptive ones (see Box 3.1, component 11). Milgram made this change because he wanted to prevent the women from leaving the experiment in a “panicked” state.8 In Condition 23 at Bridgeport with male Teachers, the interview format is the same as in Condition 20. E does not revert here to the deceptive debriefing of the earlier male conditions, but uses the full version used in the female condition (Turowetz and Hollander 2018). Nevertheless, E does not fully reveal the Yale connection or Milgram’s professorship; he maintains the deception that he is working for a private research firm. During the interviews, E often tells the women that the situation is “very similar” to that faced by a nurse when a doctor tells her to inflict pain. In contrast, the men are told that what they have just experienced is comparable to being in the army and obeying a commanding officer. In all conditions in our corpus, E has cigarettes, coffee, and tranquilizers on hand to calm subjects during interviews. The tranquilizers are sometimes discussed but never actually used in our corpus. The coffee is sometimes offered and sometimes accepted. Cigarettes are often offered by E or produced by T, with both T and E smoking. The three relaxation items are mentioned and used more frequently in the interviews with the women; E often expresses the view that the women may be more emotional and nervous than the men, and that he wants to ensure everyone leaves the laboratory calm and fit to drive home. The women, in turn, sometimes endorse this view and sometimes resist it. Teachers’ sessions are concluded when they leave the premises. The postsession interviews typically last from 10 to 30 minutes.

Box 3.1  Reconstruction of Milgram’s Interview Schedule. (The Experimenter occasionally omitted components or varied their sequence.) (1) “Explain to me what happened and why it happened, treating me as if I didn’t know.” (2)  “Did this experiment have any other purpose that you could think of?” (2a) If defiant: “Do you recall when this experiment was supposed to come to an end? What then do you propose I tell my supervisor, since we did not end when we were supposed to?” (3) [Conditions 2 and 3; later dropped] Schoolroom picture featuring angry teacher, shamefaced boy, and onlooker: “Make up a story about the picture. Who is the most likeable figure, and least likeable?” (4) “Indicate with an x on this scale how painful was the sample shock you received.” (5) “Indicate with an x how painful to the Learner were the highest shocks he received.” (6)  “How high a sample shock would you take right now?” (7) “Were you at all tense or nervous during the experiment? At the point when you were most tense or nervous, how tense or nervous were you?” (8) [Conditions 2 and 3; later dropped] Pie of responsibility: “With the use of this pie, indicate the proportional shares of responsibility, moral responsibility, that we three had for this man being shocked against his will.” (9) [In Conditions 20, 23, and 24, this question follows component 12] Participation assessment: “Indicate on this scale with an x, all things considered, how you feel about having participated in this experiment. The scale runs from very sorry to very glad, with neither sorry nor glad in the middle. (10) Demographics: e.g., name, age, occupation, marital status, education, military service, political party. In Condition 20, also asked of T’s husband, if married. (11) Deceptive debriefing [Conditions 2 and 3]: “Before you leave I’d like to tell both you gentlemen [T, L] that this machine has previously only been used to shock animals like mice and small rats. The verbal designations ‘slight’ to ‘danger’ are for these small animals and are not exactly applicable to human beings. Learner, the amperage is adjusted so the shocks you received were only slightly more painful than the sample shock . . .” (12) Full debriefing [Conditions 20, 23, and 24]: “Actually this man was not being shocked. We were very interested in how you would behave . . .”

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  73

The Sequential Context of Resistance E familiarizes T and L with their experimental tasks by using instructional, directive, and corrective sequencing. In this section, we discuss only those sequence types that appear after E has directed T to start the practice lesson (“Ready? Begin”) and before T displays “first resistance,” a first analyzable instance of opposition to continuation. These types are directive-​response, nonresistive question-​answer addressed to E, and teaching sequences. Directive-​response sequences. A key way in which the three parties constitute the setting as institutional and experimental is through their use of directive-​response sequencing. Directives have been characterized by M. H. Goodwin (2006, 517) as “utterances designed to get someone to do something” (cf. Ervin-​Tripp 1976; Vine 2009). Craven and Potter (2010), distinguishing requests from directives, describe the former as “an action in which one Teacher asks another to do something” and the latter as “an action where one Teacher tells another to do something” (420, original emphases). However, like requests, directives can display various degrees of entitlement and awareness of contingencies concerning the addressed party’s ability or willingness to comply with them (Antaki and Kent 2012; Curl and Drew 2008; Heinemann 2006). Directives make relevant compliance or noncompliance as next action, with prompt compliance being the preferred response.9 The directive-​response sequencing in the experiment clearly draws on Teachers’ noninstitutional, everyday competencies for coping with directives. Their opposition to directives, when it appears (and itself a body of everyday competencies), occurs against this background of familiarity with them. For example, E indicates to Teachers that they are to start the first (“practice”) lesson or second lesson by announcing the scripted directive “Begin”: (2) [0322 Obedient, practice 0V, 1] 1

E:

Ready,=​Begin.

2 3

(1.9)

T: Str:ong, (0.6) ar:m. (1.7) bla:ck (0.8) curtain, . . .

Like many Teachers, here T starts reading the list of word pairs after some delay (line 2). Given the institutional setting to which T attends, such delay is not necessarily structurally dispreferred. Teachers may be getting comfortable in the chair, reviewing the sheet of word pairs on the desk, trying to

74  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self remember what E has instructed them to do, etc. When T provides preferred responses to E’s directives by complying—​performing tasks as prescribed and without “undue” delay—​E does not talk after this initial directive until L starts to demand release (typically at 150 volts) and to declare he will not answer further questions (270 volts). In most conditions (and in all five in our corpus), he sits at a desk behind and to the right of T, observing and taking notes. Nonresistive question-​answer sequences. After the practice lesson has begun, T rather than E may initiate instruction by requesting guidance or confirmation from E concerning how to pursue experimental tasks. T may seek confirmation from E about a projected course of action (“I read this whole list?”) or an explanation about an unexpected feature of the situation (“The buzzer’s still sounding?”). Or T may query E about some other aspect of the situation: in Example 3 below, T delays beginning in order to ask E whether L, seated in the adjoining room, has been properly instructed. (3) [0217 Disobedient, 0V, 203] 1

E: Rea:dy, (3.3) Be:gin.

2

(5.8)

3

T: Does he know: uh-​(0.2) the procedure on this,=​

4

E: =​He just heard me give it to you.=​

5

T: =​Oh I see.

6 E: Alright.=​ 7

T:

=​Mhm,

8 9

(1.9)

T: Blue: (0.9) gir:l (1.4) nice: (0.8) day: . . .

In such cases E tersely supplies the requested instruction, confirmation, or answer, and then may explicitly direct T to go on. Teaching sequences. T and L’s experimental tasks are composed of initiations of and responses to an additional type of institutional sequence—​a teaching sequence (cf. Maynard and Marlaire 1992). T reads a list of possible word pairs to L, who is to flip the switch for the noun originally paired with the adjective. As indicated above, teaching sequences come to completion in two versions. If L responds correctly, T announces this fact; but if incorrectly, T announces the voltage to be given as punishment, delivers the shock, and reads L the correct word pair. E instructs T and L how to perform these versions before starting the practice lesson. When L flips the switch on the

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  75 machine in front of him corresponding to the correct answer, the teaching sequence runs along the following lines: (4) [0315 Disobedient, 45V, 324] 1

T: Fa:st (0.7) bi:rd, (0.8) car: (0.6) trai:n (0.6) pla:ne.

2 3

(0.2)

L: ((flips switch))

4

(0.4)

5 T: Corr:ect,

However, when L flips one of the three other switches and thus provides an incorrect answer, the teaching sequence is modified to incorporate delivery of the next higher punishment shock. (5) [0315 Disobedient, 30V, 311] 1

T: Ri:ch (0.6) boy: (0.7) ca:ke (0.7) ma:n (0.6) gir:l.

2 3

4 5

(.)

T: ((flips shock switch))

8 9

(0.9)

T: Wro:ng (1.1) Forty five volts.

6 7

(0.6)

L: ((flips switch))

(2.5)

T: Ri:ch (0.6) boy:

When E uses scripted directives like “continue” and “go on,” he is typically prodding T to perform teaching sequences: to complete those that have been delayed and/​or to initiate next ones.

Resistance to Continuation Teachers’ resistance developed in varied and heterogeneous ways. For all Teachers, irrespective of outcome, initial resistance performed “wait and see” (silence and hesitation) as to whether the Experimenter would remedy the Learner’s complaints. It postponed continuation, rather than explicitly pursuing discontinuation. A major branching point then occurred at 150 volts, where L started demanding release and all but two experiments (in our

76  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self collection) were still underway. We distinguish between what we call “minimal” versus “maximal” Dis/​Obedience, to capture four ensuing patterns of experimental trajectory: (1) In the first group, which we call maximally Obedient (49 of 65 Obedient cases: about 75%), Teachers breeze past this point (150 volts), offering minimal resistance compared to the other three groups all the way up the shock board to 450 volts. Resistance within this group is inexplicit (silence, hesitation, query prompts) and “late” (higher than 270 volts, which marks the end of the page of word lists). This group does not use stop-​tries (see Chapter 4).10 (2) A second, minimally Obedient group likewise ends “Obediently” (16 of 65 cases: about 25%). Teachers here display more difficulty with continuation than in the first group, offering more explicit resistance in the form of statement prompts, stop-​tries, and stop-​try accounts. Such upgraded resistance may even treat critically E’s handling of the situation. As with the first group, the resistance is late (beyond 270 volts). (3) A third group is minimally Disobedient (21 of 55 cases: about 38%). As in the second group, Teachers start to upgrade their resistance at, and beyond, 150 volts. Up to 270 volts, E successfully counters these resistive forays. But at some point between 270 and 360 volts, T resumes resistance, sustaining it when countered by E’s prods. These practices result in E ending the experiment. (4) Finally, a fourth group is maximally Disobedient (34 of 55 Disobedient cases: about 62%). Teachers here succeed in stopping the experiment “early” (prior to 270 volts) by sustaining a varied combination of the six forms of resistance. Their resistance displays an assortment of other-​and self-​attentive statement prompts, stop-​tries, and stop-​ try accounts (see Chapters 4 and 5). “Golden Rule” accounting and “letting the Learner decide” practices (see Chapter 5) are almost uniformly found in this last group. These Teachers display a competence for resistive coping in the Milgramesque situation not seen in the other three groups. As these descriptions indicate, many Teachers’ performances fell between the “maximal” extremes, and the overall picture of how resistance works is complex.11 What is clear, however, is that resistance is commonplace in both of

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  77 Milgram’s categories of Teachers (Obedient versus Disobedient). It does not by the fact of its occurrence alone tell us how the Disobedient group eventually succeeded in a situation in which the Obedient one failed. Answering that question requires detailed study of r​ esistance in its original interactional, sequential, and institutional context (Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 2007). We use “resistance” as an analytical term to respecify Milgram’s outcome categories in terms of concrete and detailed action (Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Garfinkel 2002). As noted earlier, resistance means problems with continuation of the experiment: action that threatens its progressivity (Schegloff 2007, 58). Teachers can resist by deferring such actions and/​or by pursuing discontinuation. Of primary interest of course are the recurrent forms and sequential context of the Teacher’s resistance, but it’s important to remember that L’s scripted negative reactions to the shocks—​ ranging from cries of pain to shouted refusals to continue—​also resist continuation. Indeed, Milgram seems to have designed L’s script as a “model” of resistance consisting of exemplars of opposition, phrases that Teachers could draw on to construct their own opposition. Some Teachers do in fact seem to resist by adopting expressions that L had used earlier in the session (e.g., “I refuse”). Such repetitions appear to be a way some Teachers express moral solidarity with L in his struggle against E. In other instances, Teachers formulate problems with continuation primarily in terms of their own experience (e.g., “I’m afraid I can’t continue”) and only indirectly reference that of the Learner. Instances of resistance may thus display self-​ orientation or other-​ orientation to such problems and be analyzed as either self-​attentive or other-​attentive. As Heritage (1998, 313) has put it, self-​attentiveness is a feature of talk that “focus[es] on how the world looks” from the perspective of speakers rather than from that of interlocutors or absent third parties, whereas other-​attentiveness attends to the viewpoint of one or more of these others. Analysis of resistive practices in terms of this useful distinction—​one oriented to by many Teachers—​is developed in Chapter 5.

First Overt Resistance and Counter-​Resistance In the context of sequences for performing the experiment, L begins to react negatively to the shocks. After discussing sequential features of L’s scripted pain cries and resistance to continuation, this section shows how “first overt

78  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self resistance”—​that is, the first explicit, nontacit display of resistance—​appears in an emerging environment of competing relevancies of projected next actions. The phrase refers to a first analyzable instance in an experiment of a particular form of Teacher resistance (see Chapter 4 for the six forms).12 As noted, Milgram seems to have intended L’s scripted cries, complaints, and refusals to model resistance to T. In terms of his equilibrium conceptualization of Obedience, what Gibson (2019) calls the “physical metaphor,” Milgram (1974) saw L’s resistance as a force impelling T toward a Disobedient outcome, countervailing that exerted by E’s directives toward an Obedient one. T was said to experience the interplay of these forces, with the Obedient one proving stronger in 65% of all the experiments. In both the practice and second lesson, L begins to display distress as the shocks get stronger. At 75 volts he starts to audibly react to the shocks with pain cries. As described above, E declares the practice lesson over at 105 volts. But in the second lesson (the actual experiment), L’s cries become increasingly loud and prolonged, and at 120 volts he starts to complain explicitly about the pain: (6) [0201 Obedient, 120V, 2] 1    T:  I’m giving you (.) a hundred twenty (.) volts. 2   (.) 3    T:  ((flips switch))=​ 4    L:  =​Ooh! 5   (1.4) 6    T:  The correct wo-​=​ 7       L:  =​Hey this really hurts. 8   (2.3) 9    T:  The correct word is wet (.) duck 10   (4.3) 11    T:  The next word is brave (.) woman . . .

The excerpt shows L crying out in pain after receiving 120 volts (line 4). After some delay, T resumes the teaching sequence by starting to announce the correct word pair (line 6). He is interrupted, however, by L’s complaint about the pain of the shocks (line 7). The scripted complaint features a prepositioned “hey,” which solicits his co-​interactants’ attention and marks a breach in experimental relevancies by noticing a potential violation or transgression (Sacks [1964–​1972] 1992; cf. Sidnell 2007). Unlike some other Teachers in

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  79 this emergent environment of competing relevant next actions, T does not immediately resume completion of the interrupted teaching sequence but performs apparently resistive silence13 and monitors the situation (line 8). No talk is forthcoming from either of the other parties, and T completes the sequence at line 9. After more delay he initiates the next teaching sequence (line 11). At 150 volts, L’s resistance to continuation becomes more explicit and forceful. The script has him summon E, declare that he is disassociating himself from the experiment and the role of Learner, and demand repeatedly to be let out: (7) [0210 Disobedient, 150V, 34] 1   T:  Wro:ng.=​>Voltage level is a hundred and fifty,< 2   T:  ((flips shock switch)) 3    L: Ow! 4   (.) 5   T:  .hh The right answer-​the right answer was-​=​ 6      L:  =​EXPERIMENTER! 7   (0.4) 8   T:  Horse.=​ 9       L:  =​LET ME OUT OF HERE. 10   (1.2) 11      L:  I’M NOT DOING THE EXPERIMENT ANYMORE! 12

(1.0)

13       L:  I REFUSE TO GO O:N. LET ME OUT! 14   (0.3) 15    T:  >He (wants) refuse to go on.< 16   (1.4)

Here L, seated in an adjoining room, cries out in pain from the 150-​volt shock (line 3). T exhibits some disfluency in starting to complete the teaching sequence, performing self-​repair with word repetition (line 5). L interrupts completion, however, with a loud summons to E (line 6). T delays a bit and completes the sequence (line 8). L then latches further shouted resistance and T remains silent, monitoring the situation. At line 15, T performs his first overt (i.e., nonsilent) resistance by prompting E to take remedial action of some sort. The statement prompt reports that L is refusing to continue, tying back to L’s latest resistive shout by using the same words: “refuse to go on.” E,

80  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self however, does not immediately respond. The ample silence treats the issue of L’s refusal as of little consequence for continuation, and E may be attempting here to elicit further resistive talk from T of interest to Milgram.14 Counter-​resistance: Enacting scripted directives. E, in turn, tends to respond to T’s resistance, irrespective of its explicitness or location on the shock scale, with silence and/​or a directive to continue (cf. Gibson 2019, Chapter 4). The very fact of E issuing a directive after L starts to cry out in pain at 75 volts displays his orientation to T as resistive. As discussed, directives make relevant a joint course of action sequence: directive/​response (M. H. Goodwin 2006). In this sequential context, T may respond in a preferred manner and continue promptly with experimental tasks. Or T may respond in a dispreferred manner by resisting the continuing course of action projected by the directive. That is, T may follow up the resistive action that provoked E’s directive with further resistive action, and thereby sustain resistance (see endnote 9 for an explanation of the meaning of preferred versus dispreferred in CA). As noted, the directives E uses are taken from a script Milgram designed for such situations. These “prods,” as Milgram called them (1974), are composed of account components that abstractly justify continuation in the face of various kinds of challenge, and directive components that project continuation as T’s proper next action. By design, these prods strongly violate interaction order obligations, as they offer little or no reciprocity to T and none at all to L. When E encounters sustained resistance by T, he is to issue serially the four scripted prods and announce discontinuation if T still will not go on. In cases of T expressing concern about L (1) suffering lasting harm or (2) not wanting to continue, E is to use one of the two “special” prods (Milgram 1974, 21–​22). Additionally, in Condition 2, E was to counter resistive requests to check on L with a prod subsequently “forgotten” by the Milgram paradigm literature (Gibson 2013b). The forgotten prod requires E to walk into the adjoining room and appear again after a minute or so with the announcement that L “seems willing enough to go on.”15 The most frequently used version of E’s script reads as shown in Box 3.2. Research in sociology and psychology has often relied on scripts. However, their usefulness notwithstanding, research on telephone survey interviewing has made clear that scripts cannot capture the details of their interactional implementation (Houtkoop-​Steenstra and Houtkoop-​Steenstra 2000; Maynard and Schaeffer 2000; Maynard, Freese, and Schaeffer 2010). That is, performers of scripts such as survey interviewers or confederates in

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  81

Box 3.2  Four Scripted “Prods” and Two “Special Prods” (Prod 1) Please continue, or, Please go on. (Prod 2) The experiment requires that you continue. (Prod 3) It is absolutely essential that you continue. (Prod 4) You have no other choice, you must go on. (Special Prod 1) Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on. (Special Prod 2) Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.

social psychological experiments engage in a process of analytic alternation (Maynard and Schaeffer 2000; see also Gibson 2019, 99ff., 116ff.; Hoffman, Myerberg, and Morawski 2015). They enact scripts in situ, alternating in real time between the scripted instructions and various contingencies of the interaction to which they are tailoring the scripts. E’s discretionary use of prods and special prods in actual experimental sessions is a case in point, and the collection displays extensive variation in E’s judgments as to how sustained T’s resistance must be to qualify as Disobedient.16

Competing Sequential Relevancies In Milgram’s lab, as Darley (1995) notes, “the attention is exactly on how the teacher copes with contraindications—​the protests of the Learner—​ discovered during the administration of the punishment sequence” (151). This chapter has been respecifying Darley’s point, one commonly made in the Milgram literature, in terms of sequence organization (Schegloff 2007). The situation consists of a three-​party interaction in which the Experimenter and Learner project competitive and opposing courses of action, with the Teacher choosing to align with one or the other. That is, as the experiment progresses, the sequential environment increasingly becomes one of opposing and competing relevant next actions—​continuation or discontinuation. By the time the session reaches 150 volts, only two Teachers in our collection have successfully stopped the experiment. These earliest

82  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self discontinuations are at 105 volts (session 0311) and 135 volts (0239). In addition to early timing of resistance, these Teachers mobilize and sustain a variety of forms of resistance (see Chapter 4). Consider the 0239 case, which we reproduce below at length to illustrate this variety in action: (8) [0239 Disobedient, 135V, 55] 1 T: You’ll receive a hundred and thirty five volt level 2 3

(.)

((buzz))

4 L: OOH:::! 5

(1.1)

6 T: .Hh ((←sniff)) 7

(0.6)

8 T: °>I won’t give any more of the:se.but I mean< (you want) the 19

strong shock now, .hh (‘an we were) up to N:, an’

20

we hafta go all the way down ta y:,=​>I don’t wanna

21

be< responsible for anything.

22

(0.5)

23 T: I’d rather not. 24

(0.6)

25 T: In fact I’d just as soon (0.2) relinquish the 26

°four fifty.°

27

(0.5)

28 T: .H ((←sniff)) 29

(1.1)

30 T: It doesn’t mean that much °ta me.° 31

(2.0)

32 E: It’s absolutely essential that you continue.

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  83 33 T: I’d rather not sir. 34

(1.0)

35 T: I’d rather not. 36

(3.9)

37 E: As I said be↓fore although these shocks may be 38

quite painful there is no permanent tissue damage.

39

(0.3)

40 E: So please continue. 41

(.)

42 T: °I’d rather not.° 43

(0.2)

44 T: I really wouldn’t-​I just don’ wanna,-​I would 45

not wanna be responsible=​I:-​believe ↓in-​ (0.2)

46

.hhhhh (0.7) probably meting some punishment out

47

for learning but uh: I think there is °a:-​° (0.9)

48

point of uh return.

49

(1.3)

50 T: .Hh ((←sniff)) 51

(4.0)

52 E: You have no other choice, you must go o:n. 53

(.)

54 E: Hm:! ((←clears throat)) 55

(0.8)

56 T: I’ve got another °choice, I can (0.2) I can forfeit 57

the four dollars and fifty cents,°

58

(1.0)

59 E: No the-​(.) you don’t forfeit that=​that’s yours 60

simply for showing up here at the lab’ratory.

In Chapters 4 and 5, we discuss in detail the various forms of resistance displayed by this Teacher and others. For now, however, we simply call attention to the variety of resistive practices in the transcript. First, there are multiple silences by T that tacitly resist E’s directives and orient to a problem in the interaction (e.g., lines 17, 41, 55). Second, T produces accounts that invoke moral issues of responsibility (e.g., lines 19–​21, 44–​45) and volition (e.g., lines 8, 12, 42). Third, these accounts are produced in the context of what we call “stop-​tries,” which are attempts to discontinue the experiment and are the most explicit form of resistance displayed by Teachers. Fourth,

84  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self T may be producing nonverbal noises that embody resistance to continuation (e.g., his loud sniffs at lines 28 and 50; other Teachers grunt, chuckle, or sigh). Fifth, T orients to his interactional obligations to the Experimenter by twice offering to return the “four fifty” (lines 25, 56–​57), the $4.50 he is being paid to participate, and in doing so hearably renounces his commitment to E and the experiment in favor of meeting his moral obligations to L. At the same time, though, he orients to E’s status as researcher and head of the experiment, for example, by using the formal address “sir” (line 33). In this way, we see T and E renewing their relationship (i.e., their local identities as Teacher and Experimenter) but also negotiating its terms on a turn-​by-​turn basis. Given the rarity of discontinuation before 150 volts, it’s clear that L’s scripted resistance at this shock level proves a catalyst, making an impact on many Teachers. Upon reaching 150 volts, 17 of the 52 Disobedient Teachers who have complied to this point go no further (33%, including the video case). Of these 17, 41% (7/​17)17 are displaying nonsilent (overt) resistance for the first time. And 18 of the 65 Obedient Teachers (28%, including 2027, unknown outcome) display first nonsilent resistance at 150 volts. Case 2021 is an example: (9) [2021, Obedient, 150V, 22] 1 T: Wrong. (.) hundred fifty volts. 2   (.) 3

((buzz sound))

4   (.) 5 L: OW::! 6   (0.9) 7 T: White (.) horse. 8   (0.3) 9 L: That’s all! get me out of here! 10   (.) 11 L: I told you I had heart trouble my heart’s starting 12

to bother me now!

13   (.) 14 L: Get me out of here please! 15   (.) 16 E: Conti[nue please. 17 L:      [My

heart’s

refuse to go

starting

to

bother

me!

I

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  85 18 E: [Go right on.] 19 L: [on! let me  ] out! 20    (1.1) 21 T: I’m supposed to.=​hm? 22    (0.3) 23 E: I beg your pardon, 24    (0.3) 25 T: Okay:, 26    (0.2) 27 E: >Alright.< 28    (0.3) 29 T: I’ll be cleared of anything, 30    (0.8) 31 E: Mhm 32     (1.0) 33 T: Sad. (.) face (.) music (.) clown (.) girl . . .

As in the previous example, here the Teacher is caught between two competing sequential relevancies: the Learner’s complaints, which project remedy as the relevant next action, and the Experimenter’s directives, which project compliance as the relevant next action. In this case, however, T, who is eventually categorized as Obedient, formulates the trouble in legal terms, rather than moral ones, by asking if she will be “cleared of anything” (line 29)—​held legally responsible if something happens to L—​and when E answers “Mhm” (line 31), she ignores L’s complaints and continues with the experiment. In doing so, she resolves the competing sequential relevancies in favor of continuation, and although she continues at various points to mark the interactional trouble with delays and hesitations, she does not again articulate or name the trouble, whether as a legal problem or otherwise. By 150 volts, competing sequential relevancies have become a crucial feature of the interactional environment for all Teachers. As one Teacher remarks at this shock level, referring to the pressure on him to choose sides and align either with E and his push for continuation or with L and his wish to discontinue, “((sigh)) I’m in the middle here right” (0306 Disobedient, 150V, 187). Nevertheless, despite L’s strong resistance at 150 volts, 35 of the 52 Disobedient Teachers are still complying at this shock level—​that is, 67%, continue (as do, of course, all the Obedient ones). Beyond 150 volts, L’s script calls for further summons to E, demands to be released, and refusals to go on. At 270 volts, T reaches the end of the word

86  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self list and E directs him/​her to go back to the top of the page and perform the teaching sequence again for each word pair. Meanwhile, L is declaring he will no longer answer the questions. E directs T in such cases to modify the teaching sequence and treat the absence of an answer as a wrong answer. Of the Disobedient Teachers, 33 go no further than 270 volts; that is, 21 of the 54 do go on (39%, including in the denominator the video case). Past this voltage level, the script calls for L to intensify his pain cries into screams (or to play back recorded screams) and to protest angrily after being shocked (“I told you I’m no longer part of the experiment!”). Almost all the remaining 21 Disobedient Teachers successfully discontinue no higher than 360 volts, a shock delivered by two of them (0232, 2437). In some of the experimental conditions in which L is seated in an adjoining room, he is to suddenly stop playing the recorded screams and cease all protest around 420 volts. The implication, which some Teachers who reach this shock level in these conditions verbalize, is that L is unconscious or dead. Past 360 volts, all Teachers go on to end as Obedient except two (2026, 2036), who snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by discontinuing after the first of the three 450-​ volt shocks Milgram required for an Obedient outcome. Such evidence from our corpus corroborates a well-​known point in the Milgram literature: the longer it takes Teachers to mobilize resistance, the less likely they are to succeed (Blass 2009, 44; Modigliani and Rochat 1995). The graduated shock levels are said to create a social psychological “binding effect,” making it increasingly unlikely that, as the session progresses, any particular instance of T’s resistance will be successful (Gilbert 1981). However, our data allow us to refine this finding in the following way: discontinuation in our data tends not to occur prior to 150 volts. So, when Disobedient Teachers stop, they tend to do so in a middle range between 150 and 285 volts (57%, or 31/​54, including the video case). Almost all the remaining discontinuations then occur by 345 volts. In sum, what Teachers do in this middle range of shocks appears to be decisive. Disobedient Teachers tend not to distinguish themselves from Obedient ones until hearing L strongly resist at 150 volts. By 270 volts and L’s declaration that he will no longer answer questions, 61% have stopped. And by 345 volts, after punishing him one to five times for refusing to answer, 93% have stopped. In this middle range, L is repeatedly renewing the relevance of discontinuation over against E’s push for continuation. Disobedient Teachers heed the call by mobilizing situated moral practice—​in the form of sustained

SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF RESISTANCE  87 and explicit resistance—​at this point in the session, whereas Obedient ones do not.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on resistance to continuation in Milgram’s lab. In resisting, all Teachers marked a violation of interactional expectations that threatened the achievement of sense and self and therefore had moral implications. But not all Teachers explicitly treated the violation as a moral problem. Caught between two competing sets of sequential relevancies, Teachers categorized as Obedient—​ and up to a certain point, many categorized as Disobedient as well—chose to go on complying with the Experimenter’s directives, renewing the working consensus that the trouble was an ordinary trouble that did not pose an issue for continuation. However, to speak of a choice to comply or resist is misleading: many such choices were made over the course of the experiment. That the choices culminated in outcomes that Milgram dichotomized as Obedient and Disobedient can all too easily lead observers down the circular path of explaining the actions that led to these outcomes in terms of the outcomes themselves: that is, Obedient Teachers complied “because they were Obedient” and Disobedient ones resisted “because they were Disobedient.” Our position, by contrast, is that Teachers only came to be classifiable as Obedient or Disobedient because of the many acts of resistance and/​or compliance they performed in the course of the experiment. These local acts of resistance and compliance require explanation in terms of the situated particulars of their achievement. In other words, rather than take for granted Obedience and Disobedience, our approach is to treat them as social objects and ask how they are accomplished and made accountable in real time. In Chapter 3, we have set the stage for our analysis of resistance as situated moral practice undertaken in Chapters 4 and 5. We have shown how resistance appears in an environment of institutional sequencing in and by which three parties, Experimenter, Teacher, and Learner, perform the experiment. First resistance (whether silent or nonsilent) by members of both outcome groups is typically reactive to prior resistance by the Learner; Teachers tend to “wait and see” whether the Experimenter will remedy the Learner’s complaints, thereby deferring continuation rather than actively pursuing

88  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self discontinuation. However, resistance by Disobedient Teachers tends to take a more explicit form than it does for Obedient ones, and to come earlier in the shock series. The Experimenter, in turn, treats Teachers’ actions as resistive by responding with scripted directives to continue. Analysis of further group differences in resistance will be developed in Chapter 4, which analyzes the sequential production six forms of resistance found in both groups and shows how the Obedient and Disobedient outcomes were achieved in terms of such resistance.

4 Forms of Milgramesque Resistance In 1962, a 45-​year-​old secretary whom we call “Mary” but who would subsequently become known as Milgram’s “Subject 2039” answered an ad in a local newspaper soliciting volunteers for a psychology experiment at Yale University. A self-​ described Protestant (Congregationalist) who voted Democrat, she and her 59-​year-​old foreman husband were ordinary people not unrepresentative of the New Haven population of the time.1 In these and other respects, Mary fit the profile of the “ordinary citizen” or “normal American” Milgram sought for his study, whose true purpose, as we’ve seen, was to determine if such ordinary people could be made to act, simply on the orders of an authority figure, in ways that violated the dictates of conscience. That is, could they be led to reproduce the sort of “banal” evil Hannah Arendt ([1961] 2006) had recently attributed to Adolf Eichmann, whose trial in Israel was front-​page news at the time? Arriving at the basement laboratory in Yale’s Linsly-​Chittenden Hall, Mary was met by a research scientist in a gray lab coat, the (confederate) Experimenter (Blass 2004). He introduced her to a fellow participant (the confederate Learner), explained the (alleged) experiment on teaching and learning, and supervised the (putatively) random selection of herself to play the role of Teacher and the peer to play the Learner. Both then performed a practice experiment to learn the respective roles, which was immediately followed by the experiment proper—an ostensibly ordinary study of learning and memory. Like hundreds of other participants in Milgram’s now-​infamous experiment, however, Mary soon came to perceive herself as caught up in a moral dilemma, between the Learner’s demands to be released from the electric chair in the adjoining room and the Experimenter’s insistence that she continue shocking him against his will. Though she would end up classified as Disobedient, Mary’s experience was in many respects typical of Milgram’s participants more generally. It is an experience characterizable in terms of a gradual gestalt shift: what began as an ordinary experiment gradually took on a more ominous cast for many participants, as the three-​party interaction among Experimenter (E), Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0005

90  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Teacher (T), and Learner (L) became less routine and increasingly troubled. As with other Teachers, Mary’s resistance was initially subtle, mostly taking the form of silences and hesitations that delayed the experiment’s progress. Soon, however, she began exhibiting more explicit forms of resistance, such as prompting the Experimenter to take remedial action and attempting to stop the experiment. For Mary, the strain of being torn between two competing sets of demands—​ between her respective interactional obligations to the Experimenter and the Learner—​culminated in the following exchange: (1) [2039 Disobedient, 150V, 18] 1 T: Incorrect (.) I am going to give you (.) a hundred 2 and fifty volts 3     (0.2) 4

((buzz))

5     (.) 6 L: OW 7     (0.3) 8 T: White horse: 9    (0.2) 10 L: Experimenter! (0.3) That’s all (.) Get me out of 11

here (0.5) I told you I had heart trouble

12

My heart’s starting to bother me now (0.4)

13

get me out of here please (0.4) My heart’s

14

start[ing to bother me

15 E:      [Go on teacher please.]=​ 16 T:      [Well            ]=​ 17

E:

=​[Please con-​]

18 T: =​[I’m. 19

  ] sorry.=​I can’t=​he wants to come out=​I-​

(0.9)

20 E: The experiment requires that you go on teacher.=​ 21

As I said before although thee (0.2) sh:ocks may

22

be painful they’re not dangerous.

23

(1.2)

24 E: °So just go right on with the test please.° 25

(2.2)

26 T: I know the [ex-​] (0.2) -​periment requires it but 27

I (0.3) #°I-​=​

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  91 28 E:        [( )] 29

T:

=​I-​°# (.) I(h)=​just can’t inflict punishment when

30

he’s (1.3)

31

°um:° h

32

(0.2)

33 E: Well it’s absolutely essential that you continue. 34

(0.8)

35 E: °uh° 36

(1.6)

37 E: with the test. 38

(7.3)

39 E: The next word is sa:d. 40

(11.1)

41 T: I’m sorr(h)y ~I can’t~=​ 42

=​((chair scrape; T getting up from chair))=​

43

T:

=​.hhh=​

44

E:

=​Pardon me,

45

T:

I-​ I’m sorry I ca:n’t.=​I uh

46

(2.0)

47 E: You have no other choice. 48

(.)

49 T: Yes I d(H)o(h):. .h(h) I mean you can have the check=​ 50

=​[ba:ck, I’m sorry this-​]

51 E:  [No I mean 52

T:

    uh ]

=​(GO AHEA[D) eh-​] if if you uh (0.3) insist on contin-​=​

53 T:     [(so )] 54

E:

55

=​uh: discontinuing we’re gonna hafta discontinue the entire uh: (.) project you see.

56

(1.1)

57 E: Uh: 58

(0.6)

59 E: Well 60

(1.6)

((E raps table with hand))

61 E: °I suppose we’ll have to°=​ 62

=​((chair scrape; E getting up from chair))=​

63 E: =​I’d like to uh. (1.6) ask both of you some questions 64

if I may:,

65 T: Yes surely.

92  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self The explicit transition from ordinary experiment to morally problematic situation begins with Mary’s first nonsilent acts of resistance (lines 15–​17) and ends with the Experimenter’s calling off the experiment in the face of her sustained resistance to continuation (lines 62–​65). Prior to 150 volts, her resistance had been relatively implicit or weak, taking the form of silences and hesitations that momentarily delayed continuation. At 150 volts, however, and following L’s demand for release (lines 9–​13), she begins to resist more explicitly and forcefully. For instance, she reports to E what L wants (“he wants to come out”; line 17) and states that she “just can’t inflict punishment” (line 29). Confronted with E’s counter-​resistance and directives to continue, she maintains her opposition, offering to return “the check” (the stipend she was paid for participation; line 49), possibly treating E’s “you have no choice” as referring to the contractual obligation she may have accepted by receiving the money. Finally, faced with Mary’s sustained and relatively forceful intransigence, E gives in. As a paradigmatic Disobedient participant, she exemplifies situated moral practice in Milgram’s lab: resistance that prioritizes interaction order obligations to the Learner over formal obligations to the Experimenter. However, as has been indicated, there were many ways to be Disobedient or Obedient in this setting. Though paradigmatic, in some notable ways Mary’s performance differs from those of many of her fellow Disobedient participants. For example, she went no further than 150 volts, after L’s first complaint about his heart, whereas many other participants, including most Disobedient ones, continued past this point after E countered their resistance with directives to continue and assurances that the shocks were safe. Likewise, Mary’s actions were not utterly different from those of most Obedient participants, who as a group display the same kinds of resistive practices as she does, and even begin to use them around the same 150-​ volt level. Going by Milgram’s published reports (e.g., 1963, 1974) or by many scholarly and popular commentaries on the experiment, it is easy to get the misleading impression of an essential or fundamental difference between Teachers in the two outcome categories. On the one hand, there were “heroic” Teachers like Mary who successfully defied immoral authority. On the other, there were Eichmann-​like Obedient participants, who (so the claim goes) either willfully cooperated with the Experimenter or allowed themselves to become passive instruments of a malevolent authority figure.

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  93 The reality was significantly more nuanced. This complexity is crucial for understanding Milgramesque behavior not just in the original lab setting of 1961–​1962 but in the real world as well. There were indeed important differences between Disobedient and Obedient behaviors, but they have less to do with the fact of resistance per se—​all Teachers resisted to some degree, with varying levels of forcefulness and efficacy—​than with how, in detail, Teachers built and sustained lines of resistance across interactional sequences. Put differently, there are almost no moral practices wholly unique to Disobedient participants: no professed ethical principles or behaviors that decisively separate them from those who ultimately obeyed the Experimenter. Rather, the differences consist primarily in how Teachers assembled and maintained (or failed to maintain) challenges to the Experimenter’s definition of the situation as a benign and important research study whose institutional requirements took precedence over ordinary interaction order moral requirements. In contrast with Milgram’s neat Obedient-​Disobedient dichotomy, a more accurate picture of the experiment would treat Obedience and Disobedience as a continuum along which participants varied: more or less Obedient (or Disobedient) more or less of the time, as opposed to Obedient or Disobedient as such. Accordingly, this chapter presents such a continuum analysis of resistance at length below. However, it’s worth noting here at the outset that even a continuous model risks reifying Obedience and Disobedience: treating them as things rather than achievements assembled in interaction on a turn-​ by-​turn basis. For Teachers’ actions to become describable and categorizable as Disobedient or Obedient at all required that the three parties (Teacher, Experimenter, Learner) collectively organize their practices in such a way as to make Teachers’ performances assimilable to those categories, which Milgram placed on each experiment only afterward and in retrospect. The experiment—​as Teachers prospectively lived it—​featured ordinary people navigating ever more troubled interactions as they tried to make sense of an increasingly senseless situation. It was their ongoing work of sensemaking in a temporally evolving context that produced the numerous local acts of compliance and/​or defiance whose repetition eventuated in outcomes that Milgram could categorize as Obedient or Disobedient. Just how were these acts interactionally assembled? How did they coalesce into reportable scientific findings about “obedience rates” under varying experimental conditions?

94  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self In this and the following chapter we pursue such questions, which can be summarized as ones about morality (and immorality) in the making of sense and self. Chapter 4 focuses on practices for performing resistance that the outcome groups shared—​but that some Teachers used more frequently and consistently than did others.2 In particular, the chapter adds a key piece to our empirical analysis of precisely how explicit moral dilemmas (cases of morality in interaction) can emerge from the tacit background of ordinary morality (morality of interaction). Below, we first present six forms of Teacher resistance that occured regularly in Milgram’s lab, locating them on a continuum of implicitness/ explicitness. Second, we use conversation analysis to analyze (1) three relatively implicit forms of resistance and then (2) three relatively more explicit forms. Third, we present a finding about a structural preference in complaint-​ remedy sequences in our data, which we call a preference for director’s remedy. Teachers orient to this preference by treating the Experimenter as the party responsible for repairing interactional trouble, such that they appeal to him, sometimes repeatedly, prior to more explicit attempts to stop the experiment themselves. Conversely, participants orient to the dispreferred status of resistance through delays, hesitations, and mitigators (apologies, accounts, etc.). Fourth and finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the payoff or upshot of our strategy of detailed comparative analysis of both outcome categories (Obedient and Disobedient), an approach uncommon in the Milgram literature.

Sequential Organization and Forms of Resistance As Chapter 3 demonstrated, participants resist in local contexts of directive-​ response and complaint-​remedy interactional sequences. Milgram’s institutional situation features three-​party interaction, which, as the experiment progresses, becomes increasingly organized in terms of opposing and competing relevant next actions that either further the institutional task of continuation or else result in discontinuation.3 Participants find themselves forced to act in ways that interactionally align either with the Experimenter, who directs continuation, or with the Learner, whose complaints project immediate remedy.

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  95 Against this sequential background, resistance takes six distinctive forms that can be placed along a continuum or scale ranging from implicit to explicit. As Hepburn and Potter (2011, 117) observe, “Resistance to a strong action such as a threat [or, as here, a directive] is itself normatively organized and can work in a range of different ways.” Subjects use the forms in combination, typically upgrading over the course of their sessions from less to more explicit. Moreover, there is an overall sequential pattern of resistance: (1) Directive: E explicitly or tacitly directs T to pursue experimental tasks (e.g., directing T and L to start the experiment [“Ready, begin”]). (2) Resistance: T performs one or more forms of resistance, which postpone continuation and/​or project discontinuation. Resistance tends to suggest a possible remedial response by E to L’s complaints. (3) Renewed directive: E’s reissued directive typically performs two actions: (3a) Refusing the remedy projected by (2), either tacitly or explicitly via an account for continuation. (3b) Directing continuation. Following part (3), the Teacher may comply and exit the resistance sequence. Or they may sustain resistance to the Experimenter’s latest directive by iterating component (2), typically by upgrading to more explicit forms of resistance, which the Experimenter then counters by iterating (3). When the Teacher develops the sequence in this manner, trading accounts and counter-​accounts for dis/​continuation with the Experimenter, the outcome tends to be Disobedient. In other words, when the Teacher sustains a line of resistance to the Experimenter’s directives, for example by refusing to go along with the experiment unless the Experimenter supplies a remedy (e.g., ensuring the Learner’s safety), the eventual result is discontinuation. Furthermore, as Teachers’ acts of resistance mount, their orientation to the moral problems with continuation becomes more explicit, for example in the form of justifications for resisting (see Chapter 5 for details). Whereas Teachers’ initial acts of resistance, especially hesitation and delay, can display an implicit orientation to moral violations (i.e., breaches of interaction order expectations and reciprocity

96  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self obligations), their later actions may become more overt in opposing such violations.4 At the less explicit end of the spectrum, we locate three forms of resistance: (1) performing silence and hesitation, (2) imprecating, and (3) laughing.5 Silence and hesitation are the least explicit ways of resisting, which they do by postponing continuation. Imprecations and laughter are more overt, in that they display reluctance to continue following the Experimenter’s directives but do not actually voice objections to continuing or call the Experimenter’s attention to interactional troubles.6 By contrast, in more explicit modes of resistance, participants locate problems with continuation by either (4) addressing the Learner, (5) prompting the Experimenter, or (6) trying to stop the experiment and accounting for such attempts. In the following sections, we examine less and more explicit forms of resistance. First, though, a word about how we identified instances of resistance. For an action to be considered resistive, it must orient to problems with continuation due to the Learner’s negative reactions to receiving shocks (see Chapter 3). Of course, not all actions that delay continuation are resistive in this sense. For example, not all questions or observations that delay progression of the experiment are resisting such progression: a repair sequence where T asks for clarification about the experimental procedure is not necessarily resistive (though it might be). Initially, our approach was to identify possible cases of resistance (e.g., silence, laughter) in our transcripts, with the proviso that these were only possible instances of the phenomenon that may or may not be amenable to grounded analysis as resistive (Schegloff 2006). What qualifies or warrants actions as forms of resistance are the local particulars of their production: either implicitly or explicitly, they can evidence the Teacher attending to problems with continuation due to the Learner’s negative reactions to the shocks. The next step, however, is to show that and how such actions are doing resistance, which means analyzing them in terms of the displayed orientations of their producers. We undertake such analysis below.

Forms of Resistance: Less Explicit The least overt forms that resistance takes in our data postpone experimental continuation, rather than explicitly pursue discontinuation.

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  97 Unlike, say, nonresistive queries to the Experimenter (e.g., asking him to further explain the Teacher role; see Chapter 3), they orient to the Learner receiving shocks as the reason for deferral. Likewise, the Experimenter may treat participants as resistive by the very fact of directing them to continue. By performing resistive silence, hesitation, and imprecation, Teachers are monitoring the situation, adopting a stance of “wait and see” (Garfinkel 1967, Chapter 2). Specifically, they are waiting to see whether the Experimenter will supply the remedy projected by the Learner’s pain cries, complaints, and/​or refusals to continue, meaning that they treat the Experimenter rather than themselves as the appropriate party to take such remedial action and allow him the interactional space to mobilize it. In doing so, they are orienting both to the Experimenter’s institutional status and his interaction order obligations to L and themselves. As we have said, these latter obligations are also moral obligations, even if they remain tacit most of the time.

Silence and Hesitation The most oblique form that Teachers’ resistance to continuation can take is silence and hesitation. In the experimental session proper (i.e., following the practice lesson), the Learner’s scripted pain cries (“Ow!”), complaints (“Hey, these really hurt.”), and demands for discontinuation (“Experimenter! Get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment anymore!”) typically begin at 75, 120, and 150 volts, respectively. That is, Milgram designed the situation to make the Teacher increasingly aware that the Learner’s reactions to being shocked pose a problem for immediate continuation. Or, in terms of our analytic framework, we could say that Milgram designed a situation where Trust Conditions are increasingly violated, and the tension between the Teacher’s respective interactional obligations to the Learner and to the Experimenter becomes ever more acute. As it becomes clearer that L is in pain and being held against his will, Teachers often display circumspect awareness of an emergent situational impropriety by delaying continuation via hesitation markers (“Um”) and/​or silence, as Example 2 shows.

98  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self (2) [0320 Obedient, 150V, 555] 1 T: I’m gonna give you a hundred and thirty five volts.=​ 2

=​((Buzz))

3 L: UH:! 4 (1.3) 5 T: It shoulda been brave woman. 6

(0.2)

7 T: Number one. 8

(1.9)

9 T: N, (.) white. (.) cloud, (.) horse (.) rock (.) house. 10

(.)

11 T: No that is (.) that is wrong. 12

(.)

13 T: I’ll give ya a hundred and fifty volts. 14

(.)

15

((Buzz))

16 L: UH::! 17

(0.8)

18 L: Experimenter! 19

(.)

20 L: Get me out of here. 21

(.)

22 L: I don’t-​(.) b:e in this experiment anymore 23

(.)

24 L: I’ve had enough. 25

(.)

26 L: Now get me outta here. 27

(.)

28 E: Please continue teacher. 29

(0.5)

30 L: No I-​I won’t go on! 31

(0.4)

32 L: I just won’t go on! 33

(1.7)

34 E: Try and relax learner. 35

(0.3)

36 L: Get me outta here! 37

(0.4)

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  99 38 E: Go on teacher. 39 L: You can’t keep me here, 40

(0.2)

41 L: strapped up like this, 42

(1.5)

43 T: O? (.) sad. (.) face, (.) music (.) clown (.) girl.

Here, after receiving 150 volts L cries out and issues a series of complaints and demands to be released. However, E then directs T to continue (line 28). After the directive, T does not immediately start reading the next word list: E’s directive is met with what is analyzable, given the sequential context, as T’s silence (line 29). L then twice refuses to go on (lines 30, 32), but E mitigates the seriousness of his complaints and demands by directing him to “try and relax” (line 34). At line 38, E issues a second directive for T to continue. L complains further (lines 39, 41), coming to a possible completion at line 42. T, however, does not say anything here either. It is not until line 43 that T begins to comply with the directives, first with the hesitant and question-​intoned “O,” the letter of the next word list, then by reading the list itself. In addition to resistive silence, Example 2 shows how the juxtaposed directives by E and complaints by L project contrary courses of action—​ continuation versus discontinuation. E and L are alternating in first position in two very different sequence types: directive-​response versus complaint-​response (or complaint-​remedy). Each further instance of a directive or complaint mitigates the other’s action force by renewing its own relevance constraints and projecting the structurally preferred responses of, respectively, compliance or remedy. Faced with the competing conditional relevancies of these projected next actions, T postpones continuation via silence and performs “wait and see.”7 After E’s insistence (two directives to go on, lines 28 and 38), T attends to the relevance of the directives rather than the complaints by beginning the next word list (line 43). He thereby skip-​ties (Sacks [1964–​1972] 1992) a compliant (albeit delayed) response to E’s latest directive at line 38. Reading the list becomes observable as a second action tying back to the directives, retrospectively constituting them as first actions in a directive-​response overall trajectory of action (M. H. Goodwin 2006; Schegloff 2007).8 Nevertheless, the significant resistive delay in this example contributes to the character of T’s

100  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self eventual compliant response, which might be glossed as “done, but with misgivings.” Silence is the most pervasive form of resistance in our data. As noted, many instances of silence are only possible examples of resistance. Given its implicit nature, silence (inaction) can be difficult to warrant analytically as performing a specific type of action. To do this, ownership of silences (how they “belong” to a speaker) must be shown. We have done this above by analyzing instances of silence in terms of their context of sequential organization. Resistive silences occur following a directive by the Experimenter initiating a directive-​ response sequence, with the preferred response projected by the directive being prompt compliance by the Teacher. Silence is resistive in this sequential context by delaying the projected compliance. Despite not all silences in the data being resistive, participants often enough perform first resistance by way of silence that momentarily postpones experimental continuation.

Imprecations A second form that resistance takes is a set of practices we call “imprecations” that display the difficulty and distress Teachers experience in repeatedly shocking L. Through such lexical and nonlexical expressions as swearing (“Jesus,” “Oh, Lord”), groaning, sighing, and even growling,9 Teachers can treat compliance as an arduous task by exhibiting the effort required to continue. Imprecations occur in two sequential contexts: they respond either to a complaining action by the Learner or to a directive by the Experimenter. That is, they react to a “triggering event” (C. Goodwin 1996, 30) and are best understood as reaction tokens (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2006) or as negative “response cries” (Goffman 1981). Like silence and hesitation, imprecations delay continuation, deferring it but not explicitly pursuing discontinuation. They are a second way Teachers can “wait and see” if the Experimenter will remedy the Learner’s complaint. Both forms of resistance, being relatively covert, trade on ambiguity. They may or may not imply sympathy for the Learner, disapproval of continuation, or disapproval of E’s handling of the situation. They may imply self-​orientation to the difficulty that continuation poses for the Teacher, other-​orientation to the difficulty continuation poses for the Learner, or both. At minimum, we can say that they orient to a problem with continuation, and that this

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  101 problem has to do with the actions the Teacher is being directed to perform and/​or the Learner’s response to them. Imprecations differ from silence and hesitation by exhibiting a heightened degree of difficulty with performing the experimental task of repeatedly shocking the Learner. That is, resisting in this way can be more explicit than silence or hesitation, since it can more strongly show that the Teacher is acting unwillingly.10 Consider Example 3 below, in which the Teacher is a 47-​year-​ old married machinist (or machine operator). During the postexperiment debriefing interview, this Obedient Teacher accounted for his compliance by claiming the importance of the experiment and the need to fulfill the contract he perceived himself as entering by participating: “I had that responsibility to keep on going . . . for the sake of conducting the experiment . . . doing the job that I was hired to do” (0213: 56:45–​55). (3) [0213 Obedient, practice 105V, 87]

1 T: Wro:ng (.) A hun↑dred? and five, volts 2    (.) 3

T: ((Presses shock lever))

4 L: OOH! 5   (0.4) 6 T: =​ Mmmm

((groan/​sigh))

7   (1.7) 8 T: Fair? skin.

Example 3 shows T, after shocking L, sighing in response to his pain cry. The cry projects remedy as a structurally preferred next action. Both E and T fail to provide remedy, however, and T instead pursues completion of the teaching sequence (line 8). In this sequential environment, then, in response to the cry and prior to correcting L, T postpones continuation via imprecation and silence. The sigh displays T’s difficulty and distress in shocking L, and delays continuation without explicitly projecting discontinuation.

Laughter Commentators on Milgram’s experiments have often been struck by Teachers’ laughter, a third form resistance can take (Blass 2004; Miller 1986). They have highlighted the “sadistic” incongruity of such behavior with L’s pain cries

102  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self and complaints. Milgram himself was the first to remark on such “nervous laughter,” associating it with Obedient outcomes through his vignettes of selected participants (1963, 1974).11 Contrary to Milgram’s claim, analysis of our collection suggests no relationship between Obedient outcome and sheer presence of laughter. After the practice lesson ends and the experiment proper begins, an effectively equivalent proportion of Disobedient subjects (25/​54 =​46%, including the Disobedient video case) and Obedient subjects (28/​64 =​44%) exhibit at least one instance of laughter and/​or smile voice. Table 4.1 summarizes. Milgram’s claim also glosses over the fact that laughter in different sequential environments can perform different actions (Glenn 2003; Potter and Hepburn 2010). Thus, we find that Teachers laugh not only in response to the Learner’s prior action (e.g., incorrectly answering a word-​ pair question or crying out in pain) but also following directives by the Experimenter. Especially in the latter sequential context, far from “sadistically” pursuing experimental continuation, laughter can often actually be resisting it. In the first sequential environment, laughter responds to the Learner’s just-​prior action. Here, it tends to work as a nonresistive “normalizing” practice, or what Jefferson (2004), drawing on Sacks (1992 [1964–​1972]), terms a “normalizing device for extraordinary events.” That is, the Learner’s pain cries and demands for release make relevant discontinuation or some other remedy. But the Teacher’s laughter in such a situation, one uncommonly encountered by most people, proposes a nonserious interpretation of the Learner’s action.12 Consider Example 4, featuring an Obedient Teacher who self-​identified as a 39-​year-​old Jewish housewife.

Table 4.1  Laughter by Outcome (During the Experiment, Following the Practice Lesson) Obedient (n =​64) Disobedient (n =​54)* Total (n =​ 118) At least one instance of participant laughter and/​or smile voice Percentage of participants

28

25

53

44%

46%

45%

*The count includes the Disobedient video case (see Appendix 1).

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  103 (4) [2001 Obedient, 120V, 72] 1

T: ((flips shock switch))

2     (0.2) 3 L: OO! 4    (.) 5

L: [(Let me out!)]

6 T: [h(hhh)!    ]=​ 7

T: =​O(h)h (g(hh)od/​l(hh)ord) (h)it’s f(h)unny!

8     (0.3) 9 T: .hhh The correct answer is wet duck.

L cries out in pain (line 3) after receiving 120 volts. In overlap with his subsequent demand for release (line 5), T responds to the cry with freestanding laughter (line 6). Then, at line 7, she further normalizes the situation with a laugh-​infused imprecation that is followed by an assessment of L’s reaction to being shocked as humorous. T’s laughter erodes the relevance of L’s projected course of action—​discontinuation—​by attending to him as being, despite appearances, not sufficiently harmed to warrant remedy. In this sequential context and with the laughter, the imprecation is not resistive; it does not orient to L receiving shocks as problematic for experimental continuation. In contrast, laughter that responds to E’s just-​prior directive to continue does tend to resist continuation. In this second sequential context, shown in Example 5 below, laughter contributes to the resistive action force of its accompanying talk by displaying T’s ability to overcome troubles experienced while participating in the experiment.13 T treats participation as problematic, though he does not explicitly say why. Example 5 features a 43-​year-​old married man who works as an experimental technician. This Obedient Teacher mentions that in his previous work as an electrician, he has “had some good shocks.” (5) [0212 Obedient, 270V, 169] 1

T: Two seventy volts.

2   (.) 3

((flips switch))

4   (.) 5

L: GET ME OUT OF HERE!

6   (3.7)

104  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 7

T: Go through it again?

8 9 E:

(0.9)

(Yes/​yeah)=​Start from the beginning please.

10

(3.6)

11 T: B:lue. (.) boy, (.) girl (.) grass (.) hat. 12

(.)

13 T: Correct. 14

(1.8)

15 T: And I shift these up and start from fifteen volts, 16

(.)

17 E: No you continue from where you left off. 18

(0.2)

19 T: °Oh: m(h)an! (h) .h° 20

(1.5)

21 T: Nice. (.) day, (.) sky (.) job (.) chair.

At line 15, T proposes to flip the used shock switches back to their original positions and restart at the beginning of the series at 15 volts, a tactic Teachers frequently use at 270 volts to try to reduce the voltage without suggesting wholesale discontinuation. T’s candidate understanding suggests he is being responsive to L’s demand for discontinuation (line 5). E, however, corrects this understanding with a directive to “continue from where you left off ”: 270 volts (line 17). Accordingly, the trouble that T experiences is being caught between L’s complaint and projected remedy and E’s directive to continue at the current shock level. He is caught between two different sequence types—​complaint-​ response and directive-​response—​that make relevant two competing sets of interactional obligations: to the Experimenter and to the Learner, respectively. Before complying (line 21), T resists the directive with silent delay (lines 18, 20) and a quiet, mild oath (imprecation, line 19) featuring laugh particles. The laughter marks the sequential dilemma in which he finds himself but also claims T’s ability to overcome that trouble, showing a kind of competence that reinforces the oath’s resistive quality. Infusing the words with laughter both enables the talk’s action (resisting continuation) and marks the talk as to be heard and responded to by the recipient (E) in a particular way (as displaying T’s ability to overcome troubles) (Potter and Hepburn 2010).

Forms of Resistance: More Explicit Moving toward the more explicit end of the continuum of resistance, we find three additional practices in our corpus: (4) addressing L, where the Teacher

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  105 produces questions or statements addressed to the Learner; (5) prompting E, which involves bringing the Learner’s distress to the Experimenter’s attention and leaving space for him to respond; and (6) stop-​tries, which involve trying to stop the experiment and accounting for such attempts. They may also project challenges to the operative working consensus, according to which the Experimenter is a competent authority figure with benign motives who would not allow the participants to be harmed, and the Learner is “not really” suffering harm (i.e., the shocks are “not dangerous”). Obedient and Disobedient Teachers alike use these practices to explicitly call attention to interactional troubles; however, only Disobedient ones sustain resistance consistently, refusing to go on cooperating with the Experimenter in the absence of any reparative work.

Addressing the Learner A fourth form resistance can take is an utterance addressed to L that does not pursue experimental tasks but rather orients to problems with continuation due to L receiving shocks. Like prompts addressed to E (see below), these utterances are formulated as queries or as statements and can occur with or without a prior “stop-​try” (an attempt to end the experiment). And, like laughter, addressing L may be resistive or nonresistive of continuation. When resistive, it typically pursues discontinuation explicitly rather than merely postponing continuation. Several ways of resisting by addressing L appear in the corpus. For example, this fourth form of resistance may occur in the course of accounting for a prior stop-​try, as in Example 6. Here, a 34-​year-​old married meter reader for the municipal water company resists continuation by addressing the Learner: (6) [0210 Disobedient, 150V, 90] 1 E: So please continue. 2    (0.2) 3

T: No: I don’t think I’m (°°) h

4    (1.7) 5

T: >YOU IN PAI:N,
‘S he alright,< .h the correct one was (.) hair.

2 3

(0.4)

T: Is he alright?

4

(0.2)

5 E: Yes. 6 T: Alright,=​ 7

E:

=​Please continue.

8 T: .H coo:l.

Although L is the party receiving the shock, T directs the queries about his well-​being (lines 1 and 3) to E. She is treating E as entitled to assess L’s well-​ being and, by implication, his fitness to continue. Although she temporarily abandons her first query to complete the teaching sequence, the queries are resistive since they postpone continuation (albeit momentarily) by orienting to L’s negative reaction to being shocked as problematic for immediately going on with the experiment. Statement Prompts: Like queries, statement prompts suggest the relevance of remedial action by the Experimenter concerning the Learner’s negative reactions to being shocked. That is, they propose that the Experimenter is accountable for ensuring the Learner’s well-​being.14 A common use of statement prompting is to report on the Learner’s reaction to the shocks:

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  109 (9) [0210 Disobedient, 120V, 3] 1 T: The voltage level will be a hundred and twenty 2

degrees-​a hundred and twenty volts

3

(0.6)

4 T: ((Presses shock lever)) 5

(0.3)

6 L: OOH::! 7

(1.8)

8 L: Hey these really hurt! 9

(0.3)

10 T: °°Eh:°° the-​the: right answer was duck hhh number 11

three °he’shollerin’=​=​it hurts like-​(0.2) ma:d now.°

12

(0.3)

13 E: Please continue. 14

(0.7)

15 T: .Hhh 16

(0.5)

17 T: °°Tch uh::°° (0.4) °tch° uh: bra:ve (0.2) woman

At lines 10–​11, T quietly announces to E that L is complaining that the shocks are painful. That is, T brings to E’s attention what L did at lines 5 (holler) and 7 (complain that the shocks really hurt). Given the relevance of remedy projected by L’s pain cry and complaining, T’s report forwards the complaint and the relevance of remedy to E. It prompts E to mobilize this remedial action: to correct the impropriety of the situation in an as-​yet-​unspecified way. However, E responds with a directive to continue (line 13), which works to refuse the remedial action that T’s prompt projected. E thus ignores not only L’s resistance to continuation but also T’s. After more resistive silence and hesitation, T continues (line 17). In bringing a matter problematic for continuation to E’s attention, statement and query prompting can suggest E’s deontic entitlement to decide what should be done about L’s pain cries and resistance (Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012; cf. Gibson 2019, 115, on “epistemological authority”). E in turn responds with scripted accounts for continuation and/​or directives. Following these, T may comply, as in the above examples. But sometimes participants do not let the matter drop, and instead mobilize the most overt form of resistance to continuation found in our corpus: stop-​t ries.

110  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

Stop-​Tries, and Accounts for Tries At the most explicit pole of the resistance continuum, the Teacher can address to the Experimenter a “stop-​try,” an utterance that attempts to bring the experiment to an end.15 Stop-​tries differ from prompts to the Experimenter by explicitly projecting discontinuation as the appropriate response to the Learner’s complaints. They typically do this by portraying continuation as in some way beyond what the Teacher is willing or able to do. Although Obedient and Disobedient participants use an overlapping repertoire of stop-​try formulations, there are stark differences in how the two outcome groups perform this practice. With respect to frequency, whereas fully 98% of Disobedient participants (52/​53) offer at least one stop-​try, only 19% of the Obedient ones do so (12/​64). When a first try is unsuccessful, members of the former group typically follow it up (often immediately) with further tries, and successful discontinuation is often achieved by means of such iterated stop-​tries and accounts for the tries that counter the Experimenter’s directives to continue (see endnote 14). In contrast, very few (4/​64 =​6%) of the Obedient participants venture more than one stop-​try.16 Table 4.2 illustrates these patterns. Differences in frequency of use aside, Obedient and Disobedient first stop-​tries are for the most part formulated similarly, exhibiting the same recurrent types of phrasing and grammatical components. Stop-​tries address the Experimenter rather than the Learner and typically feature first-​ person reference, declarative turn-​final intonation, and (less uniformly) negative verb formatting (e.g., “I don’t think I wanna: be a part of this anymore.” [0208 Disobed, 120V]). Teachers thereby project discontinuation by portraying continuation as a course of action they are unable or unwilling to pursue further. Stop-​tries thus display a relatively high level of entitlement to act on the issue of dis/​continuation. Of the six forms of resistance,

Table 4.2  Stop-​Try by Outcome (During the Experiment, Following the Practice Lesson) Obedient (n =​64) At least one stop-​try Percentage of participants

12 19%

Disobedient (n =​53) Total (n =​ 117) 52 98%

64 55%

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  111 stop-​tries most strongly resist the Experimenter’s definition of the situation and authority. Example 10 below shows T, a self-​identified 27-​year-​old Jewish housewife who ends “Disobediently,” formulating the stop-​try in terms of personal inability to continue. (10) [2016 Disobedient, 180V, 152] 1

T: That is incorrect.

2 (3.1) 3

T: °Hhh .hhh° hhhh .h=​

4

T:

((←2.4))

=​Oh I ca:n’t give him any more.

5 (0.6)

Here T announces that L’s answer is wrong (line 1). In the teaching sequence, the relevant next action is to read the voltage and deliver the shock. After delaying silently and displaying how effortful continuation is by sighing (imprecation; line 3), she upgrades to a more explicit form of resistance with a stop-​try (line 4). The turn is oh-​prefaced: given the sequential environment in which E’s directive to carry out the experiment is operative, the oh-​preface appears to propose the problematic, inapposite, and distressing status of continuation as the relevant next action. The turn may also claim independent rights to assess the situation as one in which T can continue or not. That is, T’s turn may challenge E for determining which of their definitions of the situation is more authoritative (Heritage 1998, 2002; Heritage and Raymond 2005). Finally, the turn features emphasis and sound stretching on the negatively formatted verb “ca:n’t,” portraying T as unable to continue. After coming to possible completion, T resumes resistive silence (line 5), pursuing a response by E that will remedy the problematic situation (Pomerantz 1984). In doing so, she orients to E’s involvement obligations to herself and L to participate in interactional repair. As the most explicit form of resistance, stop-​tries provide the clearest, most overt formulations of moral problems with continuation. Indeed, they sometimes frame resistance in classically moral terms, for example, by citing matters of conscience or reciprocity (e.g., “I wouldn’t want to be in there”), and as such represent the strongest challenge to the operative working consensus regarding the experiment’s purpose and consequences. In Chapter 5, we examine stop-​tries and their accompanying accounts in detail. For the moment, we simply observe that stop-​tries are the most effective practice for

112  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self sustaining a line of resistance against the Experimenter’s directives. They do not, however, occur in a vacuum, but are positioned as upgrades of earlier resistive practices (silent hesitation, prompts, etc.). As such, they form part of a local history of resistance that Disobedient participants show themselves especially skilled at building and maintaining. When Teachers state that they are unwilling or unable to continue cooperating with the Experimenter, they constitute themselves as Disobedient and are so categorized if they sustain a resistive course of action. In this way, Disobedient, like Obedient, is an achieved category, grounded in the turn structure of interaction and the local relevancies it creates. By not abandoning their line of resistance but upgrading it, Teachers become classifiable as Disobedient. Conversely, by dropping earlier resistance and resuming cooperation with the Experimenter, compliant Teachers become classifiable as Obedient. In both cases, such classifications erase their achieved character and the local histories of compliance and resistance (present to some degree among all Teachers) that provided for them. It is these histories, as interactional achievements, that we have been highlighting.

A Preference for Institutional Director’s Remedy One of the remarkable features of interaction in the experiments is how readily Teachers comply in the early stage of the session preceding the Learner’s first complaint at 120 volts. As we noted in earlier chapters, Milgram designed the experiment to make it increasingly obvious to the Teacher that the Learner is in pain and resistive of continuation. In most sessions in our data corpus, the Learner has cried out in pain several times (at 75 volts and sometimes earlier) and started to complain (120 volts) before the Teacher does anything obviously resistive and whistleblowing. Only one participant (0311) in the collection (1/​118, or 0.8%, including session 2027) successfully discontinues before delivering 120 volts. Is this fact simply an illustration of “the squeaky wheel getting the grease”—​that is, that the Learner must complain and refuse to go on if the Teacher is to be expected to seek to remedy the situation? There is much evidence in the corpus that Teachers can resist continuation without necessarily saying anything explicitly whistleblowing. They may, for example, perform resistive silence and hesitation, display the effort required of them by continuation, do resistive laughter, and prompt the Experimenter to take remedial action. As discussed in Chapter 3, first resistance typically

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  113 starts prior to 150 volts, with participants delaying continuation via forms of resistance analyzed above: they are monitoring the situation, performing “wait and see” (Garfinkel 1967). Resistance of this kind (often implicit and early in the shock series) may provide evidence for a general feature of resistive practice in the experiment. Via silence and hesitation, imprecations, and prompts, Teachers demonstrably orient to the absence of intervention (remedial action) by the Experimenter. By noticing this absence in the form of resistance that defers continuation, participants may display a structural preference for director’s remedy. Regardless of outcome category, Teachers treat the party issuing directives (the Experimenter, the “authority”) in a recurrent and patterned way after the Learner starts to cry out in pain, complain, and explicitly project discontinuation. They treat him, at least initially, as the appropriate party to remedy that which is obstructive (the Learner’s reactions to the shocks) of the directed course of action (continuation). Such postponement, however subtle, of experimental continuation often begins an interactional trajectory of sustained resistance by which Teachers push back against the Experimenter and successfully end the experiment. Preference for director’s remedy is thus a practice by which many Teachers make the moral implications of the situation more explicit. It is only after the Experimenter fails to remedy the obstruction to continuation in a “satisfactory” way that Teachers typically first issue the most direct and explicit resistive techniques—​stop-​tries and stop-​try accounts, and “letting the Learner decide” (see Chapter 5). Even those Disobedient Teachers who bring the experiment to an end at the lowest voltages initially treat the Experimenter in this way: as the appropriate party to take remedial action when the Learner first cries out and starts to resist. The fact that forceful (explicit) resistance typically only appears at 150 volts and above may be explicable, then, in terms of such a preferential and asymmetrical structuring of remedial action. Teachers appear to orient to a sequential ordering of the parties who may properly perform remedy of obstruction to the directed course of action, of pain experienced in the course of continuation, and of refusal to participate by one of the parties in the institutional setting of the experiment. The sequence of remedial action that participants tend to treat as appropriate is first appeal to the Experimenter (director); if the Experimenter fails to supply adequate remedy, then the Teacher (participant) pursues remediation by communicating directly with the Learner or challenging the Experimenter.

114  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Given that many Obedient Teachers continue to offer at least minimal resistance all the way up to 450 volts, a way of interactionally analyzing the outcome of Disobedience in terms of the posited preference structuring may be the following. Disobedient Teachers, like Obedient ones, initially attend to such a preferential structuring of remedial action. They monitor the situation, delay silently, and prompt the Experimenter to act with queries and/​ or statements. However, as the Experimenter continues to demonstrate unwillingness or inability to take “satisfactory” remedial action, Disobedient participants draw on an everyday repertoire of remedial practices to transition from deferral of continuation to active pursuit of discontinuation. Although postponing continuation and projecting discontinuation are both resistive as we’ve defined this practice (Chapter 3), for resistance in Milgram’s lab to succeed, it must ultimately go beyond mere postponement (more implicit resistance) to active discontinuation (more explicit resistance). Only in this way can Teachers, by refusing to continue going along to get along, achieve the Disobedient outcome. In sum, faced with the Learner’s plight, Disobedient Teachers may deferentially allow the authority figure interactional space to act, “giving him a chance” to remedy the situation himself. In doing so, they orient to the experiment as an order of accountability where the Experimenter is responsible for ensuring that things run smoothly and participants are protected from harm. But when the Experimenter fails to supply remedy, Disobedient Teachers, unlike most Obedient ones, take matters into their own hands. They gradually take the initiative for discontinuation, deploying increasingly explicit resistive techniques and sustaining resistance until E “finally does something” to remedy the moral problem by announcing discontinuation (“Well, I guess there’s no point in going on if he’s [L’s] not going to answer”).

Conclusion In contrast to Milgram’s operationalization of behavior as a dichotomous variable—​ Obedient versus Disobedient—​ our ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach reveals a more detailed and nuanced picture of patterned action constituting the two outcomes. We have shown that resistance is a typologically and sequentially organized phenomenon taking place during the interactions that culminate in Obedient or Disobedient outcomes. It is important to emphasize, again, that all six forms of resistance

Forms of Milgramesque Resistance  115 appear in both the Disobedient and Obedient collections. Teachers in both groups, at least occasionally and minimally, oriented to interactional trouble that had moral implications. However, the Disobedient Teachers differed by displaying the ability to sustain that orientation, whereas the Obedient ones did not. While recent Milgram research on defiance and resistance has tended to ignore the Obedient Teachers (see Gibson’s 2019 discussion of this one-​ sidedness), our comparative approach allows us to highlight the agency of participants from both groups. Comparative analysis of this sort continues to be greatly neglected by the Milgram literature, in which studies tend to focus virtually exclusively on either one or the other group. Our approach and data have allowed us to compare and contrast the two outcome groups and assess precisely how Disobedient Teachers distinguished themselves from Obedient ones. We conclude that it wasn’t use of any one of the six resistance techniques in themselves but rather how the techniques were combined and mobilized that made all the difference. The Disobedient outcome—​ successful resistance—​was achieved only by those Teachers displaying moral stamina, upholding interaction order obligations by repeatedly challenging the operative working consensus of the experiment. Like Part II as a whole, the present chapter’s comparative findings contribute to what is known about the background of shared resistance practices—​what both outcome groups had in common—​and will thereby aid future research in finding out more precisely how or why some Teachers succeeded in stopping the experiment whereas others did not. Having begun to illuminate the operation of authority and resistance in Milgram’s lab, we further develop this analysis in Chapter 5, which focuses in greater detail on how members of both outcome groups made the moral implications of the interaction explicit.

5 Self-​and Other-​Attentive Resistance In Chapter 4, we showed that all Teachers marked interactional trouble through resistive practices. We also showed that these practices varied in terms of how explicitly they oriented to the moral implications of the trouble: whereas all Teachers marked trouble through delays, hesitations, and disfluencies, most Obedient Teachers did not formulate its moral implications explicitly, for example, by reporting on the Learner’s reactions, asking if he was all right, or attempting to stop the experiment (i.e., stop-​ tries). By contrast, Disobedient Teachers moved from relatively implicit resistance to explicit resistance, culminating in a series of stop-​tries that eventually succeeded in effecting discontinuation. This chapter builds on the previous chapter’s analysis by focusing specifically on Obedient and Disobedient Teachers’ practices for making the moral implications of the trouble explicit. Accordingly, we pay particular attention to the composition1 of explicitly resistive turns in Teacher-​Experimenter interaction: to the design features of actions through which resistance is performed, which include questions, reports, formulations, and accounts, and the ways in which these actions make explicit the moral implications of the situation. In comparing how Obedient and Disobedient Teachers performed explicit resistance, we show that (1) such resistance can be grouped into self-​and other-​oriented resistance (see below), (2) members of both outcome groups displayed both types of resistance as well as a preference for other-​oriented resistance, and (3) Disobedient Teachers displayed both types of resistance more frequently than did their Obedient counterparts, as well as two types of explicit resistance that Obedient Teachers rarely or never display: Golden Rule accounts and letting the Learner decide (see below). What we call self-​oriented resistance (see Hollander and Maynard 2016 for the original coinage) describes explicitly resistive practices that display self-​attentiveness, a feature of talk that, according to Heritage (1998, 313), “focus[es] on how the world looks” from the perspective of the speaker, rather than that of copresent participants or absent third parties. In the Milgram situation, such practices locate a problem with continuation in Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0006

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  117 the Teacher’s immediate experience, including their concerns, abilities, and feelings. For example, the Teacher might say they “can’t” go on shocking the Learner, that they do not “feel comfortable” continuing, that they do not “want to be responsible” for anything happening to the Learner, and so forth. Although these practices at least implicitly reference the Learner’s situation, it is the Teacher’s experience they explicitly topicalize. By contrast, what we call other-​oriented resistance locates the problem with continuation in the Learner’s situation, for example, his protests, willingness to participate, rights, etc. (Hollander and Maynard 2016). We describe explicitly resistive practices as other-​attentive when Teachers altruistically attend to how continuation is problematic for the Learner, and thereby to “how the world looks” from his perspective. Besides distinguishing two types of explicit resistance, we complicate Milgram’s Obedient-​Disobedient dichotomy by distinguishing between minimal versus maximal Disobedience/​Obedience. As we observed in Chapter 3, the resistance of minimally Obedient Teachers (16/​65 Obedient cases: 25%) was often comparable in forcefulness, frequency, and timing to that of minimally Disobedient Teachers (21/​55 Disobedient cases: 38%). By contrast, that of maximally Obedient Teachers (49/​65 Obedient cases: 75%) was less explicit, was less frequent, and occurred later in the shock series. Because minimally Obedient Teachers produced most of the explicit resistance in our Obedient collection, this chapter’s Obedient examples come primarily from this minority subgroup. (See Conclusion below for more.) The chapter is organized as follows. First, we describe the organization and distribution of explicit resistance in the Milgram experiment. Second, we examine self-​and other-​oriented resistive practices among Obedient Teachers. Third, we examine these two types of resistance among Disobedient Teachers, comparing and contrasting their use of these practices with Obedient Teachers. Fourth and finally, we reflect on our findings and conclude both the chapter and Part II of the book.

Organization and Distribution of Explicit Resistance As noted, both Obedient and Disobedient groups employ self-​and other-​ attentive resistance in response to the Experimenter’s directives. This might come as a surprise to readers expecting the groups to dramatically differ in terms of the kinds of resistance they perform. However, with two important

118  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self exceptions (“Golden Rule” accounts and “letting the Learner decide”), the compositional design of explicitly resistive turns is similar across groups. Table 5.1 shows the distribution of these turns by group. As Table 5.1 indicates, both groups use other-​attentive practices more frequently than self-​attentive ones. Disobedient Teachers use self-​attentive accounts more than twice as frequently as Obedient ones (18/​53 or 34% vs. 10/​64 or 16%), though this is probably because these Teachers resist more often overall. As we saw in Chapter 4, Disobedient Teachers tend to perform more varied and more explicit forms of nonsilent resistance and to repeat previously used forms of resistance (see also Hollander 2015). These data provide further evidence that the main difference between the outcome groups has less to do with the compositional elements of their practices than with how those practices were used to sustain lines of resistance against the Experimenter’s directives. The Disobedient Teachers not only challenged the working definition of the situation as benign (if unpleasant) but also maintained that challenge in the face of counter-​resistance. In effect, these Teachers refused to cooperate in preserving the appearance that everything was essentially okay. To the extent that Teachers in both outcome groups made moral problems with continuation explicit, they engaged in an especially powerful form of Table 5.1  Self-​or Other-​Attentive Account Type by Outcome (During the Experiment, Following the Practice Lesson)* Account for Resistance Self-​attentive (any type) Self-​attentive (reference to legal consequences) Other-​attentive (any type) Other-​attentive (Golden Rule) Other-​attentive (letting the Learner decide)

Obedient (n =​64)

Disobedient (n =​53)

Total (n =​ 117)

10 (16%)

18 (34%)

28 (24%)

4 (6%)

11 (21%)

15 (13%)

31 (48%)

49 (92%)

80 (68%)

2 (3%)

15 (28%)

17 (15%)

0 (0%)

21 (40%)

21 (18%)

*Self-​and other-​ attentive accounts may appear in the same participant’s transcript. That is, participants may use both types. All counts are of participants, not instances of a practice.

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  119 resistance. However, such resistance succeeds in the Milgram experiment only if it is maintained over an extended sequence of turns where the Teacher does not accept the Experimenter’s bids for closure of the resistance sequence (see Chapter 4; e.g., by getting the Teacher to accept a counter-​account or offering to take responsibility for any harm that may come to the Learner). This finding fits well with Modigliani and Rochat’s (1995) argument that the establishment of a local history of resistance is important in creating further resistance. Finally, Table 5.1 shows the existence of at least two subtypes of other-​ attentive practices that are used exclusively or almost exclusively by Disobedient Teachers. Although Chapter 4 showed that the six forms of resistance appear in both outcome groups, these two practices are ways that some Disobedient Teachers produce compositionally distinctive resistance. Following Hollander and Maynard (2016), we term these subtypes “Golden Rule accounts” and “letting the Learner decide.” Golden Rule accounts are so called because they involve variations on the classic moral injunction, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”—​or, more colloquially, treat others as you yourself would like to be treated.2 Letting the Learner decide appeals to the idea that the Learner is an autonomous person with the right to decide whether he wants to continue participating in the experiment.

Self-​and Other-​Attentive Resistance by Obedient Teachers In this section, we analyze the self-​and other-​oriented types of resistive practice performed by Obedient Teachers. Though both types of resistance have to do with what is happening to the Learner, self-​oriented practices explicitly topicalize the Teacher’s situation and only implicitly reference the Learner (i.e., as the object of the action the Teacher is refusing to perform), whereas other-​oriented practices center the Learner’s experience. Self-​oriented resistance. To reiterate, by self-​oriented resistance, we mean that Teachers provide an ego-​involved, “my world” reason for postponing experimental continuation or for projecting discontinuation. The practice typically accounts for their just-​prior or concurrent resistance, which is often a stop-​try (an utterance that explicitly projects imminent experimental discontinuation: see Chapter 4). Consider the example below. The Learner (L) has been refusing to answer the questions, and the Experimenter (E) has directed the Teacher (T) to treat

120  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self no response as a wrong answer to be punished with the next shock. At line 1, T reads the next word list: (1) [0216 Obedient, 315V, 390] 1 T: Rich boy, 2

(.)

3 T: Cake 4

(.)

5 T: Ma:n 6

(.)

7 T: Girl. 8

(9.0)

9 T: hhhh >eh< My nerves aren’t very good mac=​I’m sorry 10

I don’t want to (give/​do) this (to him/​bit) anymore.

11

(1.8)

12 E: Please continue. 13 (1.5) 14 T: I’d much rather have you take this check back and just 15

let me go home.

16

(3.7)

17 E: It’s absolutely essential that you continue. 18 (0.7) 19 E: Please go on. 20

(1.5)

21 T: Rich boy,

As indicated by the long silence at line 8, no response to T’s word pairs is forthcoming from L. T then sighs and addresses E with an account for the silence and his own noncontinuation that references his “nerves,” and he issues an apology and stop-​try formulated in terms of disinclination to administer more shocks (lines 9–​10). The format of the stop-​try is account +​apology +​ marker of action disaffiliation (“I don’t want to”), such that T could be characterized as building the vocal resistance as a dispreferred type of action. After a silence (line 11), E issues a directive to continue (line 12), which, in effectively ignoring T’s account, both denies T reciprocity and displays high entitlement to have the directive complied with. T responds with silent delay (line 13), then sustains the earlier resistance with an offer to return the check in a further stop-​try that states

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  121 his preference to “go home” (lines 14–​15). In addition to stating his preference, T’s “let me” orients to his institutional position viz. E in its request for permission to leave the experiment, as does his offer to return “this check.” After more delay (line 16), E counters T’s resistance with prod 3 (line 17, “It is absolutely essential that you continue”). T performs further resistive silence (line 18), and E delivers prod 1, “Please go on” (line 19).3 T then postpones a bit further (line 20) before finally complying with E’s directives (line 21). Although this Teacher will occasionally offer further resistance later in the interaction, we can note that Example 1 is his last use of stop-​trying.4 While T’s concern for L’s situation may be implicit in both the positional (i.e., its sequential location following a long delay) and compositional (i.e., T’s nerves are being affected by what he is doing to L) features of his account, the account is self-​oriented in the sense that it explicitly marks how the current course of action is difficult for him. Specifically, it formulates T’s own “want” and “desire,” rather than articulating something about L per se. Another form of self-​oriented explicit resistance performed by several Obedient Teachers involves expressing concerns about being responsible, or held responsible, for harm sustained by the Learner. In some cases, we hear Teachers whispering to the Experimenter, asking whether the Learner will hold them responsible for his suffering and seek vengeance once he is released. In other cases, the Teacher does not voice concerns about specific repercussions for themselves, but about being responsible for something happening to the Learner more generally. This is what happens in case 2012, shown below as Examples 2a and 2b. (2a) [2012 Obedient, 195V, 72] 1 T: You’re wrong (.) the correct word is dance. 2    (.) 3 T: You’re getting a hundred and ninety vibe-​(.) 4

ninety five volts

5    (.) 6

((Buzz))

7     (.) 8 L: AH 9    (.) 10 L: Let me out of here (.) let me out of here my heart’s 11

bothering me(.)

122  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 12

Let me out of here you have no right to keep me here

13

let me out (.) LET ME OUT OF HERE LET ME OUT!

14 E: Go on [please (teacher).    ] 15 L:   [GET ME OUT OF HERE!] MY HEART’S BOTHERING 16

ME! LET ME OUT LET

17

ME OUT!

18

(1.4)

19 T: (h)I d(h)on’t want to be responsible for anything 20

happening to him.

21

(0.2)

22 E: The experiment requires that you go on teacher=​ 23

[Please continue.]

24 T: [°Oh I see.°   ] 25

(0.3)

26 T: .hh Red (.) brick rose sunset wagon.

After receiving 195 volts, L protests loudly and complains about his heart (lines 10–​14). E responds by ignoring L’s complaints and over his continued protests (line 16) urges T to “go on” (line 15). T initially resists E’s directive with silence (line 19), then upgrades her resistance at line 20, where she combines a prefacing marker of action disaffiliation (“I don’t want . . . ”) with an embedded reference to her own potential responsibility (“to be responsible”) and turn-​ ending recognition of L’s loud complaining (“anything happening to him”). Following a brief silence at line 22, E counters T’s resistance with a version of prod 2 (“the experiment requires that you go on, Teacher,” line 19). T then backs down (“oh, I see,” line 21) and resumes experimental tasks, presenting herself as being informed by E about the necessity of continuation (Heritage 1984). Although she goes back to cooperating with E to perform the experiment, T continues to resist intermittently and unassertively with delays, silences, and hesitations, before producing a stop-​try at 405 volts (“I’m afraid I ~can’t~ go on either,” line 7 below): (2b) [2012 Obedient, 405V, 279] 1 T: Still no response. 2    (3.2) 3

T: Tch four oh five volts

((different tone of voice))

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  123 4    (.) 5

((buzz))

6    (1.6) 7 T: I’m afraid I ~can’t~ go on either 8    (0.8) 9 E: The experiment requires that you go on teacher=​until 10

he learns all the word pairs correctly.

11 T: But ~he~ doesn’t seem [to   ] answer. 12 E:                [hrm!] ((clears throat)) 13    (1.2) 14 E: Well-​we must-​(0.2) go on.=​Continue please. 15    (2.8) 16 T: Wet night grass duck cloth

Like T’s earlier account, this one is self-​oriented in its focus on what she “can’t” do. Her shaky voice (symbolized by the ~ marks) on “can’t,” combined with prosodic emphasis, further embodies her reluctance to continue. At the same time, her “either” implicitly references the Learner, who did not respond to her immediately prior question, such that she may also be proposing that he too “can’t go on” and thereby displaying solidarity with him. When E counters by asserting the necessity of continuation (lines 9–​ 10), T reports a specific problem—​L “doesn’t seem to answer”—​with shaky voice on “he” and vocal emphasis on a trouble source, that is, the lack of an “answer” (line 11). Rather than address the trouble, however, E responds with another directive that effectively treats L not answering as irrelevant (line 14). Finally, following a lengthy silence (line 15), T relents and continues with the experiment. Other-​oriented resistance. In contrast to self-​oriented resistance, other-​ oriented resistance displays an orientation to ways in which continuation is troublesome primarily for L rather than for T. As a feature of resistance, other-​attentiveness is more common than self-​attentiveness in both outcome groups. This fact may indicate a favored, asymmetrical ordering of altruistic over egoistic accounts for providing remedy, an ordering attended to by both groups. That is, in formulating the moral implications of interactional trouble, most Teachers may be oriented to the relevancies of traditional moral discourse, which characteristically directs people to place the needs of others ahead of one’s own: whereas self-​attentive resistance topicalizes

124  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self potential harm to the Teacher and only indirectly and implicitly to the Learner, other-​attentive resistance explicitly treats the Learner’s situation as the main problem for continuation. One common other-​oriented way in which Teachers perform resistance is to report to the Experimenter something problematic about the Learner’s reaction to receiving shocks: (3) [2310 Obedient, practice 75V, 2] 1 T: Seventy five volts. ((practice 75V)) 2      (.) 3   ((buzz)) 4 L: Ow! 5

(1.5)

6 T: (Ow hey) I heard him say ow that time. 7

(0.8)

8 T: [Hm:.    ] 9 E: [Please] continue. 10

(0.6)

11 T: Uh: the (fig-​) the correct answer is ...

Seated in the adjoining room, L utters a pain cry upon receiving 75 volts during the practice lesson (line 4). T monitors the situation with resistive silence (line 5). At line 6, reporting on what he “heard,” T explicitly brings the cry to E’s attention in an other-​attentive way. The report suggests the relevance of remedial action by E, who is seated in the same room as T and presumably heard it just as clearly (participants wear no headphones). However, E does not immediately respond (line 7). At line 9, E directs T to continue, thereby treating the pain cry as unproblematic for continuation. Following further resistive silence and hesitation, T complies (line 11). Although this excerpt occurs earlier (75 volts in the practice lesson) than most other instances of nonsilent resistance in both the Obedient and Disobedient groups, this Teacher offers no further nonsilent resistance until 150 volts. At this point in the experiment, many Disobedient Teachers upgrade resistance to stop-​tries; this Teacher, however, queries the Experimenter as to what he should do next (“Continue?”). When the Experimenter then directs him to go on, the Teacher does so after a pause, offering only minimal resistance as he ascends the shock series. He does

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  125 not perform a stop-​try until 300 volts, well past the middle range of shocks where almost all the Disobedient Teachers successfully stop the experiment. Accordingly, while the exchange in Example 3 occurs relatively early in the shock series and the Teacher does eventually try to stop the experiment, such that he can be considered minimally Obedient, his overall performance conforms to the Obedient pattern: most resistance is relatively unassertive, and if assertive practices such as stop-​tries are mobilized, they come relatively late, and finally are abandoned as the Teacher backs down and complies with the Experimenter’s directives. Another common other-​oriented practice involves expressing sympathy for the Learner.5 In Example 4, T shocks L with 225 volts (line 1) before announcing the correct word-​pair answer (lines 8, 10). T does not immediately continue, and E (line 12), referring to where T had shocked L (line 4), directs T to hold down the shock switch longer than he has been doing. E trails off, and after a period of silence (line 13), T accounts for the way he has been delivering the shock in terms of feeling “sorry” for L (line 14). The account postpones immediate continuation and, by referencing “him” (L), is compositionally other-​attentive: (4) [0215 Obedient, 225V, 123] 1 T: You are now going to receive two hundred and twenty 2

five (.) volts.

3      (.) 4

((Buzz))

5     (.) 6 L: OOH:::! 7

(1.1)

8 T: The correct, (0.7) wor:d is noi:se. 9

(0.4)

10 T: Low, (0.2) noi:se. 11

(0.8)

12 E: Be sure you: hear the bu:zz when you: uh 13

(1.3)

14 T: Feel a little bit sorry for him. 15 E: administer the punish[ment.] 16 T:   [Al:r ]ight. 17 (0.3) 18 T: .hh The next word is ...

126  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self T’s expression of sympathy is mitigated with “a little bit,” although L has repeatedly issued pain cries, complaints, and demands to be released. Although T’s account tacitly invites E to take remedial action on L’s behalf, E counters by completing (at line 15) his unfinished directive from line 12. T then expresses willingness to comply (line 16), and after a bit of further delay (line 17), does so at line 18. Past this point, T’s further resistance is similarly mitigated until he performs a stop-​try at 360 volts [“I can’t (.) keep on (givin’ enough of this voltage)”], a point well past the middle range of shocks. But, following T’s accounts for the stop-​try, E again directs him to continue. T does so, reaching 450 volts and becoming categorized as Obedient. As with Example 2 above, T is slow to mobilize assertive resistance, and when he does so it is unsuccessful. Expressions of worry (Example 5) and “imprecations,” such as oaths and sighs (Example 6), can also show other-​attentive sympathy toward L’s plight: (5) [2017 Obedient, 285V, 177] 1 T: °Shall I read the words again:?° 2       (.) 3 T: °Blue girl:?° 4        (0.4) 5 T: [Or] 6 E: [No ]: (cuz) you’ve repeated (each) correct answers 7 to him. 8 T: [Alright.] 9 E: [(    )] 10      (0.8) 11 T: °Oh I’m worried (though-​//​but-​)° (.) Alright. 12      (0.3) 13 T: Blue. (.) bo:y (.) gi:rl (.) gra:ss (.) ha:t. 14          (.)

(6) [2024 Obedient, 420V, 335] 1

T: ((flips switch for 420V))

2     (0.6) 3 T: °°Oh my god°° hh Hard head. 4     (0.4) 5

T: tch .hhh Wet. (.) night (.) grass (.) duck (.) cloth.

6      (0.4)

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  127 As in Example 4, these Teachers are offering resistance that is both other-​ oriented insofar as it references L’s situation, and relatively mitigated and late in the shock series (285 and 420 volts, respectively). After Example 5, T resists several more times before reaching 450 volts and becoming Obedient, although none of these instances are stop-​ tries, while the Teacher in Example 6, who at 420 volts has almost reached the end of the shock series, offers almost no resistance past that point. Despite variation within the Obedient group, the evidence suggests that Obedient Teachers’ resistance is typically less assertive than that of Disobedient ones, is slower to mobilize, and eventually culminates in a backdown, even in the minority of cases where it takes the relatively assertive form of a stop-​try.

Self-​and Other-​Attentive Resistance by Disobedient Teachers Like Obedient Teachers, especially those who are minimally Obedient, Disobedient Teachers display both self-​and other-​attentive resistance to the Experimenter’s directives. However, in contrast with their Obedient counterparts, when the Experimenter counters Disobedient Teachers’ resistive responses to his directives, this group repeatedly offers counters of their own, sustaining noncompliance through practices that include accounts for their earlier resistance and iterated stop-​tries (utterances that explicitly project imminent experimental discontinuation: see Chapter 4).6 In what follows, we examine examples of both self-​and other-​oriented forms of resistance in the trajectories toward Disobedience in this outcome group. Self-​oriented resistance. Among Disobedient Teachers, self-​oriented resistance can look very much like it does for Obedient ones. Yet one kind of self-​attentive statement that Disobedient Teachers make far more commonly than their Obedient counterparts is that which refers to legal repercussions of continuation. As shown earlier in Table 5.1, of the 53 Disobedient Teachers in the corpus, 11 (21%) resist by self-​attentively referring to legal consequences; in contrast, only 4 of the 64 Obedient participants (6%) do so. Example 7 below is from Condition 3, in which Milgram has moved the Learner from an adjacent room (Condition 2) to the same room as the Teacher and Experimenter. L has been refusing to continue, and at lines 1–​2, T asks E about having “any responsibility.” This formulation, with its

128  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self reference to “any responsibility,” is negatively polarized (Heritage 2002, 78; cf. Horn 1989) and in that way structurally projects disconfirmation (a “no”).7 A silence develops (line 4), and T adds an increment to this turn (line 5), showing how he may be implicated. After a slight delay (line 6), E initiates repair at line 7, asking T to clarify if he means “responsibility” in the “legal” sense, which interpretation T confirms in overlap (line 8). Beyond the overlap, E denies that T’s responsibility would ensue (“no sir,” line 7): (7) [0310 Disobedient, 195V, 126] 1 T: Sir I-​I would like to inquire at this point, 2 (0.2) do I have any responsibility in case anything 3 happens to this man, 4 (0.7) 5 T: As I am (.) operating the switches, 6 (0.3) 7 E: Legal responsi[bility],=​No sir. 8 T:      [Yes.   ] 9 (0.6) 10 T: Uh how do I know th(h)at. h 11

((possible laugh token))

(0.9)

The self-​attentiveness is palpable in the “responsibility” issue, and T does not immediately continue after E completes the question-​answer sequence but sustains resistance with silence (line 9). At line 10, T’s resistance becomes more explicit: whereas the prior query had presumed E’s epistemic entitlement or stance (Heritage 2012)—​his knowledge of and right to pronounce on experimental matters—​this query (“how do I know that”) calls it into question, and may also display mistrust of E. Following the excerpt, T sustains resistance in several more exchanges with E. Though in time he decides to continue, he later achieves a Disobedient outcome by using stop-​tries. However, notice that even at this relatively early stage in the experiment, the Teacher is not backing down immediately, but building a line of resistance over multiple turns of talk. Thus, in addition to using a resistive practice found mostly among Disobedient Teachers (referring to legal responsibility), the Teacher is using it differently than his Obedient counterparts by sustaining resistance in response to the Experimenter’s directives to continue.

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  129 Other-​oriented resistance: Golden Rule, letting the Learner decide. In what follows, we briefly discuss similarities in the other-​oriented resistive practices of Obedient and Disobedient Teachers, before analyzing at length two such practices distinctive to Disobedient Teachers. Members of both outcome groups initiate resistance upon first hearing the Learner cry out in pain at 75 volts. Noncompliance at this point is not very forceful, in both groups typically taking the form of silent monitoring of the situation that delays continuation and/​or reporting to the Experimenter that something is problematic about the Learner’s reaction to the shocks. Also, between 75 and 120 volts, both groups may address queries to the Experimenter that display similar kinds of other-​oriented concern for the Learner’s welfare. For instance, Example 8 shows a Disobedient Teacher performing a first nonsilent attempt at resistance with an other-​oriented query (line 3): (8) [0235 Disobedient, 105V, 7] 1

T: The correct answer is (0.4) number two. Har:d head.

2   (1.2) 3

T: °(Y’know) this: is not gonna hurt him is it doc?

4   (0.3) 5

E: No this is not dangerous.

6   (.)

Here, T’s negatively polarized (“not gonna hurt him”) question asks for confirmation and shows concern for L’s welfare (Jefferson 2004; Raymond 2003). After slight delay (line 4), E provides confirmation. Following more conferral with E that further delays continuation, T resumes his experimental tasks (transcript not shown). However, he soon achieves a Disobedient outcome at 150 volts with a series of other-​attentive accounts (e.g., “I believe him, they hurt”; “He’s tired, he wants to stop”) and stop-​tries (“Well, I won’t continue with endangering a man’s life”). Although both outcome groups use such other-​ attentive inquiries, Disobedient Teachers tend to swiftly mobilize additional forms of other-​ attentive resistance. Two such additional forms—​(1) Golden Rule accounts and (2) Letting the Learner decide—​are almost never (Golden Rule) or never (Letting the Learner Decide) used by Obedient Teachers. Both practices account for prior or accompanying stop-​tries and are important means by which some Disobedient Teachers distinguish themselves from Obedient

130  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self ones. In a sense, these resistive practices represent upgrades of those used previously. They also frame the situation in more classically moral terms than do other resistive practices. Golden Rule accounts. Both in everyday and philosophical morality, a typical formulation of the Golden Rule is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The maxim enjoins moral actors to behave charitably and beneficently by empathetically identifying with “how the world looks” to others (cf. Heritage 1998, 313). When Teachers show such empathetic identification, we refer to the practice as a “Golden Rule account”: the Teacher justifies (accounts for) resistance in terms of empathetic identification with L. The practice thus contrasts with the merely sympathetic other-​attentive resistance illustrated in earlier examples. Golden Rule accounts occur in the dilemmatic situation we described earlier, in which the Teacher is caught in the middle of two opposing and competing projected courses of action: the Learner’s protests project repair/​remedy as the relevant next action, but the Experimenter nevertheless directs the Teacher to continue. Of the 17 instances of Golden Rule accounts in our corpus, all account for prior stop-​tries. Moreover, all but two are performed by Disobedient Teachers, such that the technique is one of the signatures of this outcome group (see Table 5.1). The two Golden Rule cases involving Obedient Teachers occur at 300 volts (subject 0216) and 330 volts (0220), whereas the Disobedient ones typically occur below 270 volts—​that is, earlier in the progression of shocks.8 One of the Obedient instances, though highly unusual for that outcome group, is nevertheless a perspicuous example of the practice: (9) [0216 Obedient, 300V, 348] 1 L: ((scream))=​ 2 T: =​That didn’t stay down. h 3

(1.3)

4 E: (°Look at the dial

/​uh put it down

°)=​

5 L: =​I REFUSE TO ANSWER ANYMORE! 6

(0.9)

7 T: Look (mac)=​I don’t wanna get up (to) any higher ‘an 8

this.=​I’m sorry.

9

(2.6)

10 T: I wouldn’t wanna be out there myself. 11

(2.7)

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  131 12 E: Please continue. 13

(5.1)

14 T: Hhhh ((←sigh)) Green grass,

Responding to earlier directives to pursue experimental tasks, T tries to stop the experiment at lines 7–​8 with a “look”-​prefaced turn addressed to E, which redirects the course of action toward the alternative of discontinuation (Sidnell 2007). The stop-​try has the marker of action disaffiliation (“I don’t wanna”) and features a postpositioned apology. When no response from E is forthcoming (line 9), T pursues a response at line 10 with a Golden Rule account for his just-​prior stop-​try. The turn justifies the prior try by empathetically identifying the speaker with L, and projects discontinuation. Golden Rule accounts have a proverbial flavor. For this reason, the account may solicit alignment in a particularly strong way after it has not been otherwise forthcoming (cf. Drew and Holt 1988 on idiomatic expressions in complaint sequences). Nevertheless, after some delay, E directs T to continue (line 12). The directive treats T’s empathetic identification with L as irrelevant to continuation and renews the relevance of that course of action. In this way, the turn exhibits a withholding of reciprocity on E’s part. Though T does not immediately comply, at line 14 he does so grudgingly with a sigh, and so does not sustain his resistance in the way Disobedient Teachers do. Accordingly, the example shows, once again, that the Disobedient outcome depends not so much on the use of any one resistive practice (e.g., Golden Rule accounting) but on how a variety of such practices are used together to sustain resistance. Two further Golden Rule instances, performed by a Disobedient Teacher (Examples 10a and 10b below), are remarkable because they happen early in the experiment (90 volts) before the Learner has started to complain and demand to be released. T is seated next to L. Prior to E’s directive at line 1, T has twice told E that he doesn’t “wanna hit that switch” (transcript not shown): (10a) [0311 Disobedient, 90V, 386] 1 E: Please continue. 2   (0.2) 3 T: We:ll, (0.4) uh we’re getting’ up to a lot of voltage. 4   (4.0)

132  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 5 E: Well it is absolutely essential that you continue. 6   (0.5) 7 T: Well it may be essential but this man over here is 8

getting a pretty good shock in the arm every time.

9

((turns to L))

10   (0.9) 11 E: Well y:es this is part of thee-​thing uh the 12

experiment=​He has got to be uh (0.2) uh receive a

13

punishment you see.

14   (0.5) 15 T: Yeah I know=​but I think ninety volts is enough punishment. 16   (1.6) 17 T: I was sitting over there I would hope that the teacher 18

would not go up above this point,

((turns to L))

T counters E’s directive by expressing misgivings about the high amount of voltage (line 3). After a prod from E (line 5) about the “absolutely essential” necessity of continuation, T delays (line 6) and then produces a prototypical form of protest with an agree-​disagree format (line 7) (Pomerantz 1984) in which he first agrees that “may be essential” but then displays disagreement by referring to the shock being administered to “this man” sitting next to him.9 After a subsequent prod from E (lines 11–​13), T produces another disagreement (line 15), assessing the last punishment as being “enough,” thereby challenging E’s definition of the situation and possibly his competence to determine what constitutes acceptable levels of punishment. Following a lapse (line 16), T adds a Golden Rule account that conditionally (by way of an implied “if ” prefacing “I was sitting over there” and the modal “would hope”) suggests an identification with the role of the other, to put the point in Meadian (1934) terms. Following several more exchanges of directives and resistive responses (28 lines of transcript omitted), E again directs T to continue (lines 19 and 22 below). T resists once more, other-​attentively describing L’s experience (lines 24–​26). E waits (line 27) and then (line 28) produces an account on behalf of his directives to continue, in effect placing the requirements of the experiment (“It is absolutely essential . . . ”) above the concerns T has been raising. T responds in his patterned way of acknowledging E’s talk in an agreeing fashion (line 32) and then showing misalignment with him (lines 32–​35).

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  133 (10b) [0311 Disobedient, 90V, 430] 19 E: It’s absolutely essential that you continue. 20  (0.3) 21 T: .h=​ 22 E: =​ Please go on. 23   (0.3) 24 T: It may be absolutely essential. (0.2) But this-​ (.) 25

poor man is sitting over here gettin’-​(0.9) gettin’

26

quite a kick in the arm every time. ((turns to L))

27  (3.0) 28 E: Well he hasn’t complained, 29  (0.4) 30 T: °Tch° 31  (0.2) 32 T: No he hasn’t [com    ]plained, (.) but I think if I 33

was sitting=​

34 T:          [((tap))] ((T taps table)) 35

T:

=​there I would’ve.

T’s disagreement (lines 32–​35) is formulated as a Golden Rule account for resistance that once again shows his empathetic identification with L’s experience. Following this excerpt, L agrees to “try one more” word pair. However, after delivering 105 volts, T performs another stop-​try (“Well, I’m sorry, but (.) I’m not gonna go up anymore on that voltage”). After T repeatedly counters E’s further directives prodding him to continue, E announces discontinuation. Through sustained resistance, T gets E to stop the experiment. In refusing to accept E’s counter-​accounts (e.g., that the shocks are not harmful, the Learner is not complaining, etc.), T successfully challenges the working definition of the situation. Rather than go along to get along, as the Obedient group ultimately does, this Teacher appeals to his own experience and reciprocity expectations (i.e., what he would expect if L were the one administering the shocks: Example 10a, lines 17–​18) to ground his refusal to go on. In other words, to E’s institutional orientation he counterposes attention to the moral requirements of interaction, which he formulates here in terms of the Golden Rule. Letting the Learner decide. In performing resistance, and especially when accounting for stop-​tries, some Teachers try to negotiate with the

134  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Experimenter the terms under which they would be willing to continue the experiment (cf. Gibson 2014, 2019). One other-​attentive way this is done is the practice of “letting the Learner decide,” which is a second distinctive practice by which Disobedient Teachers account for their attempts to stop the experiment. Below, we first show how Obedient Teachers can attempt to negotiate terms and then discuss the characteristically Disobedient technique of letting the Learner decide. In attempting to negotiate the terms of continuation, Teachers may ask the Experimenter to do something, such as check on the Learner and verify that he is alright, before proceeding with the experiment. Consider the following Obedient example, where T’s attempt at negotiating the terms of continuation contains elements of both self-​and other-​oriented resistance: (11) [2035 Obedient, 405V, 278] 1 T: Hhh °I’m sorry I c(h)an’t cont(h)inue.° ((breathy/​ 2

fainting voice))

3   (0.3) 4 E: The experiment requires that you go on.=​Please continue. 5   (0.4) 6 T: But I don’t want it on my conscience.=​ h(h)h(h) .hh 7   (1.5) 8 T: Wet. (.) night grass duck cloth. 9   (6.3) 10 T: °Can’t you even check him first sir,°=​ 11

E:

=​Hr:m!=​

12 T: =​°To be sure that he’s alright?°

At line 1, T produces an apology-​prefaced (cf. Robinson 2004, 296) stop-​ try that projects discontinuation. Then, countering E’s directive at line 4, T sustains resistance by making a self-​attentive appeal to her “conscience,” with resistive laugh tokens interspersed and appended (line 6; Haakana 2001). Following a silence, she produces the next word-​pair item (line 8). No response is forthcoming from L (line 9), who is seated in the next room and has not responded for some time. At line 10, T uses an interrogative formulation to plead with E to postpone continuation until E has ensured that L is in an acceptable condition to continue. The plea prompts E to “check him

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  135 first,” which, however, with its modal formatting and turn-​ending respectful address term, only weakly proposes a condition for continuation (Curl and Drew 2008). Here, T’s use of “even” attends to E’s rejection of her prior stop-​ try and presents checking on L as a minimal action that E could perform before she continues. E then clears his throat (line 11), and T, still more weakly (she nearly whispers at line 12), adds an increment to line 10 that refers to L’s condition (Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002). Following the excerpt, E responds with a directive to continue, and T backs down by complying. She performs no additional stop-​tries and reaches the end of the shock series with minimal further resistance. Like Obedient Teachers, Disobedient ones may attempt to negotiate the terms of continuation by prompting the Experimenter to take remedial action. However, one such practice unique to the Disobedient group is “letting the Learner decide” (see Table 5.1). With this practice, Disobedient Teachers treat the Learner, rather than themselves or the Experimenter, as the party who should decide whether to go on (cf. Gibson 2019, 23, 137). Letting the Learner decide can account for trying to stop the experiment and/​or can counter E’s directive to continue. Teachers typically follow up the practice not by backing down, but with insistence that the Learner be allowed to make his decision known. For his part, E uses special prod 2 to counter such concerns that L is being forced to continue (“Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.”).10 Letting the Learner decide is performed in either of two ways. In the less common version, T addresses L with a proposal to discontinue or a statement that L should decide whether to continue: (12) [0306 Disobedient, 150V, 205] 1

E: Please go on teacher.

2   (11.2) 3

T: It’s up to you Mister [Walla]ce.

4

L:    [(     )]

5   (0.2) 6

L: Well I’m not goin’ on

In the more common version, T addresses E with a stop-​try account or other counter to E’s directive that tasks E with demonstrating that L is willing to go on:11

136  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self (13) [0208 Disobedient, 120V, 26] 1 T: I don’t think I wanna: (.) be a part of this anymore. 2   (2.6) 3 E: Please continue. 4   (0.5) 5 T: °#No.#° 6   (11.0) 7 E: It’s absolutely essential that you go o:n. 8   (2.6) 9 T: Well if he says it’s alright it’s alright with 10

me=​(Will//​Would) you ask him if he wants to go on?

11   (3.2)

In either version of letting the Learner decide, T accounts for trying to stop the experiment by treating L as the relevant authority on the matter of continuation, the party with primary rights and entitlement to decide. By contrast, in Golden Rule accounting, Teachers typically treat themselves as knowing that the Learner is being forced to act against his will, such that it is up to them alone to decide whether to continue. Nonetheless, what both practices have in common is an other-​attentive focus on the Learner’s condition and the Teacher’s and Experimenter’s interactional obligations to him. Against the formal authority and asymmetry the Experimenter’s directives embody, the Teachers employing these practices orient to their moral responsibility to protect the Learner’s self from degradation and harm.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the composition of explicitly resistive practices produced by Teachers during the Milgram experiment, additional to those presented in Chapter 4. We have shown that Teachers in both outcome groups formulate the moral implications of interactional trouble in self-​and other-​oriented ways, with both groups displaying a preference for other-​ oriented formulations that may reflect an orientation to the emphasis of traditional moral codes on altruism. While both self-​and other-​oriented resistance display concern for the Learner’s well-​being, self-​oriented resistance directly topicalizes the Teacher’s experience, whereas other-​oriented resistance topicalizes that of the Learner. Nonetheless, both types of resistance are

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  137 ways of making violations of the underlying morality of interaction explicit in a particular interaction (Turowetz and Maynard 2010). In the context of Milgram’s experiment, such practices can be viewed as upgrading less explicit instances of resistance (such as delays, hesitations, imprecations, and nervous laughter) by articulating a moral problem and explicitly projecting repair/​remedy as the appropriate next action by the Experimenter. Though members of both outcome groups perform explicit resistance through self-​ and other-​oriented practices, Obedient Teachers do so less frequently (only 25% are minimally Obedient), less forcefully, and less consistently than their Disobedient counterparts, with the result that they eventually back down and continue the experiment on the Experimenter’s terms. Here we take stock of the present chapter’s findings with respect to the argument we have made in Part II of the book (Chapters 3–​5). Specifically, we present three overall conclusions about morality and resistance in the Milgram experiments: (1) Resistance need not draw on traditional moral discourse to be moral or effective. (2) Milgram’s dichotomous outcome categories obscure the variety of practices through which Teachers came to be categorizable as Obedient or Disobedient. (3) Disobedient Teachers differentiated themselves from Obedient ones against a background of shared resistance practices. (1) Resistance can be moral without explicit appeal to moral principles. Part II’s findings have implications for the important question of whether the resistive actions of Milgram’s participants are best understood as morally principled. We have argued that the moral dimension of resistance in the Milgram situation is frequently implicit rather than explicit. Common forms of resistance (Chapter 4), such as silences, sighs, and laughter, mark violations of the underlying moral order of interaction without explicitly formulating or articulating their moral implications. Furthermore, when we turn to the accounts Teachers produce for resistance (Chapter 5), we find a range of descriptions and justifications, only some of which invoke principles of the sort we typically associate with traditional moral discourse, such as the Golden Rule. Milgram himself conceived of moral action in terms of the principles and tenets of that discourse and looked for evidence that Teachers were following them as they resisted the Experimenter’s directives. Thus, in a postexperiment interview with Disobedient Teacher 0226, Milgram asks the man if he consulted ethical rules in his mind as he decided whether to comply with the Experimenter:

138  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Milgram: 47:03: “Did you rapidly survey in your own mind uh ethical theory and say that in this situation I don’t have the right to do it? or.” [Long pause, T has no immediate answer.] M: “Did the rational justification precede or follow the (more/​moral) emotional reaction to the situation?” T: “I just didn’t like it.” “And then I probably came to the rationale that this isn’t right.” [55:47] Milgram agrees at 1:00:29.

For Milgram and commentators who share his conception of morality, it may seem that most Teachers did not resist on moral grounds, or that their resistance did not have a moral dimension per se, because they did not explicitly invoke moral principles. By contrast, we have argued for a much more expansive view of morality: to be engaged in interaction is to participate in an enterprise underpinned by moral commitments and obligations to coparticipants and to the situation. Violations of the underlying moral order of interaction produce trouble that can become visible in the turn structure of a given interaction. Such trouble threatens the achievement of sense and self, and has moral implications whether participants explicitly articulate them or not. The Milgram situation offers a perspicuous example of those implications, the ways participants may work out their meaning turn by turn, and the consequences for themselves and coparticipants that working out can produce—​that is, ignoring the trouble at the Learner’s expense or insisting that his complaints be remedied. Accordingly, morally principled resistance, in the sense of invoking traditional moral discourse to justify one’s actions, is but the tip of a deep (and ordinarily tacit) structure of moral sensibilities and competencies that extends to the very foundations of human sociality. On this view, morality is embodied not only in classic moral discourse but also in the form of practices—​ranging from pauses and hesitations to explicit displays of concern for the well-​being of others—​by which actors achieve the moral character of everyday and institutional situations. (2) Variation within Obedient and Disobedient outcome groups. A striking feature of Milgram’s experimental design is its dichotomous outcome categories, which, in addition to erasing Teachers’ agency, neglects the complexity of the moral dilemma they encountered and how they made sense of it. When we examine the concrete interactional practices through which Teachers complied and resisted, we find that all Teachers marked trouble in turns immediately following the Learner’s pain cries and protests. What distinguishes Disobedient Teachers from Obedient ones is not an orientation

Self- and Other-Attentive Resistance  139 to trouble as such, but how they (a) made sense of the implications of that trouble, (b) explicitly treated them as a moral problem and insisted on repair and reciprocity, and (c) persisted in doing so when confronted with the Experimenter’s demands that they continue shocking the Learner against his will. (See point 3 below for elaboration on these similarities and differences.) It is difficult to analyze and write about Milgram’s experiment without referring to and therefore reproducing his outcome categories. Our own approach has been to mark the categories (i.e., by capitalizing them; cf. Rawls and Duck 2020) while respecifying them in terms of the variety of practices through which they were achieved in interaction. In attending to the diversity of resistive and compliant actions that led to Teachers being classified as Obedient or Disobedient, we find a continuum of situated practices that crosscut Milgram’s categories. We have attempted to capture some of this diversity in our distinction between minimal and maximal Obedience and Disobedience. At the same time, however, we would stress that our aim here is not to replace one set of categories with another (more nuanced) one, but to further sensitize analysts to the range of empirical practices on which such categories depend for their intelligibility, and which ought to form the primary focus of analysis. (3) Disobedient Teachers differentiated themselves from Obedient ones against a background of shared resistance practices. Part II has repeatedly noted that the two outcome groups differed less in terms of which resistive practices they used than in terms of how frequently they used them and how they organized them sequentially. Only the most explicitly morally principled accounts—​“Golden Rule” and “letting the Learner decide”—​are distinctive to the Disobedient group. Thus, there is a background repertoire of forms of resistance drawn on by both groups, a fact that highlights similarities rather than contrasts between the groups (Hollander 2015). Against this background of shared practices, Disobedient Teachers differentiated themselves from Obedient ones in the following ways. Overall, they resisted more often. They used relatively explicit resistance, such as stop-​ tries, much more frequently. Virtually all Disobedient Teachers upgraded their initial, implicit resistance to this most explicit form found in the corpus (stop-​try), whereas stop-​tries were far less common in the Obedient group (Table 5.1). Disobedient Teachers thus capitalized on a greater range of the full continuum of possible resistance practices than did Obedient ones. Importantly, they also used the techniques more consistently to assemble lines of resistance in which the Experimenter was, in effect, increasingly

140  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self pressed to fulfill his interactional obligations—​moral obligations—​to all participants in the experiment, including the Learner. In sum, Disobedient Teachers succeeded due to the way they built acts of resistance into sustained sequences in which they refused to back down or comply with the Experimenter’s directives to continue. They declined to “go along to get along” and maintain the illusion of reciprocity in a situation in which the Experimenter was not, in fact, offering reciprocity. Instead, they consistently marked the Experimenter’s failure to meet his interactional obligations to the Learner and themselves through continued acts of resistance. By contrast, their Obedient counterparts—​including the minimally Obedient ones who sometimes resisted vigorously—​ultimately backed down and continued their collaboration with the Experimenter, in the process accepting (or at least not challenging) the working definition of the situation as essentially benign, if uncomfortable. We turn now to Part III—​addressing current debates about Milgram, science, and morality—​which opens with Chapter 6 on attempts to explain Obedient collaboration.

PART III

C U R R E N T DE BAT E S : IN T E R AC T ION I N T H E POSTE X PE R IME N T I NT E RV I EW

6 Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors In this chapter, we present our explanation of Milgramesque behavior, contrasting it with major alternative theories. Drawing on accounts for their behavior that Teachers provided after the experiment in audio-​recorded debriefing interviews with the Experimenter, we argue that a majority of Obedient Teachers—​and many Disobedient ones up to a point—​went on complying with the Experimenter’s directives to shock the Learner against his will because they were engaged in what Sacks (1984) calls “doing being ordinary”: looking for usual, expectable features of social settings and acting under the assumption that others will cooperate with us in making sense and self. Reasoning that no competent, typical researcher would knowingly allow harm to come to his subjects, these Teachers made the ordinary judgment that despite appearances to the contrary, the Learner was not in any real danger. Besides grounding our own explanation of Milgramesque behavior, attending to Teachers’ accounts provides for critical evaluation of the current contending explanations of Milgram’s results—​Milgram’s (1963, 1974) own agentic state theory, Reicher and Haslam’s (2011) engaged followership theory, and Gibson’s (2019) rhetorical persuasion theory. More so than in Parts I and II of the book, in this chapter we are primarily in dialogue with Milgram scholars, whose backgrounds run the gamut from psychology and sociology to communication studies and history, and whose contributions we review below. We will argue that our findings offer only qualified support for each of these theories, with the majority of Teachers in our data invoking some variant of doing being ordinary—​particularly the assumption that the Experimenter is trustworthy and competent and would not allow the Learner to really be harmed—​to justify their actions. Overall, we conclude there is no single theorized process or model sufficient to explain Milgramesque behavior, but rather multiple processes operating in combination, including our own proposed process, which we have elsewhere called normalizing Trust (Hollander and Turowetz 2017).1

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0007

144  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

Explaining Milgram: 60 Years Without Consensus Ever since Milgram created the “obedience” paradigm in social psychology some 60 years ago, commentators have offered many contrasting interpretations of his findings. It would seem straightforward to evaluate the import of a randomized and controlled experiment: to assess its internal and external validity, the reliability of its measures, and the hypothesized causal relationship between explanatory and response variables (Campbell and Stanley 1966). However, Milgram’s research design departed in important ways from experimentalist ideals.2 Such departures not only increase the difficulty of assessing the experiment’s real-​world generalizability but also augment the number of plausible social psychological theoretical interpretations of his results. After years of immersion in the Milgram literature and study of a large collection of the archived audio recordings—​capturing both the experimental sessions (our empirical focus in Part II) and the immediately postexperiment debriefing interviews (in Part III)—​we remain dissatisfied with the various global explanations of “obedience” proposed to date. For such reasons, we doubt such a smoking gun (single process or “cause”) still lies waiting to be discovered in Milgram’s lab. It may well be that the goal of identifying a single social psychological process responsible for his results is illusory (Brannigan, Nicholson, and Cherry 2015). As Staub (2014) avers, in Milgram’s lab “it is unlikely that a single psychological process led to either continued compliance/​cooperation, or refusal to cooperate. Varied processes can arise from the interaction of situation and personality” (508). Likewise, in the real-​world context of the Holocaust, “any analysis of why they [perpetrators] behaved the way they did must rely on a variety of explanations rather than a generic core” (Overy 2014, 515). That is, just as “grand” theories of genocide face daunting empirical challenges, so comparable challenges appear to face single-​process theories of Milgramesque behavior, whether in the lab or real world. Beyond agency versus structure (voluntarism vs. situationism). Though the Milgram literature is large, explanations of “obedience” can be grouped into two broad paradigms. The first, and more recent, emerging in the early 2000s (see Chapter 1), emphasizes the role of Teachers as active participants rather than passive subjects (Gibson 2019). For instance, Reicher and Haslam’s influential “After Shock” paper (2011) proposed that active social identification with the Experimenter (“engaged followership”), and not passive obedience as Milgram had claimed, was the main social psychological process at

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  145 work in the experiments, and accordingly rejected Milgram’s argument that Teachers complied because they became passive agents of the Experimenter (“agentic shift”).3 More recently, a number of archival studies—​for example, Gibson (2013a), Haslam et al. (2015), and Perry (2013)—​have used the Yale archive and/​or interviews with former participants to highlight Teachers’ interpretations of the experiment and their own actions. These studies all claim that an adequate explanation of Milgramesque behavior must (at least in part) be informed by Teacher-​participant perspectives and self-​justifications. However, this “active” picture of Milgram’s Teachers sits uneasily with a foundational premise of the midcentury social psychological experimental tradition within which Milgram worked, a second paradigm we call situational determinism.4 This tradition conceives of human social behavior as caused or determined by social psychological forces, either within or outside of conscious awareness, produced by features of a situation. The situationist view of behavior, particularly the classic variant espoused by Milgram and his postwar colleagues, treats actors as bearers of social psychological processes acting through them. The situation itself is reduced to a set of exogenous stimuli impinging on actors (Brannigan 2021; Brannigan, Nicholson, and Cherry 2015), treated as givens rather than cooperative achievements of the participants. Milgram’s Obedience film (1965b) illustrates his commitment to this paradigm, especially via comparison of Obedient and Disobedient outcomes to motions of charged particles in an electromagnetic field. As used in the Milgram literature, both paradigms tend to posit a split between the individual and situation. This is the familiar agency versus structure binary that has shaped social and psychological theory, especially since 1945 (see Chapter 1). Situationist theories of action locate the cause of individual actions in situational variables. Milgram’s agentic state theory, in particular, reduces behavior to a function of the situation in a decidedly deterministic way. By contrast, current agency-​centered theories are less deterministic than probabilistic, emphasizing the capacity of actors to make and modify decisions in light of the effects their actions produce. Nevertheless, current theories like engaged followership are causal insofar as they posit a cognitive mechanism—​identification with a relevant other (Milgram’s scientist)—​as causative of Teacher behavior. Though the putative mechanism is located inside the person and not the situation, it is still a causal force producing variation in Teachers’ behaviors. By contrast, our own interaction order approach focuses not on the space outside of actors (the situation) or within actors (their minds), but on the

146  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self spaces between them, as constituted in and through interaction. This has been the point of our respecification away from morality in action to morality in interaction (see Chapter 1). We have been analyzing self and situation as local, ongoing achievements by and for participants that can change over the course of a given interaction, with each successive turn of talk and embodied action. To the extent that self and situation remain “the same” across a sequence of turns, it is because participants achieve that sameness via shared practices and expectations. In earlier chapters, we showed how Milgram’s Teachers, in interaction with the Experimenter and Learner, first constituted the experiment as an ordinary, benign study of learning and memory, and then worked to either preserve or challenge that definition of the situation. In what follows, we focus on the sensemaking practices they engaged in as they did so, particularly the set of practices Sacks (1984) calls doing being ordinary, which all Teachers initially employed in achieving the mundane character of the experiment and which formed the background against which they came to resist the Experimenter’s directives.

Accounting for Obedience: Doing Being Ordinary In accounting for their actions during the postexperiment debriefing interviews, many Teachers displayed a strong commitment to the benign social order that commonsense actors usually take for granted. Although produced after the experiment ended, their accounts suggest that in the course of the experiment, these Teachers were doing being ordinary. Sacks likens being ordinary to a job, arguing that the ordinariness of the social world is an ongoing achievement by and for its members. If the world is experienced as benign and “normal,” it is because members constitute it as such, and hold one another accountable for doing so. That is, the world is ordinary because we are constantly achieving the ordinariness of everyday situations (e.g., driving to the store, seeing a movie, participating in a social psychological study), which reflexively act back upon our ongoing practices for navigating those situations as they develop. In an ordinary “cast of mind,” people see and report on ordinary features of social scenes: It is not that you might make such observations [nonordinary observations] but not include them in the story, but it is that the cast of mind of doing “being ordinary” is essentially that your business in life is only to see and

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  147 report the usual aspects of any possibly usual scene. That is to say, what you look for is to see how the scene you are in can be made an ordinary scene, a usual scene, and that is what the scene is. (Sacks 1984, 416, original emphasis)

Doing being ordinary, for Sacks, is a matter of not only which details persons choose to report on but also what they see in the first place. It is a way of organizing one’s perception of social reality, so that nonordinary aspects of a scene effectively become unseeable. As Sacks (1984, 419) puts it, for most people in most situations, mundane details like “the way someone turned around” are not just untellable, but unseeable: “The way in which your mother turned around is something unseeable, much less tellable.”5 When unusual or unexpected events occur in everyday life, the first impulse of those in an “ordinary cast of mind” is to normalize them by bringing them into alignment with existing expectations, something they may do without conscious awareness. People routinely scan such events for their mundane, expectable characteristics, and for ways they might turn out to be perfectly ordinary after all. “People take on the job of keeping everything utterly mundane. . . . [N]‌o matter what happens, pretty much everybody is engaged in finding only how it is that what is going on is usual, with every effort possible. . . . And it is really remarkable to see people’s efforts to achieve the ‘nothing happened’ sense of really catastrophic events” (Sacks 1984, 419). The ethnomethodology and conversation analysis literature features many examples of such efforts and their normalizing effects. For instance, Maynard’s (2003) analysis of news delivery describes the work participants do to preserve the benign character of the everyday world in the face of bad news. In particular, he shows that whereas participants foreground good news, they “shroud” bad news, delivering it gradually over a series of turns that usually end with some sort of “bright side exit”: an affirmation that despite the news, things will be okay. As they normalize bad news and integrate it into their lifeworld, participants achieve and preserve the ordinariness that such news threatens to disrupt. Likewise, Jefferson (2004) describes a practice for normalizing experiences with the phrase “First I thought X, then I realized Y.” In this sequence, the first thought turns out to have been wrong: for example, the companion of someone who has been shot reports having assumed “at first” that the noise they heard was a “faint pop,” or that the companion is just joking around. “Asserting the wrong ‘first thought’ reaffirms, in the face of some actuality, the in-​principle correctness of the ordinary alternative. In effect it is proposing

148  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self that the wrong ‘first thought’ should have been right.” As such, in addition to describing the (initially) ordinary judgment the speaker made while having the experience, reporting “wrong first thoughts” is part of “a ritual used to manage, to put into normal perspective, something that might otherwise be disruptive” (Jefferson 2004, 140, original emphases). In his classic breaching experiments Garfinkel (1967) argues that members of society hold one another accountable for achieving the mundane, expectable, commonsense character of everyday life—​in other words, for doing being ordinary—​and describes the sanctions they impose on those who do not participate in this process. For example, here is the transcript of a conversation between an experimenter (E, one of Garfinkel’s students) and unwitting subject (S): From Garfinkel (1967, 42): S: Hi, Ray. How is your girl feeling? E: What do you mean, “How is she feeling?” Do you mean physical or mental? S: I mean how is she feeling? What’s the matter with you? (He looked peeved.) E: Nothing. Just explain a little clearer what you mean. S: Skip it. How are your Med School applications coming? E: What do you mean, “How are they?” S: You know what I mean. E: I really don’t. S: What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?

In this exchange, Garfinkel’s student-​experimenter (E) violates the mundane expectation that he will know what others mean without their having to spell it out in so many words. In only a handful of turns, the conversation goes from an ordinary greetings exchange to the subject (S) insinuating that the student-​experimenter is “sick.” In general, when members fail to “do being ordinary,” they create confusion and consternation among copresent others, who may then assume that there is something wrong with them and question their competence. In Milgram’s lab, Teachers behaved as ordinary commonsense actors in assuming that the Experimenter was telling the truth and that his motives were benign: those of a typical researcher affiliated with a prestigious

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  149 university. To assume otherwise from the outset, or too early on in the proceedings, would have opened them up to allegations that they were being unreasonable, paranoid, overly suspicious, or uncooperative. They trusted the Experimenter as a matter of course, at least initially. What distinguished ultimately Obedient from ultimately Disobedient Teachers was their willingness to go along treating the situation as normal—​as an ordinary-​if-​ uncomfortable experiment—​rather than openly rejecting the Experimenter’s assurances that no one was being harmed. To paraphrase Sacks (1984), Obedient Teachers made ongoing efforts to achieve the “nothing much is happening” appearance of the scene, cooperating with the Experimenter to sustain an essentially benign working definition of the situation even as they sometimes voiced misgivings. As we have seen, most Disobedient Teachers did this too, at least at first. Like the Obedient Teachers, they began the experiment in an ordinary cast of mind. Unlike their Obedient counterparts, however, they were able to step out of that cast of mind and remain there until the Experimenter discontinued the experiment. In the sections to follow, we ground this argument in the postexperiment accounts provided by Milgram’s Teachers. Whereas earlier chapters make extensive use of conversation analysis, this chapter takes a more ethnographic approach to the data. Here, we are less concerned with how the interview accounts were sequentially occasioned than with what they can tell us about how the Teachers made sense of the experiment. Because the data are retrospective, they provide at best indirect evidence of the sensemaking practices that Teachers employed during the experiment. The interview setting is a different context of accountability than the experiment itself, so we must be cautious in making leaps from what Teachers said about what they did during the experiment to what they actually did (or thought). Nonetheless, we feel justified in using these accounts, in combination with our turn-​by-​turn analysis of resistive practice from the preceding chapters, to argue that doing being ordinary, and the Trust Conditions it presupposes, is important for explaining what Teachers did (and did not do) during the experiment proper.6 In doing so, we situate ourselves in a long line of ethnomethodologically informed ethnographers, including Garfinkel (1967) and Sacks ([1964–​1972] 1992), who draw liberally on reports and accounts to augment direct observation of situated practice. As we will see, the accounts also provide at least limited support for alternative explanations of the Milgram phenomenon, suggesting that no one of the current theories fully captures or models what occurred in his lab.

150  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

Why Teachers Say They Obeyed Although Milgram recorded hundreds of interviews he conducted with Teachers immediately after the experiment, Milgram scholars have mostly neglected them (except Perry and Gibson), leaving this important data source largely untapped. Consequently, little is known about how Teachers themselves oriented to the moral significance of their actions, despite the many assessments of Milgram’s own scientific ethics offered over the years (e.g., Baumrind 1964; Kaufmann 1967; Nicholson 2011). In our research, we examined the postexperiment accounts produced by 91 Teachers, split evenly between Obedient (n =​46) and Disobedient (n =​45) outcome categories. Based on repeated listening and transcription of relevant portions of the interviews, we identified four types of accounts Teachers gave for continuing with the experiment: (1) Following instructions, (2) Learner was not really being harmed, (3) Importance of the experiment, and (4) Fulfilling a contract. These occur among both Obedient Teachers, who offered them to explain why they went along with the experiment despite the Learner’s protests, and Disobedient ones, who used them to explain why they complied with the Experimenter’s directives before the experiment was discontinued.7 Below, we first describe these four types of account. We then spotlight a specific account, Learner was not really being harmed, voiced by a majority of the Obedient Teachers in our collection (33/​46, or 72%).8 These Teachers (T) claimed they continued because they did not think the electroshocks posed a danger of injuring the Learner (L), despite strong indications to the contrary, thereby exhibiting trust that the Experimenter (E) wouldn’t allow harm to the Learner. Given this account’s high frequency, it offers an important clue toward explaining Milgramesque compliance. It also helps us distinguish Obedient from Disobedient Teachers, in that comparatively few of the latter invoked it.

Accounting for Continuation The Experimenter conducted the debriefing interviews using Milgram’s schedule of questions and statements (see Box 3.1). Though the interviews were highly structured, E nonetheless allowed Teachers ample time to voice reactions to the experiment. The interviews therefore varied in length, with many reaching over 20 minutes.

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  151 The Experimenter often directly asked interviewees why they continued or stopped. However, Teachers also frequently voiced justifications while answering the Experimenter’s other questions.9 Across both contexts (solicited vs. volunteered accounts), Teachers used four types of explanation for continuation.10 A breakdown of these accounts and their distribution across Obedient/​Disobedient outcomes is shown in Table 6.1.11 Table 6.1 provides a breakdown of accounts across all five conditions in our collection. The most common explanation offered by Obedient Teachers is L not being harmed. Out of 46 Obedient Teachers, 33 (72%) used it at least once. They also used it more frequently (33/​76, or 43%) than they did other types of account. By contrast, we see that Disobedient Teachers produced only 5 of these accounts, which made up just 5/​27 (18.5%) of all the accounts for continuation they offered. Disobedient Teachers were far more likely to say they continued because they were following instructions (in comparison to L not being harmed), a reason that treats the Experimenter as an authority figure entitled to give directives (instructions) and expect compliance but says nothing per se about his competence/​trustworthiness or the safety of the Learner. Obedient Teachers also frequently offered the following instructions account, sometimes in addition to L not being harmed. Finally, a minority of Obedient and Disobedient Teachers cited the importance of the experiment and/​or contractual obligation to the Experimenter as reasons for continuing. We provide examples of these accounts below. Since our collection includes all 40 interviews from Condition 2 (Voice-​ Feedback), we can also report the frequency distribution for this condition by itself. These results are noteworthy due to the prominent role that Condition Table 6.1  Accounts for Continuation Overall (91 Accounting Participants) Following Instructions Obedient outcome (n =​46) Disobedient outcome (n =​45) Total

L Not Being Importance of Harmed Experiment

Contract Total

27

33

11

5

76

16

5

4

2

27

43

38

15

7

103

152  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Table 6.2  Accounts for Continuation in Condition 2 (36 Accounting Participants)*

Obedient outcome (n =​22) Disobedient outcome (n =​14) Total

Following Instructions

L Not Being Harmed

12

15

5 17

Importance of Experiment

Contract

Total

6

4

37

4

2

1

12

19

8

5

49

*The table includes only the 36 (out of 40) participants who produced at least one account.

2 has played in the Milgram literature. It is this condition, which Milgram first reported on in 1963, that many commentators on Milgram have in mind when they discuss the key findings from the experiment. As Table 6.2 shows, the frequency and distribution of accounts in Condition 2 are quite similar to those of the collection overall. Again, L not harmed appears more frequently than does any other account in the Obedient interviews. Fifteen out of 22 total (68%) Obedient interviewees use it at least once. Disobedient Teachers, by contrast, produced just 4 instances of this account. Nonetheless, it makes up 33% (4/​12) of all the accounts for continuation they did offer, suggesting that perceptions of the experiment as ordinary and benign were important for these Teachers too. Following instructions. Many Teachers justified compliance by pointing out that E kept telling them to continue, and they merely followed his “instructions” (“orders,” “commands,” “requests”). (1) [0322 Obedient, 55:38, component 8]12 1

T: Uh:, (0.4) You you were uh (.) >In other words
I(h) was just doin’ it$< 6

cuz you ↑said so?=​And uh:=​You heard him ↑yelling,=​

7

You coulda ↑sto:pped.=​You coulda stopped ↑me.

8   (0.6) 9 E: (Well) you could’[ve stopped (   ) 10 T:  

      [I

figured if it wasn’t ↑serious?

11   (0.9) 12 T: If it was ↑THAT serious you woulda ↑stopped me. 13   (.) 14 T: (°D’ya see that?°)

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  155 We will have more to say about this type of account, and its subtypes, below. For now, we can observe that the Teachers, both of whom were ultimately classified as Obedient, appeal to the ordinary assumptions that an experiment includes a series of participants (Example 2, lines 1–​4) who would not have continued to participate if subjects were being harmed; that E was not “an inhuman monster” (Example 2, lines 13–​14); and that if the situation “was THAT serious you [E]‌woulda stopped me” (Example 3, lines 10, 12). Although they do not know the Experimenter personally—​he may well have been a monster, for all they knew—​they nonetheless made assumptions about who he was and what he would have done if the Learner were really in danger. That is, based on what “Anyone” knows (i.e., any competent member of the culture: cf. Garfinkel 1967) about members of a commonplace setting like a research experiment and their motivations, these Teachers took for granted that despite appearances, they could count on everything being all right after all. Importance of the experiment. The third most common type of account invokes the importance of the experiment, or of science more generally, as a reason for continuation. Though continuation may have been difficult, these subjects indicate that the experiment was worthwhile or valuable in some way, even if they do not clearly understand its purpose. In so doing, they may present themselves as engaged followers of E’s leadership (Reicher, Haslam, and Smith 2012). Due to this account’s relevance to engaged followership theory, we construe the category very broadly. For instance, we include any account that explicitly avows scientific values: (4) [2024 Obedient, 26:42, component 12] 1 E: ((E has dropped cover story)) Why ↑did you do it. 2  (1.2) 3 T: I don’t ↑know:.=​As I said because: (0.2) I mean this 4

is-​(0.4) I felt-​(0.4) >In the back of the head
there was no 9

hesitation upon your part< that we con↑tinue, (0.5)

10

And because also he was in .h (0.4) the roo:m

11

without anybody being w:ith him.

12

(0.3)

13 E: Mhm, 15

(0.2)

16 T: >And I knew that< uh I couldn’t see him, (0.7) 17

An::d uh if there was any question that this would

18

affect his heart?=​Or that he would faint? (0.6) You

19

wouldn’t have (0.4) allowed me to go o:n.

20

(0.4)

21 E: I see. 22 T: So I assume for ↑that reason that it was only 23

↑moderately painful.

(8) [0218 Obedient, 40:08, component 7] 1 E: Why did you then.=​Why did you [go on. 2 T:    [.hh 3    (.) 4 T: Well,=​I: used discretion in the sense that I didn’t 5

think that (0.7) eh::: (.) that this uh .hh experiment

6

would be:: as you said in the beginning nothing would-​

7

actually ↑come of it,=​It wouldn’t-​leave the man .hh (.)

8

with any extreme (.) e↑ffects of it.=​So

9

[I (felt)

10 E:   [There would be no permanent [tissue damage. 11 T:      [No permanent tissue. 12

=​So I thought (.) they were just sudden shocks, . . .

(9) [2004 Obedient, 27:55, component 7] 1 E: $Why did you think$ it was funny ((T’s name deleted)) 2 T: Eh heh heh heh! .h (.) $I don’t know.$=​I knew it 3

wouldn’t ↑hur:t him.

4    (.) 5 E: Uh huh, 6    (0.4)

160  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 7 T: ↑That was one thing.=​That I knew it wouldn’t hurt him. 8

(0.8)

9 E: Well they’re not dangerous,=​No:.=​ 10 T: =​No:.=​Because I knew you ↑wouldn’t give it to us if it was.

These Teachers dealt with the experiment’s ambiguity by highlighting E’s professional judgment and competence, while downplaying the importance of L’s resistance. In Example 7, Teacher 0204 notes that E displayed “no hesitation . . . that we continue” (lines 8–​9) and that L was alone and unmonitored in the other room (lines 10–​11); he also says that “You [E]‌wouldn’t have allowed me to go on” (line 18) if L was truly in danger. On the basis of such observations, he claims that the shocks must not have been dangerously painful. Likewise, in Example 8, Teacher 0218 relies on E’s judgment (“as you said in the beginning”: lines 5–​6) that L is not in danger. And in Example 9, Teacher 2004 claims to know that the shocks were not harmful, explicitly basing this judgment on the conviction that E would not have exposed participants to danger. Like Teacher 0204 in Example 7, she voices an assumption about what the Experimenter would do if the Learner’s health were at risk. Note that Teachers 0204 (line 18) and 2004 (line 10) use reasoning by hypotheticals in accounting for their situated judgments. If L had been in danger, E “wouldn’t” have allowed the experiment to go on or have performed it in the first place. From the facts that E did perform the experiment and allow it to continue in the face of L’s resistance, it follows (for the Teachers) that L was not “really” in danger. This commonsensical argument depends, of course, on the belief that E’s professional judgment guarantees his participants’ well-​being. As Edwards (2006) observes in a study of suspects responding to accusations by police, claims about what someone would or would not do suggest a disposition to act (or not act) in a particular way. A suspect who insists that he “would not” hit a woman, for example, is implying that he is not the sort of person who would do such a thing. Likewise, it seems that Teachers 0204 and 2004 are making an inference about the kind of person E is. But having only met him minutes earlier, they cannot possibly ground such a judgment in any familiarity with his biographical details. Rather, they can only be basing that judgment on their knowledge of the category of persons to which the Experimenter belongs, and the attributes and motives typically ascribed to them. That is, they treat E as a typical representative of a social category whose members can be expected as a matter

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  161 of course (or commonsense) to behave in ways that are ordinary for persons like themselves. Indeed, in keeping with what Goffman (1959, 12–​13; see Chapter 2) calls the “morality of appearances,” they can justifiably feel entitled to treat E in this manner, and to express surprise and consternation when and if their assumptions about him are violated. Along similar lines, Teacher 0218 expresses trust in E by basing his account for continuation on something E had said. He interrupts himself (“experiment would be . . . ”: line 5) to insert a report of E’s speech (“ . . . as you said”: lines 5–​6). This interactional move, which conversation analysts call an insert repair (Schegloff 2013), shows T orienting to what E said as grounds for his reasoning. That is, this Teacher’s use of “discretion” (line 4) is largely grounded in E’s perceived trustworthiness, and in the commonsense assumption that he could be taken at his word. Treating L as overreacting. Other Teachers, in claiming that L was not really being harmed, asserted that L’s distress indicated not harm but rather overreaction to the shocks. According to these accounts, something about L made him overly sensitive to shocks that were, “in reality,” only moderately painful. Of course, such reasoning presupposes trust in E’s assurances that the shocks were not actually harmful: only if the Teachers could take for granted that L was not in any real danger could they reasonably conclude that he was overreacting. (10) [0203 Obedient, 49:26, component 5] 1 ((Elms conducts interview in role of E’s “assistant”)) 2 T: And I imagine that (.) it may nos-​not necessarily 3 have been all: ↑painful except maybe somewhat-​in 4

his ((L’s)) mi:nd (.) thoughts.

(11) [0215 Obedient, 1:01:30, component 11] 1 L: [( ) 2 T: [((to L)) In other words you were already building 3

and (.) and an:-​ an↑ticipating something greater (0.5)

4

that what you were ac-​ actually receiving.=​

5 E:

=​Well actually he did.=​He: he started I guess to

6

anticipate mo[re (

)

7 L:     [↑Ah:=​I was just nervous.

162  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self These Teachers suggested that L experienced the shocks as more painful than they “really” were. Teachers 0203 and 0215 identify L’s mental state as the source of the trouble: he was anxiously “building and anticipating” (Example 11, lines 2–​3) something worse than he received, or the pain was simply “in his mind” (Example 10, line 3).16 Doubting the cover story. Finally, a handful of Teachers explained themselves via L was not being harmed by expressing doubt about E’s cover story. Although Milgram went to great lengths to maximize experimental realism, he was not entirely successful with every Teacher. Clearly, the gestalt of the situation was altered for strong doubters, and with it the implications of their actions. Like many other interviewees, these Teachers justified themselves to E in terms of L not being harmed. Though they differed from Teachers who believed L was not being harmed but accepted the cover story (at least so far as we can tell), this group of doubters shared the former’s reasoning that L could not truly be in danger: that everything was all right after all. Indeed, their mistrust of the cover story indicates a more fundamental trust in E’s commitment to Trust Conditions and the moral order of interaction: the Experimenter could not possibly allow subjects to come to harm, so something else must be going on. In other words, they assumed that the Experimenter would not really allow L to get hurt, though he could conceivably construct a fictitious cover story in which L seemed to be harmed—​a practice that, as it happens, is par for the course in ordinary experiments, which routinely employ some degree of deception.17 We can also observe that doubting was not an all-​or-​nothing affair of total credence versus total skepticism. Rather, of those who displayed suspicion of some aspect(s) of the cover story (often near the beginning of the interview), nearly all believed other aspects: that L had indeed received the lower-​ level shocks, that the experiment’s purpose was indeed to study learning and memory through punishment, that L’s cries were spontaneous and not prerecorded, or that E was in fact a research scientist. Furthermore, in cases of skepticism, E responded by defending the cover story (at least during partial debriefings, where the cover story was maintained; see Chapter 7) or by sidestepping the issue. These strategies usually succeeded, it seems to us, in preventing doubts from crystalizing into hardened certitude of total deception. Example 12 below illustrates both E’s tactics for handling doubt, as well as Teachers’ practices for making sense of situational ambiguity. E had previously asked T to assess how painful to L were the highest shocks he received (interview component 5). At 44:34, T prefaces his suspicion that L had not actually received shocks with the “honesty phrase” (Edwards and

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  163 Fasulo 2006) “Well, to be extremely candid” (not shown), suggesting that the forthcoming response is contrary to appearances or expectations.18 Several minutes later, E reasserts the cover story: (12) [0225 Obedient, 47:20, component 5] 1 E: Well he actually was receiving shocks.=​Now you 2

uh (0.7) indicated to me I (.) I believe uh: (0.6)

3

two: or three times=​At least ↑once that you did not

4

want to con↑tinue.

5

(0.7)

6 E: If you (.) believed that he was not getting 7

shocked °uh° why did you continue.

8

(1.7)

9 E: Or if you (re-​) if you believe that uh (1.5) °uh:° 10

(0.3) these shocks were not painful or:: (0.3) whatever.

11

(1.5)

12

T: Why did I wanna stop,

13

E: Yeah.=​Why did you: uh: (0.7) wanna stop at that point.

14

(2.6)

15 T: Um:, (1.6) Well uh 16

(0.3)

17 E: (And//​I mean) I don’t understand the ↑reason.=​ 18 T: =​>And [I I-​< There’s a sort of a threshold.=​ 19 E:   [(I don’t) 20

E:

=​((clears throat))

21

(0.8)

22 T: Or a twilight zone where uh (0.8) uh: (1.4) although 23

I-​I felt that per↑haps he (wasn’t)=​>I had a< good-

24

​(0.3) idea that perhaps he wasn’t receiving the

25

shock. (0.6) Uh (3.2) That there was a bare possibility.

26

(0.2) That he was. (0.7) An:d (.) if there was no

27

(0.6) physical response from him (in a way of) (0.6)

28

just leaving the roo:m,=​Or pulling out the wires or

29

what have you, (0.9) and then (0.4) on your command

30

I was to continue I would go ahead until I had

31

passed that threshold. (0.6) of: (0.2) doubt.

32

(0.4)

33 E: Hm: 34

(0.5)

164  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 35 T: At a certain point,=​When >I dunno maybe about three 36

hundred an’ (1.2) some uh (0.7) volts °I was° (0.4)

37

pretty contin (0.3) convinced that uh (0.9) he wasn’t

38

receiving anything ↑th:at (1.1) strong:. (0.7) Or I

39

would be getting a (3.2) uh::: (4.7) different type

40

of response.=​A more uh (0.6) uh::: (1.2) more violent

41

(0.4) response. . . .

Teacher 0225 orients to the discrepancy between his expectation of how an ordinary person would respond to shocks and L’s response. Since people would normally react in a “more violent” (lines 40–41) way than L did to 300 volts of electricity, he reasons that this feature of the cover story is false. This Teacher also describes how his sense of doubt evolved over time, saying that even when he “had a good idea that perhaps he wasn’t receiving the shock,” there nevertheless “was a bare possibility . . . that he was” (lines 24–​ 26). Indeed, even when he says he was “convinced” that L was not receiving shocks, he downgrades that description with the modifier “pretty” (lines 36–​37). Here, we see an illustration of doubt as a continuum, rather than an either-​or binary—​as a process that developed in and through the efforts of Teachers to disambiguate their interactions with E and L. Other aspects of the experiment were also subject to doubt. For example, another Teacher (2304, Obedient, 23:07) explained that “when he [L]‌ stopped hollerin’ I didn’t know what happened. . . . I just figured that somebody had let him out.” Like Teacher 0225 in the previous excerpt, this participant made sense of L’s responses (and eventual nonresponses) to the shocks by reasoning that he was not receiving them. But rather than doubt the cover story per se, he assumes that L had been released from the shock generator. Again, we can note the reasonableness, from a commonsense perspective, of inferring that “someone,” if not E himself, would respond to L’s demands to be let out, especially if he were at risk. In other words, rather than conclude that L had stopped responding because he had passed out from pain or worse, this Teachers preserves the ordinary-​after-​all character of the situation by assuming that someone would come to L’s assistance.

Alternative Explanations for “Obedience” As noted above (see also Chapter 1), several explanations of the Milgram phenomenon have achieved wide visibility. For many years, the dominant one

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  165 was Milgram’s agentic state theory. In the past decade, engaged followership has emerged as a viable alternative, and now seems the most widely accepted. A more recent theory gaining traction is Stephen Gibson’s persuasion-​ centered explanation, which we call rhetorical persuasion. Whereas engaged followership argues that Teachers complied because they identified with the experimenter and the scientific enterprise more generally, rhetorical persuasion posits that they were persuaded to comply, both overtly by the Experimenter’s rhetoric and covertly by the experimental apparatus (e.g., the lab, shock machine, E’s gray lab coat, etc.). In what follows, we consider these theories in light of our findings and our own argument about the importance of doing being ordinary. Then, we argue that while our explanation can account for the majority of Obedient cases—​nearly three-​quarters—​it is by no means exhaustive. Nor does it entirely rule out other explanations. Rather, our findings offer the most support for the idea that multiple processes produced the compliant and noncompliant behaviors. That is, just as Holocaust scholars have increasingly favored the notion that no one mechanism led ordinary Germans to participate in genocide, so we suggest that the reasons Milgram’s subjects behaved as they did are multiple, complex, and not mutually exclusive. Moreover, limitations of his experimental design make it impossible to decisively assign responsibility to one of the contending explanations.

Rhetorical Persuasion Social psychologist Stephen Gibson’s theory is grounded in his important archival work on discourse and interaction (specifically rhetoric and argumentation) in Milgram’s lab (e.g., 2013a, 2014, 2017, 2019). Gibson draws in particular on rhetorical psychology (RP) and discursive psychology, approaches critical of causal-​determinist styles of social psychology and broadly complementary to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and to our own Milgram research. His work features rhetorical analysis of a large collection of transcripts of the experiments to analyze the interactions of the Teacher, Experimenter, and Learner. Using a total of 126 recordings from Conditions 2 (Voice-​Feedback) and 20 (Women as Subjects), as well as the hitherto unresearched recordings of Conditions 4 (Touch-​Proximity) and 7 (Two Peers Rebel) (2019, 94), he has shed much light on rhetorical strategizing and negotiating between the three parties in Milgram’s lab. Specifically, this work includes discovery and analysis of a hitherto

166  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self little-​known practice for countering resistance from Teachers (the “forgotten prod”) that briefly appeared in Condition 2 whenever someone insisted that the Experimenter verify the Learner’s well-​being (2013b), and the role of invocations of “knowledge” (or lack thereof) in Experimenter-​Teacher negotiations (2014). This line of research thus highlights the long-​neglected topics of interaction, resistance, and Disobedience in Milgram’s lab: ways of acting that we too have put at center stage. Gibson’s theory, presented in his recent (2019) book, starts from the observation that “the experiment was as much about persuasion as it was about coercion” (2019, 4) and then seeks to “extend the rhetorical metaphor to encompass objects, institutions and procedures” (8). Using many empirical transcripts of the experimental sessions, Gibson provides extensive analysis of persuasion and argumentation centered on the interactions between the Experimenter, Learner, and Disobedient Teachers. To account for Obedient Teachers’ compliance, the majority of which featured little explicit resistance and hence little explicit rhetoric or argumentation, he argues (in his Chapter 7) at length for an expansive rhetorical metaphor. “Rather than limiting rhetorical analysis to occasions on which the experimenter, participant and/​or learner are demonstrably arguing with one another, we can treat the bodily movements of these individuals, the material apparatus used in the experiment, and even the experimental procedure itself, in terms of a metaphor of argumentation” (2019, 169). That is, “the persuasive function of the experimental procedure arises not only from the extent to which it could be invoked verbally, but from the extent to which it can be understood as forming the banal, unspoken background to the context of the experiment. The procedure can therefore be understood as persuasive in and of itself, over and above the extent to which it could be invoked in a project of persuasion by either the experimenter or participant” (2019, 186, original emphasis). Given the broad similarities of our respective methodologies, we think there is much of value in Gibson’s approach. In particular, his analysis of argumentation—​hitherto ignored by Milgram scholarship—​provides an important corrective to treatments of Obedient Teachers as passive and docile. It also demonstrates the importance of persuasion in Experimenter-​Teacher interactions through close analysis of precisely how E countered, and in many cases overcame, Teachers’ resistance. Argumentation and rhetoric no doubt play a part in explaining Obedience to authority. Nevertheless, as with Haslam and Reicher (see next section), we think Gibson overstates the generality of

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  167 his explanation, in this case by viewing the experiment more or less exclusively through the lens of persuasion. Here, we focus on two problems with the argument: (1) explanatory circularity and (2) intellectualism. (1) Explanatory circularity. Gibson’s (2019) analyses of examples of rhetoric and argumentation in Milgram’s lab are typically cogent and illuminating (Chapters 4–​6), and there are indeed many things for rhetorical analysis to bring to light both in the experimental sessions themselves (Gibson 2013a, 2014) and in the interviews (Gibson et al. 2018). However, we see the analysis (in his Chapter 7)—​the linchpin for his theory—​of relatively nonresistive Obedient Teachers (what we call maximal Obedience in Chapter 3) as unsuccessful. There, he shifts from an analysis of what Teachers did (what they said) to one that focuses on what they did not do (the unsaid), arguing that nonverbal aspects of the context of compliant action (shock generator, Milgram’s procedure, the prestige of Yale University, etc.) can be understood to persuade (albeit metaphorically) compliance. The problem with this line of argument is that it assumes precisely what it needs to demonstrate: that Teachers complied because they were persuaded. Rather than showing that Teachers were persuaded on the basis of something they did (e.g., capitulating to E in an argument), Gibson treats the fact that they did not argue or resist as evidence of persuasion. The result is a circular argument: Teachers did not resist because they were persuaded by nonverbal aspects of the experimental apparatus, and we know this is so because they did not resist. Missing here is any criterion apart from the explanandum—​ the fact of compliance itself—​by which we could assess the adequacy of Gibson’s argument.19 More generally, he offers no relevance criterion for distinguishing aspects of the experimental situation that mattered for Teacher behavior from those that did not. Without such a criterion, the list of potentially relevant aspects is indefinitely extendable.20 By contrast, our sequential analysis interprets maximally Obedient Teachers as orienting to and renewing the relevance of E’s most recent directive to pursue experimental tasks, stretching back to his original directive (“Begin”: see our Chapter 3) to start the experimental session itself. Within this context, we see argumentation and persuasion as two practices (albeit important ones) among many others witnessably employed by Teachers as they navigated their way through an increasingly uncomfortable and ambiguous situation. Accordingly, while we readily acknowledge that rhetorical analysis has something important to contribute to our understanding of Milgram’s experiment, we do not think it is a useful way of interpreting

168  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self everything that went on in his laboratory. Thus, rhetorical persuasion is not a “smoking gun” for explaining Milgramesque compliance. (2) Intellectualism. We think Gibson’s attempt to reduce Milgramesque compliance to argument and persuasion reflects a more general tendency toward intellectualism in his theory and method of analysis, RP.21 By highlighting the role of rhetoric in human social behavior, Gibson (following Michael Billig) risks making thought and mentality omnipresent in behavior as such.22 Especially in Gibson’s expansive conception of rhetoric (in his Chapter 7), the implication seems to be that people are ceaselessly engaged in argumentation and rhetoric—​with inanimate objects, with other people, and (when alone) with themselves in terms of thinking (self-​directed argument). By contrast, we wish to highlight the problems raised for such universalization of thought, as criticized over a long tradition in philosophy of mind, ranging from Dewey (1896), Mead (1934), and Merleau-​Ponty (1945) to Ryle (1949) and Dreyfus (1991, 2014; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). This sort of criticism, which we favor, is that, in contrast to most traditional Western conceptions of behavior and mentality, thought (including argumentation and rhetoric) should be seen as only a phase of action and as only one kind of practice among many others. Notwithstanding Gibson’s qualifications that his expansive conception of rhetoric and argumentation should not be taken literally (e.g., in terms of interactions with inanimate objects), it remains difficult to see how his universalization of the rhetoric metaphor to all human behavior avoids the intellectualist corollary that all behavior involves (or even worse, is caused by) thinking. Universalizing “rhetoric” and “persuasion” as coextensive with “social action” does not seem fruitful to us: not all reality construction is best conceived as rhetorical or persuasive. Not all social interaction, and not all human–​inanimate object interaction, is usefully analyzed as treating situations as occasions for persuasion. Like thought and mentality more generally, we think persuasion is best conceived as one among many ways of being in the world, rather than the default or baseline of human social behavior as such (Dreyfus 2014).

Engaged Followership The engaged followership theory of obedience was developed by social psychologists Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher. In a series of

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  169 influential publications dating back to their “After Shock” paper (2011), but with roots in their earlier BBC prison study (Haslam and Reicher 2007; Reicher and Haslam 2006) and work on social identification (e.g., Reicher and Hopkins 2001), Haslam and Reicher make the argument that Teachers obeyed because they actively identified with the Experimenter. A string of recent studies offers evidence in support of this analysis of Milgramesque compliance (e.g., Haslam, Reicher, and Birney 2014; Reicher, Haslam, and Smith, 2012), much of it drawing on survey data Milgram collected from Teachers months after the experiment had ended. Engaged followership has several strengths. First, unlike earlier research in the Milgram paradigm that was conducted independently of the Yale Milgram archive and that speculated about the experiences of Teachers, Haslam and Reicher’s argument is grounded in self-​ reports of those experiences. Second, in centering the experiences of Teachers, engaged followership treats them as active agents rather than passive instruments of an authority figure. In place of Milgram’s “particle” in a “forcefield,” engaged followership presents us with active subjects who voluntarily cooperated with the Experimenter in pursuit of a valued objective: the advancement of science. Third, the theory proposes a well-​theorized mechanism, social identification, to explain obedience, one that has been documented in a range of experimental contexts. That said, our immersion in Milgram’s archived audio recordings has led us to dissatisfaction with engaged followership and social identification as sufficient explanations for Milgram’s findings (Hollander and Turowetz 2017, 2018; Turowetz and Hollander 2018). Indeed, we are skeptical of any explanation based on a single process, be it Milgram’s agentic state theory, Haslam and Reicher’s engaged followership, or Gibson’s rhetorical persuasion. To be sure, Haslam and Reicher (2018) “entirely endorse” the argument that “it would be both futile and wrong to posit a single process to account for what Milgram found.” Yet the tendency of their publications, in our view, has clearly been to advance engaged followership as a comprehensive theory of Milgramesque behavior: the single most adequate model for fitting the “obedience” data. Our findings do provide limited support for engaged followership. We’ve seen that in the interviews, several Teachers invoke the importance of the experiment as a reason for continuation. Above, we discussed two illustrative examples. Appearing below is another example supporting Haslam and Reicher’s argument. Here, Teacher 0238 explains that he continued

170  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self following E’s instructions because he “liked the idea of the experiment” (line 13). (13) [0238 Obedient, 58:25] 1 T: I could have refused to go on 2     (1.0) 3 E: True. 4     (0.6) 5 E: True. 6     (.) 7 T: I didn’t. 8     (1.2) 9 E: I wonder why 10     (1.3) 11 E: Why didn’t-​why did you: uh continue. 12     (1.4) 13 T: I liked the idea of the experiment. 14     (0.5) 15 T: I wouldn’t uh: I would not have minded being in 16

there myself.

17     (1.2) 18 T: I think it’s (f)-​I think what you’re doing is good.

We take this account to be paradigmatic of what Haslam and Reicher mean by an account indicating a social identification process of engaged followership. This Teacher acknowledges the difficulty of the circumstances for continuation (“I could have refused to go on,” line 1) but presents himself as doing so because he shares something of the Experimenter’s (or Milgram’s) values or ideology (“I liked the idea of the experiment,” line 13; “I think what you’re doing is good,” line 18). His explanation and positive assessment support a theoretical explanation of obedience in terms of engaged followership. It seems clear that, had our collection been full of similar accounts, it would provide key (if indirect and circumstantial) evidence supporting that theory. Although the relationship between behavior and post hoc accounting is not direct, such a finding would at minimum show that many Obedient Teachers, in the minutes immediately following the behavior in question, assessed the experiment positively and presented themselves as sharing the Experimenter’s values. However, this is not what we found. The 46 Obedient Teachers—​each of whom, as we have seen, often provided more than one kind of explanation

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  171 in the interview—​voiced two other accounts far more frequently than Importance of the experiment (11/​46, or 24%). These were Learner was not being harmed (33/​46, or 72%) and Following instructions (27/​46, or 59%). These data suggest that although engaged followership is compatible with some of the reasons Teachers offered for going along with the experiment, it falls well short of capturing most of the accounts they produced. Those accounts, on the whole, suggest that commitment to Trust Conditions and doing being ordinary provide a more comprehensive explanation for Milgramesque behavior than engaged followership does. In a recent exchange between the present authors and Haslam and Reicher, the latter argue that engaged followership may be compatible with our claim that trust is central to explaining obedience (Haslam and Reicher 2018). In particular, they argue that “participants’ accounts of their behavior nevertheless revolved around expressions of trust in the Experimenter which can themselves be seen as manifestations of shared identity and engaged followership” (Haslam and Reicher 2018). In other words, Haslam and Reicher propose that Teacher-​participants trusted the Experimenter because they were engaged followers—​trust could be an effect of followership, rather than independent of it. Our response to their paper indicated problems, as we see it, with this argument, of which two in particular stand out. First, there is no reason to suppose that trust implies identification with the person being trusted. As commonsense actors, we trust and expect that the stylist cutting our hair will not purposely cut our throat (i.e., something nonordinary). To assume otherwise without good reason is to fail at being ordinary, which includes trusting that others’ motives are typical for categories of persons such as themselves, and thereby invite the allegation that we are behaving “unreasonably” (paranoid). However, such trust does not require that we in any sense identify with the hair stylist. Second, our argument makes an important distinction between what might be termed small-​t trust and Trust Conditions, which Haslam and Reicher run together. When we display small-​t trust as we engage in doing being ordinary, we also exhibit our commitment to Trust Conditions, which consist of constitutive expectations and practices for assembling an intelligible, known-​in-​ common world: expectations/​practices we assume others share with us as a matter of course. As Rawls (2010, 105) puts it, Trust is “a state of mutual commitment to a practice.” If the hair stylist in our hypothetical example is oriented to Trust Conditions in the same way we are, something we usually take for granted, we can reasonably make the ordinary judgment that they are committed to performing their identity in accordance with ordinary expectations

172  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self and to giving us the turns we require to make sense and self with them (e.g., to constitute ourselves as stylist and client). Given these Trust Conditions, we can small-​t trust (or conversely, come to doubt, over the course of the interaction) that they will not harm us. In other words, Trust Conditions constitute the necessary precondition for and background against which small-​t trust is possible: whereas small-​t trust may be gained or lost over the course of an interaction, Trust Conditions are either present or absent. And where they are absent, actors cannot make the identities or situations in which small-​t trust can be invested in the first place. When Obedient Teachers say they small-​t trusted the Experimenter, they are displaying their commitment to Trust Conditions and to the notion that the Experimenter shares that commitment—​that he is committed to eventually providing them with the reciprocity required to make sense and self in an ordinary, expectable way (including confirmation that the Learner was never in any real danger), even if he is currently denying them that reciprocity.23 That commitment to Trust Conditions, and not identification with the Experimenter, forms the basis for small-​t trust in the Experimenter and for any engaged followership that may occur thereafter. For these reasons, the accounts we have categorized under L was not really being harmed are not reducible to those grouped under importance of the experiment. This is not to say that importance of the experiment accounts should be reduced to what we have elsewhere (Hollander and Turowetz 2017) called normalizing Trust. Rather, our point is that the relatively few Teachers who accounted in terms of the experiment’s importance should be understood as providing a distinct kind of explanation whose defining feature is engagement: direct or indirect allusion to the experiment as in some way valuable, important, useful, or effective (as in Example 13 above). This feature does not appear in the other three accounts. Accordingly, we posit doing ordinariness versus engagement as distinct types of compliance processes at work in Milgram’s experiments, whose characteristic features are lost in attempts to reduce either process to the other.24

Conclusion: Multiple Processes of Compliance The impetus in social science and psychology has often been to produce a general theory or account of a phenomenon (e.g., obedience to authority) when in fact there may be nothing more to discover, and nothing less, than myriad cases connected by family resemblances (Wittgenstein 1958). Or,

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  173 as Hacking (2004, 6) argues regarding social constructivism and general theories of what he calls “making up people”: “There is not and never will be any universally applicable theory of making up people. . . . [W]‌e can ask general questions about obedience and resistance—​what are they, how do they work, etc., and use specific examples to answer them. But we can’t produce a general theory of obedience that’s universally applicable, ahistorical, etc.” Philosopher Immanuel Kant long ago framed the fundamental issue with his well-​known question about freedom and, consequently, morality: In a world of Newtonian physical mechanics, what is our role as free moral agents (see Williams 2010)? Chapter 6 has argued that doing being ordinary is an important factor in explaining the behavior of Milgram’s Teachers, particularly Obedient ones. Taking for granted, at least initially, that they were committed to the same Trust Conditions as the Experimenter, Teachers assumed that he would fulfill his involvement obligations to themselves and the Learner. In Goffman’s (1959) terms, they operated under a working consensus where the morality of appearances could be assumed as a matter of course: the Experimenter was who he claimed to be, the experiment was what he said it was, and all those involved could be expected to take lines of action consistent with their situated identities. As the session became more anomic, however, Teachers struggled to reconcile the working definition of the situation with what they were experiencing. In these circumstances, many Teachers, and especially Obedient ones, searched for and “found” features of the situation that confirmed it was ordinary after all, if uncomfortable. The features they found, and later reported on in their postexperiment accounts, were those that any reasonable, competent member of society could be expected to look for and find: the competence of the Experimenter, the presence of a cover story that only made it seem as though the Learner was being harmed, signs the Learner was overreacting, and so forth. These features, in turn, were only findable during the experiment, and reportable afterward, due to the ongoing constitutive work of the Teachers in their interactions with the Experimenter and Learner. For the Experimenter to come off as competent, for example, it was not enough for him to project competence; the Teachers needed to recognize and orient to that competence in their engagements with him. We also critiqued explanations of the experiment in terms of a single mechanism. For all their differences, the two paradigms we focused on, engaged followership and rhetorical persuasion, each emphasize a single process. For engaged followership, it is a cognitive process of social identification with the

174  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Experimenter. For rhetorical persuasion, it is the state of being persuaded by the Experimenter and his lab. Both explanations depend, as such, on something not directly witnessable in the interaction: the effect the experiment is having upon the thought processes or cognitive states of the subjects. By contrast, doing being ordinary is a distinctively social process and set of practices that implicates the minds of actors, certainly, but it is not located in the minds of actors. Rather, its locus is the collectivity of persons who participate in the practices for assembling an ordinary, commonsense social world. Because those practices are social, they must be accessible and available to two or more people who are committed to using them to make sense together. Such persons hold themselves and one another accountable not only for continually assembling and renewing the mundane world but also for finding in it and reporting on exactly those features that Anyone—​i.e., any bona fide, competent member of the collectivity (Garfinkel 1967)—​possessing “common sense” could be expected to find and report on. Conversely, if the practices and expectations composing being ordinary were restricted to a single individual, they would not be social but idiosyncratic, and therefore could not be used to make a world known (and knowable) in common or exhibit transpersonal regularities. Doing being ordinary, as described by Sacks (1984) and Garfinkel (1967), is directly witnessable in the practices of a society’s members and the reasons they give for engaging in those practices. It has to be, otherwise it could not have any social import. For precisely that reason, its constitutive practices are available both to members of a given collectivity and to the analyst who would research that collectivity. We find evidence of these practices in the ways of sensemaking that Teachers displayed in postexperiment conversations with the Experimenter, as well as in the experiment proper, where Teachers demonstrated a commitment to Trust Conditions while also displaying awareness (through acts of resistance) that those Conditions were threatened. What is the upshot for our explanation vis-​a-​vis competing ones? As we have shown, our argument finds substantial support in the accounts Teachers offered in their post hoc interviews with the Experimenter, particularly the category of accounts we call L was not really being harmed. Fully 72% of Obedient Teachers in our collection for whom we have accounts produced at least one instance of this kind of account. However, we also documented other kinds of accounts that we think offer at least limited support for other explanatory frameworks. There are cases where Teachers

Explaining Milgramesque Behaviors  175 invoke the importance of the experiment as a reason for continuation, and a case can be made that they did so because they identified with the scientist and his apparatus. Such accounts are also broadly consistent with the notion of rhetorical persuasion, and Gibson has adduced evidence for that process in several publications on Teachers arguing with the Experimenter. There is arguably also evidence in our data that is consistent with Milgram’s agentic state theory. The Teachers who claimed they were following instructions but said nothing about the Learner not being harmed may call to mind Arendt’s ([1961] 2006) analysis of Eichmann, which so inspired Milgram’s research and his interpretation of Obedient behavior in particular. It is certainly possible that a modified version of agentic state theory, one more grounded in the accounts of Teachers and sensitive to their agency, could explain at least some of what occurred in Milgram’s laboratory. What these findings point to, we think, is the conclusion that, although doing being ordinary played an important part in Teachers’ behavior, there were multiple reasons they complied with the Experimenter. As such, we take the position that there were multiple processes of social psychology at work in the Milgram experiment (Hollander and Turowetz 2017). It is perhaps ironic that in his efforts to give “the [ancient] dilemma inherent in obedience to authority . . . contemporary form by treating it as subject matter for experimental inquiry” (Milgram 1974, xi) by creating a scenario that would allow him to isolate a single social psychological process that would explain obedience to immoral authority, Milgram ended up demonstrating the operation of multiple processes. In the end, Milgram’s research design simply left open too many possible ways of ending with a categorization as Obedient to rule out multiple processes of compliance.

7 Milgram, Science, and Morality In this chapter, we focus on the interactional work involved in Milgram’s experimental design, arguing that this work involved substantial affective labor (cf. Hardt and Negri 2005) and care work (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) that has remained largely unexamined in Milgram’s own and his critics’ discussions of his research. This work—​which included crafting and refining a script, directing confederates, convincing Teachers to do things they were reluctant to do, and persuading them not to be upset about it afterward—​is important not only for its historical relevance but also because it was a key ingredient that made the experiments possible. As ethnomethodological studies of science and work have long documented, practitioners usually treat the interactional details of how they accomplish their work as “specifically uninteresting” (Garfinkel 1967, [1986] 2017, 2002) and leave them out of public accounts of what they do. Indeed, it is assumed that a competent practitioner will do the work in such a way as to make these details ignorable. For Milgram—​whose commitment to objective, scientific experimentation meant treating the interactional work of conducting the experiment and the researcher’s personal commitments as irrelevant or as sources of bias—​ such details included the considerable affective labor he invested in eliciting strong emotional and moral reactions from his participants and managing those reactions during and after the experiments. It is perhaps ironic that Milgram publicly neglected the affective work that went into his experiments, given the theatrical impetus behind them. However, this neglect is unsurprising because the goal of such “high impact experimentation” (Aronson 2010), which became popular in postwar America, was to realize the positivist ambition of producing generalizable scientific results uncontaminated by the local ecology of the laboratory, including the emotional investments of its personnel and the behind-​the-​ scenes work they did to make the science possible. As Elliot Aronson (2010), one of the best-​known practitioners of this type of social psychological experimentation, describes it:

Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0008

178  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self The challenge of this kind of experimentation is to find a way to imbed the participant in a prearranged scenario that is coherent, absorbing, and believable. The experimenter must have the skills of a playwright, a director, and an actor without abandoning scientific rigor. . . . We called this approach “high impact experimentation” because we plunked people into the middle of a situation that was so real for them that they had to respond as they would have outside the laboratory. (Aronson 2010, 102)

The idea was to transform the laboratory from an artificial setting into a naturalistic one, providing the experimenter with an ideal situation that combined ecological realism and experimental control. In this way, the experimenter could hope to capture the dynamism of real life, reproducing its emotional and affective aspects and making it feel “real” without sacrificing “scientific rigor.” Several now-​classic experiments emerged from this tradition: Festinger and Aronson’s work on cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1962), Solomon Asch’s (1956) experiment on conformity in judgment (of lengths of lines), and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo et al. 1971). It also gave rise, of course, to Milgram’s obedience experiments of 1961–​1962. In their efforts to simulate real life, “high impact” experimenters paid close attention to dramaturgical considerations (see Brannigan 2021, Chapter 3). “The key ingredient in the high impact experiment,” writes Aronson (2010, 103), “is theatricality. If the experiment is going to work, the script must be believable and the experimenter must be a convincing actor.” Milgram biographer Thomas Blass (2004, 263) observes that Milgram scrupulously attended to even the smallest details of his work: “In his experiments, Milgram was much like the director of a play, both in his meticulous attention to technical details and staging and in their intended effects on his audience.” In this chapter, we show that behind his veneer of dispassionate scientific neutrality, Milgram engaged in substantial affective labor, which we, broadly following Hardt and Negri (2005, 108), define as “labor that produces or manipulates affects.” Likewise, we examine Milgram’s care work1 (cf. Gilligan [1982] 1993), which includes caring for and sustaining the local relationships that make social activities such as science possible (Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011), as he trained and rehearsed his confederates, ran Teacher-​participants through his experiments, and tried to influence their feelings about it afterward. Within our interaction order framework, we draw on feminist studies of science (Haraway 1997; Kerr and

Milgram, Science, and Morality  179 Garforth 2016; Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) that highlight the affective and care dimensions of scientific practice to argue (1) that Milgram’s affective labor and care work made it possible for him to produce phenomena (“obedience” and “disobedience”) that he could subsequently make accountable (intelligible, warrantable) in the idiom of positivist science and (2) that such labor transformed Teachers’ attitudes toward the experiment and its moral significance. In arguing that Milgram engaged in affective labor and care work, we mean to call attention to the “neglected things” (Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa 2013) of caring rendered invisible in Milgram’s publications. As feminist scholars have repeatedly pointed out, the neglect of care in much mainstream science has gone hand in hand with the devaluation of care’s personal, emotional, and particularistic elements, which have traditionally been relegated to the sphere of “women’s work” and subordinated to masculine ideals of impersonality, rationality, and universality (Gilligan [1982] 1993; Smith 1987). But, as these scholars demonstrate, without “women’s work” of caring, “men’s work” is impossible. Or to put the point in ethnomethodological terms, without the “seen but unnoticed” details that compose the background of everyday life, the social world we take for granted could never be accomplished (Garfinkel 1967; Zimmerman and Pollner [1970] 2017). It is precisely these (local, particular) details that we have been investigating in this book, and which once again form our target of investigation in the present chapter. The chapter is organized as follows. First, we elaborate our argument about the centrality of affective labor and care to Milgram’s research, providing illustrations from recorded interactions between Milgram and the Experimenter (John Williams) and other observations from the recordings (e.g., changes to the script). In attending to the interactional work to which Milgram paid attention as he conducted his research, we gain access to the commitments and valuations that allowed him to produce putatively objective findings about “obedience to authority.” Second, we present an in-​depth analysis of the postexperiment debriefing sessions, focusing especially on the “full” debriefings Milgram held with female Teachers (Condition 20), which illustrate the full range of practices and resources (e.g., offering cigarettes to soothe Teachers’ nerves) the Experimenter employed as he attempted to change their minds about the experiment and its moral significance. Specifically, we highlight the reparative facework (Goffman 1967) in which the Experimenter (E) emphasized

180  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Teachers’ reluctance to continue with the experiment, his effecting a reconciliation between Teacher (T) and Learner (L), and his apologizing for the “hoax” and explaining why it was necessary. In some sense, reconciliation can be seen as the final act of Milgram’s play—​a scripted-​in-​advance moment when, following a dramatic climax, the characters (and audience) achieve catharsis and closure. Overall, we argue that the affective work in which Milgram enlisted Teachers during debriefing resolves the puzzle of explaining how most Teachers could have expressed negative or ambivalent attitudes toward the experiment before being debriefed (Perry 2013) and yet report on a survey they filled out several months later that they were “happy to have been of service” to Milgram (Haslam et al. 2015). Third and finally, we suggest that Milgram was helped in this affective work by the postwar prestige of science in two ways. First, he could draw on public trust in science, then at an historic high (Gauchat 2011), in persuading Teachers that the trouble they experienced was necessary for the advancement of the scientific enterprise, to which they might now see themselves as contributing. Second, trust in science and the scientific method made it easier to neglect the interactional-​dramaturgical dimension of the science he practiced, especially in public records of the research.

Staging, Affect, and Matters of Care in Milgram’s Experiment Milgram intended the experiment to be an objective, modern, scientific study of obedience to authority: a topic of longstanding concern to philosophers, theologians, and dramatists. In place of appeals to abstract reason, or to emotion and feeling, he sought empirically grounded, generalizable findings about human conscience and behavior. Milgram’s conception of science was aligned with the social and psychological science of his time, the mid-​20th century, which was broadly positivist, championing measurement and operationalization over theoretical speculation and positing a firm distinction between scientific fact and moral values. This was a paradigm that viewed the researcher’s personal values and commitments as sources of bias that needed to be carefully controlled and kept out of the research process, lest they contaminate the researcher’s efforts to discover laws or law-​like generalizations about human psychology and society. What this perspective overlooked (among other things) is that successful interaction

Milgram, Science, and Morality  181 requires social commitments that are not subjective but that are also not included in the “objective” description of “the experiment.” The idea that science can proceed without involving social commitment, affective work, and social interaction has been challenged many times over the years, especially since the 1960s. One of the more influential challenges, growing out of feminist social studies of science and technology, shows that the classical boundary between reason and affect in science is more myth than reality (see Haraway 1997). In what has been described as an “affective turn” in science studies, such scholars have advocated “a renewed focus on embodiment, care and affective interactions in relation to the intellectual projects, fieldwork, models, and discovery work of science” (Kerr and Garforth 2016, 3). Research in this vein shows that scientific inquiry is driven by whatever scientists treat as matters of concern (Latour 2004)—​an idea that some feminist scholars of science have broadened into the more encompassing notion of matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). Care means not only “an affective state, but also an obligation to ‘pay attention’ and to actually do the care it takes to practically pay attention” (Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa 2013, 160, original emphasis). Care, in this sense, consists of a set of relational attachments that include the personal dispositions of researchers and their subjects, and more broadly encompass practices that not only support cared-​about objects (both human and nonhuman) but also contribute to their creation. As such, scientists’ practice of care and attention “actually makes worlds” (Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa 2013, 160, original emphasis), rather than merely observing them. Far from being inimical to objectivity, affective attachments to cared-​ about details are a necessary, sine qua non condition for its achievement. Objectivity is a valued feature of science, and scientific care is its condition of possibility. It is because scientists are embedded in an affect-​laden social world that they can produce findings that they and their colleagues may treat as valid and reliable for all practical purposes. Unlike finished reports tailored for publication in scientific journals, the “messy” details of science-​ in-​the-​making exhibit care for the people, places, and objects involved in the research and discovery process. Though usually in the background of everyday and institutional conduct and therefore easily overlooked, these details form the bedrock of the scientific enterprise and are essential for understanding its workings. For all these reasons, Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) suggests that scholars of science should treat care as a topic of inquiry, while

182  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self at the same time adopting it as a methodological guideline that urges attention to the “neglected things” of scientific practice. Treating care as a topic of inquiry gives us access to the ordinarily invisible details of scientific work. It also directs attention to the affective labor performed in the course of that work. As Hardt and Negri (2005) observe, such labor is grounded in concrete social relationships and involves both mind and body in the production and manipulation of affects, such as joy, sadness, and anxiety. In Milgram’s case, the neglected details of how he directed and staged his experiments provide insight into how he created a troubled relationship between Teacher and Experimenter, and how he continually tweaked the script for that relationship to maximally violate interaction order expectations and induce confusion, stress, and anxiety among his subjects. Among other things, this involved closely monitoring the Experimenter and Learner’s performance and offering them critical feedback between sessions. In recordings of these exchanges, we sometimes hear Milgram blending the roles of scientist and play director as he evaluates Williams’s (Experimenter) and McDonough’s (Learner) delivery of the script. For example, after subject 0307 (Disobedient) leaves the lab, Williams (43:10) confers with Milgram: “You want me to stick to the paper [script], just the four times?” He is asking about his reuse of one of the prods during the experiment, and Milgram responds by validating his performance: “Yeah, but the way you did it was fine.” Although Williams deviated slightly from the script, Milgram decides that in this instance, his deviation was “fine.” Presumably, Milgram felt that it did not unduly threaten the standardization of the experiment. However, Williams’s question may have been spurred by Milgram’s criticism of his use of prods with subject 0305 (Disobedient). After that session ends, we hear Milgram taking Williams to task for not delivering the prods consistently enough (46:24). “Something’s wrong. We’re changing it all the time and we can’t have that.” “It varies too much also from subject to subject” (49:36). Milgram wants more standardization in Williams’s use of the prods, which he refers to as applying “pressure”—​that is, pressure on the Teacher to continue. Like a debate coach, Milgram instructs Williams to counter Teachers’ resistance more strongly: NEVER, NEVER not on ANY occasion allow your s-​allow him to get the last word. Because what it sounds like is that he has persuaded you. That you were getting into him. Continually r-​refuse to accept him (47:25–​47:44).

Milgram, Science, and Morality  183 Milgram forcefully reprimands Williams for allowing the Teacher “to get the last word.” His remarks here both instruct and complain, actions intensified by his repetition of and raised volume on never and the negatively polarized any (Koshik 2005), which together propose that the instructions are unconditional. Milgram is particularly adamant that Williams does not allow the Teacher to control the definition of the situation—​to “persuade” him to let up or concede in any way. This was a crucial matter for Milgram, as the standardization of his experiment depended not only on consistent following of his script but also on the maintenance of a “field of forces” equally polarized between Williams’s directives and McDonough’s complaints. The experiment would not work if the “field” became unbalanced, and it was Williams’s job to maintain that tension. By “Continually . . . refus[ing] to accept” the Teacher, Williams was to consistently deny them the reciprocity they needed to achieve mutual intelligibility, thereby producing the moral and emotional anxiety required for the experiment. We also see Milgram performing affective labor and care work in the way he tinkered with and revised his script. For example, after subject 0211 (Obedient) leaves the lab, we hear Williams talking to Milgram about the previous subject 0210—​the “man at 8:00” p.m. who “broke off ” (disobeyed). Together, they are working out how to modify Williams’s script to deliver the “forgotten prod” (Gibson 2013b), in which, faced with two recent subjects’ (0208, 0210) insistence on checking on the Learner, Williams goes into the adjacent room and makes a show of verifying that McDonough is willing to continue. Williams says: I gave him all the commands on here [the script] and there are some I gave him a couple of times. . . . [H]‌e took the command, I guess, to “please continue.” . . . [T]his is what he kept saying to me, and I kept uh-​I gave him all the different commands.

Williams continues, “I told him, you have no choice,” to which Milgram responds, “Well you tell ‘em first that they have to continue” (57:12–​58:24). That is, in response to Williams’s report, Milgram directs him to organize his prods so that “[you] have to continue” (prods 2–​3) comes before “you have no choice” (prod 4: see Box 3.2). Milgram is using the exigencies furnished by the experiment to make order out of contingency (cf. Garfinkel 1963), introducing the “forgotten prod” (Gibson 2013b) to maintain control in the face of unanticipated moves by Teachers. It is telling that after introducing

184  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self into the experiment this small token of interactional reciprocity by the Experimenter (i.e., checking on the Learner), Milgram would later remove it from his script, a change that shows his orientation to making the interaction as troubled and troubling as possible. In sum, Milgram invested substantial affective labor and care in the design and implementation of his experiments, attending closely to details of staging, performance, and standardization in his efforts to combine maximal realism and scientific rigor. Behind the veneer of dispassionate neutrality on display in Milgram’s published reports of his findings, there was sustained affective labor on the part of Milgram and his confederates as they worked to create conditions under which relationships of “obedience” and “disobedience” between themselves and the Teachers could emerge, and which involved carefully manipulating the way Teachers felt about the situation as it unfolded. As we discuss in the next section, Milgram likewise devoted considerable affective labor to transforming how Teachers perceived and felt about those relationships after the experiment, during the debriefing interviews.

Debriefing: Responsibility and Reconciliation In responding to attacks on his ethics, Milgram (1964b, 1974) defended his debriefing procedure. For many years, his account was largely accepted by commentators on his work (e.g., Blass 2004; exceptions include Baumrind 1985; Mixon 1989; Orne and Holland 1968). After all, Milgram’s report was based on first-​hand knowledge of the debriefings, to which commentators had only indirect access. Recent archival research, however, has challenged Milgram’s account of his procedures. Gina Perry (2012, 2013), in particular, has conducted valuable research in the Yale Milgram archive, in addition to interviewing original subjects as well as Milgram’s graduate student Alan Elms. Perry observes that Milgram was inconsistent in his debriefing practices: before Condition 20 (all women subjects), the debriefings were terse and partial: subjects were not told that the Learner was not really being shocked, for example, but only that the shocks were mild, and that the Learner was overreacting to them—​an account the Learner then confirms as he reconciles with the Teacher. Beginning with Condition 20, however, Milgram’s debriefings became more extensive: he had Williams reveal that

Milgram, Science, and Morality  185 the Learner was not really being shocked, and that the point of the study was to see how far the Teachers would go before stopping the experiment. These changes notwithstanding, Perry concludes that the debriefings remained one-​sided and insufficient, amounting to a monologue . . . [not] invit[ing] questions or discussion with the subject. . . . [T]‌he pattern of debriefing across obedient and disobedient subjects from condition 20 onward is the same. Williams followed a standard script for the debriefing that is independent of subject reactions. Typically it involved a minute and a half of delivery, the introduction of McDonough [Learner], and a handshake, before the subject was shown the door. (Perry 2013, 85; cf. Perry 2012, 84–​90)

We note that Perry’s conclusion sits uneasily alongside recent work in engaged followership, which finds on the basis of postexperiment surveys completed by Teachers that a majority viewed the experiment positively, with many reporting they were “happy to have been of service” (Haslam et al. 2015). If the debriefings were as perfunctory as Perry claims, why did Teachers express such positive attitudes afterward? We argue that Perry is right in saying that many Teachers, perhaps a majority, were negatively disposed toward the experiment immediately after it ended. The audio recordings of the sessions themselves confirm as much, and her interviews with several subjects further illuminate the negative reactions. But her characterization of the debriefing interviews is not entirely accurate. Although Milgram’s interviews were highly structured, the Experimenter allowed Teachers ample time to develop responses. Interviews therefore ranged in length, with many reaching more than 20 minutes.2 Furthermore, the recordings show that, especially from Condition 20 onward, Milgram (usually via Williams) was trying to reframe Teachers’ understanding of their actions and achieve reconciliation with the Experimenter and Learner. Debriefings often featured extended conversations between Teachers and the Experimenter, who offered words of support as well as props (cigarettes, coffee, and tranquilizers were at hand) to help calm their nerves and make them “feel better” about the whole affair. We have proposed that the debriefings represent a key missing piece of the puzzle connecting Teachers’ negative assessments of the experiment immediately after it ended to the positive assessments they offered several months later (Turowetz and Hollander 2018). That is, the debriefings were

186  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self transformative for many Teachers in making sense of their experience. By attending closely to interaction during the debriefings, we can grasp how the Experimenter guided Teachers through a gestalt shift: from seeing the experiment as a flawed and senseless study of learning and memory to a meaningful and important contribution to the scientific enterprise. Doing so also highlights the affective work Milgram performed as Teachers accounted for their actions and the relations of care he attempted to promote between Teachers and his practice of science. In what follows, we provide an overview and analysis of Milgram’s debriefings as news delivery sequences (Maynard 2003) that transitioned Teachers from their initial understanding of the experiment to a new and more benign one. We show how, within the context of that sequence, the Experimenter performed several actions, including informing, explaining, and accounting on behalf of what we are calling affective labor, which involved working to transform the moral meaning of the experiment and its implications for self.

Deceptive Versus Full Debriefings As noted, Milgram’s debriefing procedures evolved between fall 1961 and spring 1962. In the first 19 conditions, he had Williams conduct what we call partial or deceptive debriefing. These were relatively short and succinct, and crucially did not inform Teachers that the Learner was not really being shocked—​though the Experimenter does state that the shock machine was calibrated for small animals and did not harm the Learner, which the latter confirms as he joins the debriefing. However, from Condition 20 onward, the debriefings were more comprehensive, including the revelation that the Learner was not being shocked, that he was in fact a confederate of the Experimenter, and that the experiment’s true purpose was to study how far subjects would go in shocking the Learner against his will. We call these full debriefings—​though even here, Milgram did not disclose some relevant information, such as his Yale connection in Condition 23 (Perry 2013). The adoption of “full” debriefing was likely due to pressure from his funding agency (National Science Foundation) and other early criticism of his methods, as well as his perception of the importance of keeping the women in Condition 20 from leaving the lab “panicked.”

Milgram, Science, and Morality  187 Although the earlier and later debriefings differed, they both addressed two issues of moral import previously overlooked by commentary. First, the interviews addressed responsibility, or the problem of assigning blame for the Learner receiving shocks against his will. For instance, especially during full debriefings, the Experimenter typically highlighted Obedient Teachers’ resistance (e.g., “I had the feeling you were reluctant, that you didn’t really wanna to do this”). By topicalizing their lack of enthusiasm and/​or active resistance, the Experimenter invited responses of having been concerned “all along” about the Learner and being less culpable than the Experimenter himself. As we discuss below, in these instances the Experimenter is engaging the Teachers in reparative facework (Goffman 1967) by helping them to separate their “true” self—​caring, compassionate, morally upright—​from the problematic or “contaminated” self (Goffman 1963) they enacted during the experiment. Second, the interviews emphasized reconciliation among the three parties. In both types of debriefing, the Learner enters the room, claiming responsibility for the problems with continuation (e.g., “I was nervous”) and absence of resentment (e.g., “No hard feelings”), and in the full debriefings, the Experimenter apologizes for “hoaxing” the Teacher. These sets of practices, we suggest, can account for the shift in Teachers’ attitudes toward the experiment that took place during debriefing. Below, we focus specifically on the 56 full debriefings in our collection, as they provide the clearest illustration of the range of affective labor performed by the Experimenter and Teachers. We do so with the understanding, however, that despite their more truncated form, deceptive debriefings aimed at producing the same effects as full debriefings, making them comparable along the key dimensions of responsibility and reconciliation.

Full-​Debriefing News Delivery in Condition 20 (“Women as Subjects”) The central portion of Milgram’s full debriefing was organized as a news delivery sequence (NDS). In this section, we describe that sequence and the perspective display sequence (PDS) that regularly preceded it. In ordinary conversation, speakers use the PDS to elicit another person’s stance on a topic so that they can fit subsequent talk to it (Maynard 1989). This has the effect of heading off overt disagreement and fostering social solidarity

188  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self among participants. The NDS is used to convey news, elicit a response from the recipient, and assess the valence of the news (Maynard 2003). More than simply relaying news, the NDS is crucial for realizing an item as news and working out its significance. As we will see, Milgram’s Experimenter adapted these practices to achieve debriefing and reconciliation with the subjects.

Perspective Display Sequence: “What Did You Think of the Experiment?” The PDS consists of three components: (1) a question or statement projecting (2) an evaluative response, followed by (3) a second evaluation calibrated by the first speaker to the prior evaluation. In Milgram’s lab, the Experimenter produced the first component, which was usually a variation on the question in the heading of this subsection (“What did you think of the experiment?”). The question and the PDS it launches are important because they embody the Experimenter’s orientation to the Teacher’s perspective (pace Perry 2013) and because they often elicit an evaluation before the Teacher is debriefed. This information allows us to compare these initial assessments with those provided during and after debriefing to ascertain the impact of debriefing on assessments of the experiment. Table 7.1 features 32 PDS assessments from Condition 20 cross-​tabulated by valence (positive, negative, ambivalent) and outcome (Obedient vs. Disobedient). The table shows that the pattern of assessments by Obedient Teachers does not greatly differ from that of Disobedient ones. Only 3 Obedient Teachers Table 7.1  Outcome by Perspective Display Sequence (PDS) Assessment Valence (in Condition 20)* Positive Obedient outcome Disobedient outcome Total

Ambivalent Negative

No Assessment

Total

3 1

8 5

4 4

5 2

20 12

4

13

8

7

32

*Note: We transcribed 37 full debriefings from Condition 20. Of these, only 32 featured a PDS. The table shows the 20 PDSs involving an Obedient Teacher and the 12 PDSs involving a Disobedient one.

Milgram, Science, and Morality  189 responded positively. More frequent are ambivalent or plainly negative assessments (12/​20, or 60%). For example, Obedient Teacher 2034 says of the experiment, “It’s not what I anticipated” (ambivalent), and Teacher 2035, also Obedient, says, “I thought it was very cruel” (negative). Also noteworthy is that 25% (5/​20) of Obedient Teachers withhold any explicit assessment, either through silence or digression. These results are consistent with Perry’s (2013, 83) account of widespread “distress and anger” among Teachers and contrast sharply with Haslam et al.’s (2015) finding that many Teachers reported positive feelings about the experiment on the questionnaire they filled out months later. That only three Obedient Teachers (in Condition 20) offered positive assessments before debriefing is hardly consistent with their having been “engaged followers” of the Experimenter. Rather, the process of debriefing transformed Teachers’ attitudes, such that they left the lab feeling markedly different about their participation than they did immediately after the experiment and before the interview. We now explore the debriefing proper, and the affective labor it involved.

News Delivery Sequence Having elicited Teachers’ evaluations of the experiment (PDS), the Experimenter begins a full debriefing by way of the NDS. Whereas 32 PDSs appear in the 37 interviews from Condition 20, the NDS appears in all 37 interviews. It consists of four components: (1) announcement, (2) reaction, (3) elaboration, and (4) assessment. As Maynard (1997, 117) notes, “The assessment turn may mark the completion of an NDS. However, following an initial assessment, a deliverer may produce further, embellishing elaborations that also receive evaluation.” This “expanded” (Maynard 1997, 123) NDS often occurs in our 56 full debriefings (from Conditions 20, 23, and 24), with the Experimenter elaborating extensively on the news and projecting further assessments by the Teacher. Crucially, these later and frequently positive assessments by Teachers contrast with their initial responses to the PDS (frequently ambivalent or negative), producing inconsistency across the interview as a whole. Thus, it seems clear that full debriefing could transform Teachers’ initial “distress and anger” (Perry 2013) into “happ[iness] to have been of service” (Haslam et al. 2015).

190  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

News Announcement: “This Man Was Not Being Shocked” The following example shows how the Experimenter performs the first component of the NDS, the news announcement itself. (1) [2001 Obedient, 29:23] 1 E: Well let me say this,=​uh Missuz ((T’s name)),=​We were 2

quite interested in your reactions as a matter of fact.

3     (1.7) 4 E: tch Uh::, (1.5) to uh (0.3) my-​(0.2) ((clears throat)) 5

commands.=​Telling you to continue. (0.3) °You see.°

6     (0.6) 7 E: °#Uh (at least/​especially)# as the situation became 8

necessary°=​ We are interested in your: reactions and

9

uh how far you would go and so forth.=​On this machine,

10

(0.7) .h Uh and actually: as a matter of fact,=​this

11

man was ↑not being shocked,=​In the next room.

12     (0.6) 13 E: °#Uh: (0.2) He did not receive any shocks.°

The Experimenter begins with a preannouncement (“let me say . . .”) before starting to inform the Teacher of what “we” were “interested in” (lines 1–​2). His “as a matter of fact” works as an honesty phrase (Edwards and Fasulo 2006), framing the forthcoming talk as sincere but contrary to expectation. Honesty phrases are characteristic of the Experimenter’s announcements: they indicate a discrepancy between the experiment’s hitherto asserted purpose—​to study the effects of punishment on learning and memory—​and its actual one. After elaborating (lines 4–​5, 7–​9), he announces that the Learner “was ↑not being shocked” (line 11). His prosodic emphasis on the negation term (“↑not”), additional honesty phrase (“as a matter of fact”), and contrast marker “actually” (Clift 2001) all distinguish previously asserted appearance (the cover story) from emerging reality. Collectively, these practices work to change the definition of the situation heretofore presented to the Teacher. The example also illustrates a recurrent feature of the full debriefings that contrasts with Perry’s (2013, 85) account of them as conducted “independent[ly] of subject reactions.” The Experimenter’s news delivery characteristically includes numerous turn-​ transition relevance places (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974): for instance, here at lines 3, 6, and 12.

Milgram, Science, and Morality  191 At such points, his turns of talk are grammatically and prosodically complete, making speaker transition relevant. Only when the Teacher does not assume speakership does the Experimenter continue. Indeed, he frequently pursues responses (Pomerantz 1984) by reformulating the announcement (e.g., line 13: “He did not receive any shocks.”). Moreover, some of these pursuits are done in increments (e.g., lines 4 and 7) that, by extending the prior turn, obscure the absence of response while also renewing its relevance (Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002). Thus, although Experimenter and Teacher may also orient to unequal expertise and power, it is apparent that the Experimenter regularly treats Teachers as coproducers of full-​debriefing news.3

News Reaction: “Oh, I Felt So Sorry for That Man” This is a key moment in the debriefing. Upon hearing the announcement that the Learner was not really being shocked, Teachers would have experienced a gestalt shift wherein actions performed during the experiment took on new meaning and significance. For many Obedient Teachers, the news would have confirmed what they suspected was true, that the Learner was never in any real danger, but had no way of knowing for sure. Now that they were finally receiving reciprocity from the Experimenter and getting the feedback they expected, they were able to establish the kind of mutual intelligibility that had been absent during the experiment (and which the Disobedient Teachers refused to tolerate). At the same time, all Teachers—​ including Disobedient ones, who had gone along with the Experimenter up to a point—​needed to reckon with actions they had taken before they knew for certain that the Learner was safe. Taking the new information about the Learner’s well-​being onboard, many Teachers cooperated with the Experimenter to manage the moral meaning of their behavior and its implications for self. Teachers typically reacted to the Experimenter’s announcement with expressions of surprise, followed by reports of what they experienced during the experiment. At minimum, their reactions featured a change-​of-​state token (“Oh”) that receipted the announcement as news (Heritage 1984) and/​ or repair initiations (“He wasn’t being shocked?”). Such practices can embody surprise, as can initial silence following the Experimenter’s announcement (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2006). Example 2 illustrates overt surprise:

192  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self (2) [2020 Obedient, 19:43] 1 E: Well:,=​Uh let me tell you that uh (0.2) he wasn’t 2

really being shocked.

3     (1.0) 4 T: tch Was it just uh frightened?=​More: or less:?=​ 5 E: =​ No:,=​Uh no he was ac-​he’s an employee.=​Of Yale:, 6

=​Uh the same as I am,=​He uh-​=​

7 T:

=​.h ↑OH my God(h) hh=​

8 E:

=​h(h)eh!

9     (0.6) 10 E: tch uh he is-​=​ 11 T: =​ Oh: golly. h(h)=​

Following E’s announcement (lines 1–​2), the Teacher initiates repair with a candidate understanding (line 4). The Experimenter rejects this understanding (“No”) and explains the Learner’s true role, along with his own (lines 5–​6). As the Experimenter starts another turn (“He uh”), the Teacher responds with a surprise token (line 7). As Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2006, 161) observe, such tokens are “designed to appear as-​if-​visceral”; in producing them, “people confirm for each other a shared, taken-​for-​granted world defined by a set of norms, values, and expectations of which the ‘surprising’ behavior, event, or whatever constitutes a breach.” The Teacher’s reaction token marks the Experimenter’s news as a breach of expectations, as does the mild oath “Oh golly” at line 11. Likewise, several Teachers react with professions of “ritualized disbelief ” (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2006). For example, Obedient Teacher 2017 responds with “You’re kidding.” Other Teachers compare the situation to “Candid Camera” (2011, Obedient: “This is like Candid Camera n(h)ow!”), and some “flood out” (Goffman 1974) with unrestrained displays of emotion. Thus, Disobedient Teacher 2008 reacts with prolonged laughter, then rhetorically exclaims, “I should have known!” In such cases, Teachers exhibit an as-​if-​visceral reaction to the news. Practices such as repair and candidate understandings, by treating the announcement as unexpected, work to make sense of it and mark a transition between knowledge states. Following initial surprise, many Teachers go on to produce experiential reports: claims about what they thought or felt during the experiment. The Experimenter, pursuing reconciliation, supportively aligns with these reports, for instance, by observing that the Teacher was “quite nervous”

Milgram, Science, and Morality  193 (2026, Disobedient) or was “reluctant to . . . inflict pain” (2009, Obedient). These experiential reports and the Experimenter’s response to them are important, as they perform “counter-​dispositional” work (Edwards and Potter 2005) that displays concern for the Learner’s well-​being. By reporting subjective states, such as thoughts, feelings, and inclinations, Teachers account for their actions by disavowing cruelty or malice toward the Learner and presenting themselves as having been concerned for him “all along.” This, in turn, implies that they are not the kind of person who would ordinarily behave as they did during the experiment, and that they only went along with the Experimenter under duress (cf. Edwards 2006). In effect, they are distancing their true self from the problematic self they projected during the experiment. For his part, the Experimenter assists in this reparative facework (Goffman 1967), building solidarity with the Teachers as they redefine their relationship with him and with the experiment. Consider Example 3, where the Teacher, having been informed of the Experimenter’s deception, engages in experiential reporting: (3) [2001 Obedient, 29:52] 1 E: =​Does this make you: uh (.) [feel a little better? 2 T:     [H:: ((sigh)) 3   (0.7) 4 T: tch .h[hh 5 E:   [Uh:: 6   (.) 7 T: ↑Oh: °I felt so sorry for that ma:n.=​I can’t tell you.° 8

((T sounds breathy and “relieved”))

9   (.) 10 E: Did you really? 11   (1.0) 12 T: °°Oh°°=​Cuz >I [thought< that I-​(was): was just-​(0.3)=​ 13 E:    [(  ). 14 T:

=​just hitting him for no reason at all.=​Just whipping

15

him at the post.

Following his announcement that the Learner was not being shocked (not shown), E solicits a report of T’s emotional state (line 1). Her prebeginning sigh, which she produces in overlap with E’s question, embodies negative affect and forecasts a dispreferred turn (Hoey 2014, 183), and she goes on to

194  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self report that she “felt so sorry” for the Learner, a sentiment she intensifies with her idiomatic “I can’t tell you.” Here, she is hearable as trying to deflect a possible judgment that her “obedience” was motivated by callousness or cruelty. Her claim to have felt concern counters that interpretation, making inferentially available (Edwards and Potter 2005) to E that she indeed pitied the Learner. At line 10, he encourages elaboration (“Did you really?”), and the Teacher then accounts for her feelings. She emphasizes the apparent senselessness of what she was asked to do (“just . . . for no reason” lines 12, 14) and compares it to a cruel and archaic form of punishment (“whipping him at the post,” lines 14, 15). This Teacher’s news reaction, in disclaiming cruelty toward the Learner and tacitly complaining about the experiment, is typical of the reactions elicited by the Experimenter’s news of deception. In particular, it illustrates common practices Teachers used in making sense of what occurred during the experiment and transforming its moral meaning and implications for self.

News Elaboration: “We Don’t Like to Fool You” After the Teacher reacts to the announcement, the Experimenter elaborates upon it. He delivers this part of the script with several practices emphasizing that the Learner experienced no pain or harm. For instance, he may state that the cries the Teacher heard were prerecorded and reveal that the Learner is a Yale employee and fellow project member. He may also repeat the news announcement, reasserting that the Learner did not receive any shocks. Thus, following Example 3 above (transcript not shown), the Experimenter does a reformulated announcement (“He was not actually receiving any shocks”) that is fitted to, and counters, the Teacher’s report (lines 14, 15) that she thought she was hurting (“whipping”) the Learner. Similarly, in Example 4 below, the Experimenter redoes his announcement (line 16) following the Teacher’s reaction (line 9). Furthermore, his news elaboration characteristically features an apology for the deception (“We really don’t like to fool you this way”): (4) [2012 Obedient, 20:26] 1

E: Let me say this that uh (0.2) first of all:, (1.4)

2

this: uh,

3   (.)

Milgram, Science, and Morality  195 4 T: Thank you. 5   (0.5) 6 E: gentleman in here, (0.2) #uh# (0.2) was not really 7

being shocked.

8   (1.3) 9 T: I see. 10   (1.2) 11 T: Yeah.=​Actually it was uh (1.3) it was uh: a gimmick 12

more or less.

13   (0.6) 14 E: Well:, (0.3) y:eah you might put it that way. 15   (0.5) 16 E: #Uh# (.) he wasn’t being shocked, (0.7) uh he’s 17

actually an employee of Yale.

18   (0.6) 19 T: Mhm,=​ 20

E:

=​°See.=​Uh°

21   (0.5) 22 E: °We work uh-​on this experiment together.° (tch) 23   (1.0) 24 E: Uh:, (1.4) We really don’t like to fool ya this way. 25   (0.8) 26 E: But it’s necessary cuz >you see< we’re studying-​ 27

(.) your: (0.2) reactions.

By issuing an apology, the Experimenter treats the deception as requiring justification—​in other words, as morally problematic. He also pursues reconciliation with the Teacher, proposing to re-​establish trust through an honest admission of guilt. At the same time, however, he accounts for the deception by stating its necessity: to study the Teachers’ reactions, it is essential that they not know the experiment’s real objective. Some Teachers respond by explicitly accepting the Experimenter’s apology, for example, by claiming to understand why deception was necessary. Similarly, some Disobedient Teachers offer a counter-​apology, after learning the experiment’s true purpose, for disrupting it with their resistance. In such cases, we find Teachers accepting that deception was a necessary part of the experiment, which may carry the implication that the stress and anxiety they endured was in some sense justified. Insofar as Milgram was

196  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self able to persuade Teachers that his scientific work depended on their being deceived, and to the extent that this led them to find value in what they went through, if not wholly approve of it, we can see one way in which they might have come to identify with Milgram’s enterprise, and in the process become (ex post facto) the “engaged followers” Haslam et al. (2015) document in their analysis of Teachers’ survey responses. As we suggest below, the postwar prestige of science likely formed a background condition that helped facilitate acceptance of the deception and any consequent identification that may have occurred thereafter.

News Assessment: “I Feel Better” Milgram intended for his debriefings, especially in their full form, to induce Teachers to rationalize their actions and reconcile with the Experimenter and Learner. Though the Experimenter pursues indications that Teachers “feel better” throughout the debriefing, this is especially evident in the assessment phase of the NDS. If Teachers do not volunteer this information, he typically solicits a self-​report with the positively polarized question, “Does that make you feel better?” In ordinary conversation, news recipients’ assessments are structurally recurrent features of news delivery (Maynard 2003); in the institutional setting of Milgram’s lab, news recipients frequently assessed the Experimenter’s news by professing to feel better. (5) [2013 Obedient, 27:01] 1

E: And uh: he was not really being shocked you see.

2

T: °(h) heh!°

3      (0.6) 4 T: .h=​ 5

E: =​Does that make you feel better?

6    (0.2) 7

T: It does(h).=​(h) [huh!=​

8 E:    [eh(h)

Just prior to Example 5, the Experimenter had been elaborating on his news announcement. At line 1, he redoes that announcement, using the adverb “really” to mark a contrast between appearance and reality. The Teacher responds with a beat of laughter (line 2), and following a pause (line 3) and

Milgram, Science, and Morality  197 Teacher in-​breath (line 4), the Experimenter solicits confirmation that the news makes her “feel better” (line 5). His question is formatted as a positively polarized yes-​no interrogative (Koshik 2002) that projects an affirmative response. Though the Teacher produces such a response (line 7), its non-​ type-​conforming design (lacking a “yes”) may be a subtle means of asserting agency (Heritage and Raymond 2012). Also, the Experimenter’s laugh particle at line 8 (“eh(h)”) appears after the Teacher’s interpolated particles of aspiration (the (h) tokens at line 7; cf. Potter and Hepburn 2010) and in overlap with her laugh token, and thereby aligns with the Teacher’s response—​ perhaps embodying a sense that they are “on the same page.” In addition to solicitations of well-​being, the Experimenter performs several additional “reconciliation practices” (as we term them) during full debriefing that promote relaxation after the stresses of participation and invite improved assessments of the experiment. These practices, some of which we have already described above, structure the remainder of full debriefing: (1) Offer of relaxation item (“Would you like a cigarette?”). Cigarettes, coffee, and tranquilizers were on hand to calm Teachers during the interview. The Experimenter often offers cigarettes, or the Teacher is carrying them, and they smoke together. (2) Debriefing news delivery (“He wasn’t really receiving shocks.”). The Experimenter drops the cover story. (3) Solicitation of well-​being (“Does that make you feel a little better?” “How do you feel now?” “I certainly hope you don’t feel bad about coming down [here to participate].”). The Experimenter (and Learner) may perform this practice multiple times. (4) Summoning the Learner (“JIM?”). The Learner (Jim McDonough) responds by returning and meeting the Teacher “under different circumstances.” He assures the Teacher that there are “no hard feelings” and in many cases takes responsibility for the trouble that occurred during the experiment, for example, by explaining that he was “nervous” and “overreacting.” (5) Solicitation of positive attitude toward experiment (“What do you think of it, now that it’s over?”). (6) Announcement of future report and book (“You’ll receive a report in a few months, and I think you’ll find it quite interesting. A book will also be published.”). (7) Leave taking (“And we did certainly appreciate having you here and we enjoyed you very much.”).

198  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Overall, the reconciliation practices embody the Experimenter’s affective work of managing Teachers’ reflections and feelings about their experience in Milgram’s lab. This work proved capable of improving Teachers’ earlier ambivalent and negative assessments. In Condition 20, at least 65% (24/​37) of the Teachers in our collection, just prior to departure, respond positively to the Experimenter’s participation assessment question (see component 9, Box 3.1). For instance, after “defiant” Teacher 2023 writes her participation assessment, she says, “Well (.) this is after I have spoken with you now. (.) You don’t want my immediate reaction” (25:57). Likewise, in Conditions 23 and 24, at least 68% (13/​19) provide positive responses. These figures are bare minimums, reflecting only Teachers’ (or the Experimenter’s) verbalized comments about their written responses, thereby omitting Teachers who wrote a positive response but did not verbalize it. Thus, the pattern of participation assessments, provided at the very end of the interview, inverts that of the earlier PDS assessments, being more consistent with “happ[iness] to have been of service” (Haslam et al. 2015) than with “distress and anger” (Perry 2013). In working with (and on) Teachers’ understanding of the experiment, Milgram aimed to remake and reground their relationship to it and to the self (cooperative or resistant) they enacted in its course. In the process, he sought to change the moral meaning that Teachers assigned to the experiment. As we have seen, his efforts in this regard were largely successful, and can explain the otherwise puzzling shift in Teachers’ attitudes toward the experiment. If, as Haslam and Reicher suggest (Haslam et al. 2015), Teachers were at any point “engaged followers” of the Experimenter, most were not so to begin with, but rather became so in and through the debriefing process. The debriefings, especially in their full form but also in their more deceptive one, were not simply informative but transformative. They enlisted Teachers in the affective work that would more easily allow them to make their actions morally accountable, with the result that months afterward, many Teachers could report that they were “happy to have been of service” to Milgram (Turowetz and Hollander 2018).

Trust in Science The Milgram experiment is an extreme case in many respects. It is certainly not representative of the typical experiment, social psychological

Milgram, Science, and Morality  199 or otherwise, especially in our own age of strict institutional review board protocols and ethical oversight. Also, since Milgram’s subjects were not randomly selected (see Chapter 1), there is a good chance he oversampled people who were more likely than average to be sympathetic toward science, and thus more likely to respond to his newspaper ad or mail solicitation in the first place.4 That said, it is precisely because of his experiment’s extremism and the negative and ambivalent reactions it initially received from subjects that the postexperiment interviews offer an instructive case study in the extent to which debriefing procedures can reshape attitudes toward the research process. In particular, it shows how assessments of science can be affected by participation in research, and how such participation can involve researchers and subjects in concerted negotiations about the meaning and value of scientific work. If the goal of Milgram’s debriefings was to turn Teachers into “engaged followers,” or at least move them closer to that position, the results from the postexperiment questionnaires he had them fill out would suggest that he succeeded (Haslam et al. 2015). We should note, however, that Milgram was probably helped in no small part by the fact that his experiment was conducted at the high point of public trust in science, which in the United States was during the 1950s and ’60s. Milgram was able to capitalize on that trust both during the experiment, when his script had the Experimenter direct the Teachers by appealing to the experiment’s “requirements,” and later in the debriefings, especially the full debriefings, where the Experimenter explained to Teachers that the “hoax” was necessary to bring the research off and that the findings were to be written up in a book. In this way, science furnished Milgram with a resource that he could use to persuade Teachers to continue with the experiment and to help justify his conduct—​and theirs—​immediately afterward. At the same time, given background understandings about the importance of science in a rapidly transforming post–​World War II America—​a war in many ways won via science—​Milgram’s appeals to what his science required could make Teachers feel that they were part of something larger than themselves that mattered, and that what they had experienced minutes earlier was in some sense not only justified but also valuable. Likewise, widespread trust in the scientific method allowed Milgram to neglect the interactional details of the experiment and to warrantably exclude them from public record, in effect rendering them invisible and perpetuating the Cartesian myth of value-​free science. This is one reason that

200  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self inspecting the lived practices through which social facts, including those of science, are produced is so important. It problematizes the strong fact-​value distinction that Milgram took for granted and directs attention to the local, situated, ordinarily invisible work of actually doing science (as opposed to reporting it), making it easier to detect the researcher’s own value and moral commitments and to question their ethicality where relevant. Of course, public trust in science has waned considerably since Milgram’s time (Gauchat 2011), as has trust in the impartiality of the scientific method. Yet for exactly that reason, it is increasingly important to understand how ordinary people’s participation in science is implicated in the attitudes they form toward scientific work—​how the process of participating affects the meanings they attach to science. As an extreme example of participants’ attitudes shifting from disengagement to engagement or re-​engagement, the Milgram debriefings may have something valuable to teach us about the dynamics at play in more prosaic postresearch discussions between scientists and research participants.

Conclusion: Moral Meaning and Self in the Remaking Where Part I of this book set the stage for a re-​examination and reframing of Milgram’s experiment, and Part II focused on its performance, Part III has highlighted its closing act: the postexperiment interviews. Chapter 7 has examined the affective labor and care work Milgram performed as he directed and rehearsed his confederates, created a moral dilemma for his Teachers, and then led them through debriefing to a revised understanding of the research and the actions they took while participating in it. In tandem with the Experimenter (and Learner), Teachers redefined what occurred in the lab only minutes earlier, accounting for seemingly callous or cruel actions while performing facework that distanced their “true” self (presented in the postexperiment interview) from the self they had enacted under constraint (during the experiment). In the process, their attitudes toward the experiment often displayed a shift from negative or ambivalent to positive. As Perry (2013) rightly points out, encouraging Teachers to rationalize their behavior in this setting was morally problematic. In this chapter, we have seen just how elaborate that encouragement was and the practices it involved. Rather than simply providing information or news about the

Milgram, Science, and Morality  201 experiment, the debriefings did the work of redefining a troubled situation and its significance. This finding, in turn, gives us a fuller picture of the moral problems associated with Milgram’s research, which encompass what occurred not only during the experiment but also in its immediate aftermath.

8 Conclusion For generations of social psychologists, Milgram’s dramatic findings have exemplified the principle that Elliot Aronson has called “the essence of social psychology, namely, that the social situation can exert a powerful impact on human behavior” (Aronson 2010, 209). The Milgram experiments provide an especially powerful illustration of how the smallest details of a situation, including pauses, delays, hesitations, and body posture, can mark trouble, perform moral resistance, and ultimately determine the outcome of a troubled interaction. This fact has not been lost on Milgram commentators and scholars. As Lee Ross (quoted in Patnoe 1988, 103, emphasis in original) puts it: What the Milgram experiments offered was an unparalleled demonstration of the degree to which it is specific, often subtle, details of the situation that matter most and yet go undetected and unappreciated. Milgram’s demonstrations challenge us to look at the situation closely, taking care to appreciate the subjective viewpoint of the actor, especially when we must try to explain behavior that seems inexplicable.

Yet, among Milgram scholars, there has been conspicuously little attention given to the “specific, often subtle details” that are so indispensable for explaining what happened in Milgram’s almost 800 experimental sessions. In this book, we have focused on precisely such details. In doing so, we have advanced a novel analysis of the Milgram experiment, one grounded in an interaction order approach to the study of social action, which argues that the way Milgram’s Teachers oriented to the moral commitments and obligations underlying human interaction explains important differences between the Teachers whom Milgram categorized as Obedient and those he categorized as Disobedient. We have also addressed Teachers’ viewpoint, taking seriously the accounts they produced during the course of the experiment (see Chapters 4 and 5), the reasons they gave for their actions in its immediate aftermath (see Chapter 6), and how their assessments of the experiment were Morality in the Making of Sense and Self. Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190096045.003.0009

Conclusion  203 transformed through the affective labor in which the Experimenter enlisted them during the debriefing interviews (see Chapter 7). In this concluding chapter, we focus on what Milgram’s research can teach us about resistance, authority, and the underlying moral requirements of human interaction. First, we address the question of whether Milgram’s experiment can be generalized to the real-​world cases of genocide, particularly the Holocaust, that inspired his research. Drawing on Goffman’s (1961) classic analysis of the relationship between asylum staff and patient-​inmates, we argue that the moral requirements of sense-​and self-​making would have made it impossible for the Experimenter to sustain the working definition of the situation as a benign-​if-​uncomfortable study of learning and memory much beyond the 30–​60 minutes allotted for each experimental session. A majority of Obedient Teachers did not think they were really harming the Learner: sooner or later, though, even the most trusting among these Teachers would have almost certainly stopped complying, forcing the Experimenter to end the experiment as he did with Disobedient Teachers, or to provide the reciprocity he had been withholding by finally engaging in repair (e.g., showing that the Learner was all right). By contrast, in real-​ world cases of destructive obedience, the perpetrators are fully aware that they are harming others but do so anyway. Of particular importance in such cases is the use of stigmatized categories (e.g., “Jew”) to dehumanize victims, as well as sufficient time, indoctrination, and use of terror for perpetrators to become the kinds of people capable of harming them. For these reasons, we think it is a mistake to directly generalize the Milgram experiment to the kinds of real-​world atrocities Milgram sought to explain. This does not mean, however, that Milgram has nothing to teach us about the dynamics of authority—​of resistance, compliance, and power—​in everyday life. The practices of persuasion and resistance performed in Milgram’s lab are operative in everyday situations as well as extreme ones, and we can learn much from the Milgram experiments about how the timing, frequency, and design of resistive actions, within and across sequences of interaction, may affect outcomes. Furthermore, the experiments provide a stark example of the marginalization, exclusion, and harm that can result when participants in an interaction do not adhere to the ground rules of an interaction order, which require that reciprocity be granted to all coparticipants. Thus, while a majority of Obedient Teachers did not believe they were acting immorally—​and therefore would not have gone along with the Experimenter indefinitely—​their actions were nonetheless morally problematic in ways that

204  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self reveal the moral requirements of an interaction order and the consequences for sense and self of violating them. Second, we revisit the sociology of morality (see Chapters 1 and 2), further clarifying our contribution in light of the analysis presented throughout the book. By deliberately breaching the everyday, taken-​for-​granted expectations held by Teachers, Milgram created trouble that revealed the ordinarily tacit practices through which members of a society make sense and self, and their grounding in sets of obligations and commitments that have moral implications, whether members recognize them or not (cf. Rawls 1987). As such, Milgram’s situation of forced moral choice—​aligning with the Experimenter and ignoring the Learner or aligning with the Learner and resisting the Experimenter—​constitutes a perspicuous example of morality in the making of sense and self and the work actors do to coproduce the moral character and meaning of situations and identities to which attitudes, values, beliefs, etc.—​the usual focus of social scientific studies of morality—​may be subsequently applied. Third and finally, we reflect on the Milgram experiment as an important cultural event, 60 years after it was conducted, one that has left a deep impact on conventional wisdom about research ethics and responsibility. Likewise, Milgram’s importance has been generally understood as being that, under the right circumstances, ordinary people can be made to do horrific things, and this interpretation has influenced global culture in how we see ourselves as moral agents. However, when we open the “black box” (cf. Latour 1987) of Milgram’s experiment and examine those acts in their details, as we have done in this book, this interpretation becomes problematic. Milgram’s analysis of and publications about the experiment erased Teachers’ agency, especially the acts of resistance all Teachers performed. We have found that, although the Obedient Teachers could be said to have acted immorally (by denying reciprocity to the Learner), a majority did so under the assumption that no one was actually being harmed. This finding, we suggest, provides an important corrective to the dominant interpretation of Milgram—​as having shown that under the right conditions, almost anyone can be made into a monster who acts with callous disregard for the well-​being of others. The majority of Obedient Teachers did not act without conscience, or as passive instruments of the Experimenter (pace Milgram), but rather as morally aware agents who went along with the Experimenter because they reasoned that there was no moral problem.

Conclusion  205

The Moral Requirements of Selfhood and the Limits of Milgramesque Compliance The ground rules of an interaction order require that participants cooperate to make sense and self together (see Introduction and Chapter 2). This entails a moral obligation to recognize and support the selves of all coparticipants and to engage in repair whenever self is threatened. Where the underlying morality of interaction is violated and repair is not forthcoming or not successful, the interaction may break down, potentially causing harm to all participants and especially to those who are most socially vulnerable. Even where the interaction does not break down completely, however, if participants ignore evidence of trouble and go on as if everything is all right, the selves of all participants will be threatened, and all may sustain harm. This applies not only to participants who suffer exclusion and marginalization but also those who do the excluding and marginalizing. This is because the self of each participant depends for its realization on the selves of copresent others, from whom recognition and reciprocity are required. As Goffman (1967, 85) puts it: While it may be true that the individual has a unique self all his [sic] own, evidence of this possession is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labor, the part expressed through the individual’s demeanor being no more significant than the part conveyed by others through their deferential behavior toward him [sic].

Where one or more participants are prevented from making sense and self, this can interfere with their ability or willingness to grant coparticipants the recognition required to support their own selves, in the process revealing the dependence of each self on mutual cooperation from others. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this argument is to be found in hierarchical relationships, where one person has authority over another. In such cases, the person in a position of authority expects and usually takes for granted that those in subordinate positions will comply with their directives. However, when trouble occurs—​for example, when the “subordinate” resists the “superior’s” directives or flatly refuses to comply with them—​it reveals the dependence of the “superior’s” identity and authority on the continued cooperation of their “subordinates.”

206  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self A classic statement of this point is Hegel’s ([1807] 1977) analysis of the “master-​slave” dialectic. Although the master/​mistress has absolute control over the slave, s/​he nonetheless depends on the slave for recognition. However, because the slave has been reduced to an instrument of the master, s/​he cannot provide the master with the intersubjective recognition required for her/​his own self-​making. Instead, the recognition the slave provides is deficient, as it is not given freely but coerced. For this reason, the master-​slave relationship is inherently contradictory: in treating and recognizing the slave as slave, the master makes it impossible for the slave to grant the reciprocal recognition s/​he needs. Williams (2000, 106) summarizes Hegel’s argument as follows: The truth of the master is the slave. That is, the reduction of the slave to a mere commodity makes explicit what domination and mastery are. Moreover, having reduced the other to a slave, to something unessential, the master must now find the truth of his self-​certainty in the slave. This is impossible. For the slave is no longer an independent self-​consciousness which alone can jointly elevate self-​certainty to truth. Truthful intersubjective communication requires that the recognition of the other must be authentic, that is, freely bestowed.

Hegel presents an extreme version of the tension present wherever institutional hierarchies impinge on interaction order requirements for recognition and reciprocity.1 Yet the argument he makes is philosophical and abstract. A more concrete, empirical analysis of this tension is provided by Goffman (1961) in his landmark study of the relationship between staff and patient-​ inmates at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. The mental hospital is an example of a total institution designed to fully subsume the selves of its members, regulating every aspect of their conduct and reducing them to a mere appendage of the institution. In practice, Goffman shows that the patients devise myriad “secondary adjustments” that allow them to make and preserve self within the interstices of the institution. Moreover, he shows that staff members often tolerate such deviations from the rules to ensure the continued cooperation of the patients and smooth running of the hospital. Such arrangements reflect “a kind of compact between inmates and staff ” (Goffman 1961, 97) where staff make concessions to patients, who in return “are expected to become less loyal to the counter-​mores and more receptive to the ideal-​for-​self that the staff defines for them.”2

Conclusion  207 Rawls (1987, 40) observes that the concessions that hospital staff make to patients “tell us something about the moral order which selfhood demands. It is an equalitarian order which stands against the institutional distribution of rights and opportunities.” Such concessions also reveal the mutual dependence of staff and patient identities: if staff are to ensure the continuity of the institution, they cannot completely mortify patients’ selves. Staff must provide patients with some degree of reciprocity and recognition, however minimal and seemingly trivial in some instances, if the institution that employs them is to continue to function. In other words, to sustain a working consensus compatible with the ideal aims of a total institution, staff must tacitly allow and even support an “underlife” that contradicts it. In light of these considerations, we can see why the Milgram situation was impossible to sustain over the long run: it did not satisfy the minimal interaction order requirement that participants cooperate (however tacitly, trivially, and unofficially) to make sense and self. In a way similar to Hegel’s master-​slave dialectic, Milgram ruled out the possibility of secondary adjustments, producing a self-​contradictory dynamic in which the Experimenter refused to grant reciprocity to the resistive Teacher yet demanded reciprocity and recognition in return. He refused, that is, to cooperate in making sense and self with the Teacher or Learner, forcing the Teacher to choose absolutely—​between either granting reciprocity to the Experimenter and ignoring the Learner’s complaints and pleas or insisting on reciprocity with all coparticipants, including the Learner, which meant resisting the Experimenter and trying to stop the experiment. We have seen that Teachers categorized as Disobedient prioritized reciprocity with all participants, explicitly treating the situation as a moral problem and thereby constituting themselves as moral actors facing an immoral situation, whereas Teachers categorized as Obedient ultimately went along with the Experimenter, effectively accepting the working definition of the situation as benign-​if-​uncomfortable and treating the trouble as nothing out of the ordinary. But the one-​sided reciprocity that characterized the relationship between Obedient Teachers and the Experimenter—​in which many continued to cooperate, creating an illusion of mutual reciprocity because they trusted that no one was really being harmed—​could not have gone on forever. It is certainly conceivable that Obedient Teachers would have gone on shocking the Learner beyond the 450-​volt maximum if that were possible and if the

208  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Experimenter had insisted on it. Eventually, however, his assurances that the Learner was safe would strain credulity, even among the more trusting Teachers, necessitating a change in the working definition of the situation and the identities it supported. Not being able to elicit further compliance from the Teachers, the Experimenter’s own situated identity would be compromised, forcing some sort of repair process that would involve granting at least minimal reciprocity to the resistive Teacher and pursuing mutual understanding and intelligibility. The limits of Milgramesque compliance illustrate a crucial difference between Milgram’s lab and real-​world instances of genocidal obedience. In the real-​world situations that Milgram was trying to simulate, such as the Holocaust, those who engage in destructive obedience know that they are harming others but manage to rationalize their actions, often by placing their victims in dehumanizing categories such as “Jew” or “slave” (cf. Garfinkel 1948; Sartre [1943] 2001) and reasoning that they deserve to be harmed. These interactions are overtly immoral, even if participants convince themselves otherwise, as they involve the deliberate destruction of sense and self. Indeed, in some cases, such as the Nazi concentration camps, the social order is designed to manipulate and undermine any stable interactional expectations victims might form. Garfinkel (1975 Boston University seminar)3 gives the example of SS guards pulling prisoners out of line to be shot. After creating the appearance of a pattern by pulling prisoners from one part of the line several times in a row, the guards would abruptly change the “rules,” now pulling them from an entirely different part of the line. Similarly, in his account of his own experience in a camp, Eugen Kogon ([1950] 2006, 126) describes how prisoners would be forced to wait in line in cold weather for two or three days to receive money that had been sent by family members, during which time “the prisoners might be commanded to throw themselves down in the muck, lie prone for half an hour at a time, or turn the line front end backward, so that the men in the front rows who had been standing for four or five hours were the last [in line].” By contrast, although their actions were morally problematic insofar as they denied reciprocity to the Learner, a majority of Milgram’s Obedient Teachers claimed they didn’t think they were harming him. In the absence of reciprocity or repair from the Experimenter, many made the ordinary judgment that they could trust the Experimenter, who they reasoned would not allow any real harm to occur. As it turned out, their judgment was correct: the

Conclusion  209 Learner was not really harmed after all, as Teachers would learn during the debriefing interviews, where they were told either that the shocks were mild and the Learner was overreacting (in Milgram’s “partial” debriefings) or that the Learner was not actually receiving shocks at all (in the more candid “full” debriefings). Of course, it could have been otherwise. It could have turned out that the Learner was indeed being harmed, that the Experimenter was incompetent or negligent or even sadistic: the Teachers had no way of knowing for sure that their assumptions about him were accurate. But in any case, the point is that a majority of Obedient Teachers did not explicitly treat the situation as a moral problem because they did not believe there was one: they trusted that the apparent contradiction between what the Experimenter and Learner were telling them would eventually be resolved “somehow,” in a satisfactory way, such that the moral problem was merely apparent rather than real. But what about the Obedient Teachers who did not say they went on because they believed no one was really being harmed? What about those Teachers who primarily justified themselves as “following instructions,” omitting any mention of the Learner’s well-​being? It may be that these Teachers most closely approximated the sort of real-​world destructively Obedient actors Milgram sought to study. But we should be cautious in drawing such conclusions: specifically, we should not make assumptions about these Teachers’ motives on the basis of what they did not say. It is certainly possible that they too trusted the Experimenter’s competence and motives and went along with his instructions for precisely that reason. What we can say, based on the data, is that they did not explicitly treat the situation as a moral problem—​though they did frequently orient to morally implicative interactional trouble via delays, hesitations, and disfluencies. But the question of whether they did not explicitly orient to a moral problem because they did not think anyone was being harmed must remain open. The limits of Milgramesque compliance have implications for ongoing debates among social psychologists and historians about Milgram’s relevance for explaining real-​ world instances of genocide, especially the Holocaust. Milgram set out to determine whether destructive obedience to authority was due to personality traits, for example, an authoritarian personality (a la Adorno et al. 1950), or to situational variables (a la Asch 1956). In recent decades, scholars evaluating the relevance of his findings to the Holocaust have divided into two camps: one that favors Milgram’s relevance for explaining the Holocaust (Bauman 1989; Blass 2000; Browning [1992]

210  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self 1998; Newman and Erber 2002) and another opposing it (Brannigan 2021; Cesarani 2004; Goldhagen 1996; Mastroianni 2002; Mixon 1989). Given our own finding that a majority of of Milgram’s Obedient Teachers claimed they complied because they did not think the Learner was being harmed, as well as consonant findings by Perry et al. (2020) based on their recent reanalysis of Milgram’s data, we do not think that Milgram’s research is generalizable to real-​world cases of genocide in any direct way. Indeed, there is an important difference between the behavior Milgram observed over the course of any given 30-​to 60-​minute-​long experimental session and that displayed by an official such as Adolf Eichmann over the course of his bureaucratic career in the Nazi German government. While Hannah Arendt ([1961] 2006) famously treated him as emblematic of the “banality of evil,” Eichmann in 1933 was only potentially the person he became by 1945. Nor were the activities demanded of him the same, or for that matter the government institutions making these demands. Eichmann, the directives he was tasked to obey and creatively implement, and the Nazi agencies under whose auspices he worked—​these all developed dramatically in this 12-​year period. As historian David Cesarani, Eichmann’s most recent biographer, observes in his criticism of the use of the Milgram experiment to “scientifically explain” the actions of Eichmann and other Nazi perpetrators: There are different kinds of authority and relations of power: a person who is inclined to take instructions from a technician or scientist on a value-​free issue may not react in the same way to orders from a person associated with a government agency or a political party they disdain. A purely abstract and universal relationship [obedience to authority in Milgram’s sense] cannot be used to explain another one [that of Eichmann to his superiors] that is shot through with history, politics and cultural preconceptions. (Cesarani 2004, 355)

But although we think it is a mistake to directly generalize from Milgram’s experiment to such real-​world atrocities as the Holocaust, the practices exhibited in Milgram’s lab do have much to teach us about the social dynamics of authority—​obedience, resistance, power, and moral practice—​ lessons that we have attempted to distill in this book and that we can now summarize:

Conclusion  211 1. Resist early and often. Although both Obedient and Disobedient Teachers resisted, the latter tended to resist earlier and more frequently than the former. They also tended to resist more explicitly. Whereas many Obedient Teachers never moved beyond tacit resistance—​ for example, delays, hesitations, sighs, imprecations, nervous laughter, fidgeting—​ all Disobedient Teachers upgraded the explicitness of their resistive practices. 2. Use a range of practices. Disobedient Teachers exhibited a wider repertoire of resistive practices than Obedient ones. In addition to delaying the progress of the experiment, they frequently topicalized the Learner’s distress (e.g., “He’s saying he doesn’t want to go on”), asked the Experimenter to check on him, offered to return the stipend for participating in the experiment, and produced accounts in which violations of the underlying moral order of interaction were made explicit. 3. Adhere to interaction order obligations and commitments. Perhaps the most important difference between Obedient and Disobedient Teachers is that the former allowed the Experimenter’s violation of interaction order obligations to stand, resulting in harm to sense and self for all participants and especially for the Learner, who insisted that he was being hurt and demanded an end to the experiment. As we have seen, many of these Teachers did not believe they were harming the Learner and would likely have resisted more strongly if they thought otherwise. Nonetheless, by “going along to get along” and creating an illusion of reciprocity where there was none, they exacerbated the trouble and its harmful consequences. To the extent that the Disobedient Teachers were heroic, their heroism consisted in refusing to accept the working consensus that everything was essentially benign, instead repeatedly marking the Experimenter’s failure to meet his interactional obligations to both themselves and the Learner through sustained acts of resistance. These Teachers insisted on reciprocity with all participants, including the Learner, and in so doing demonstrated their commitment to the equalitarian requirements of an interaction order. We think these lessons have broad applicability to a wide range of real-​world situations. Taking them seriously could help empower those confronting unjust authority, examples of which include plane crashes (pilot-​to-​copilot interaction: Frankel 1985), rape and sexual harassment (Kitzinger and Frith 1999), and bullying and torture (commanding officer to lesser officer or enlisted person: Zimbardo 2007).

212  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Finally, we can note the experiment’s undeniable heuristic power to serve, in a phrase Garfinkel (1967) borrowed from Herbert Spiegelberg, as an “aid to a sluggish imagination”—​to our collective endeavor to better understand compliance with malevolent authority in a variety of historical, political, economic, and social interactional contexts.

Implications for the Sociology of Morality Throughout this book, we have argued for an interaction-​centered approach to morality. While there is a growing body of research on the sociology of morality, and the science of morality more generally, we find that it has paid insufficient attention to interaction (see Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2). In general, sociologists of morality have tended to focus on attitudes, values discourses, and predictors (e.g., demographic attributes) of moral behavior, as opposed to what actors are doing, within the context of the moral requirements of an interaction order, to coproduce the moral character and meaning of situations and identities. By contrast, our analysis of Milgram does not speculate about the values or cognitive dispositions of Teachers (cf. Vaisey 2009), nor about the cultural resources and schemas they may have drawn on to fashion strategic lines of action (cf. Swidler 2001), nor about the status of attitudes and beliefs as predictors of action. Instead, we treat the situations and identities to which attitudes, beliefs, etc., may be related as outcomes of concerted action in interaction: the concerted actions, rather than the attitudes and beliefs, come first. Further, we have argued that while human interaction necessarily has moral implications, which exist whether participants in a given interaction recognize them or not, the moral meaning of a situation (i.e., its character as good, bad, not really a moral problem after all, etc.) depends on what participants visibly and audibly do and say (not what they think, or say they would do), turn by turn and sequence by sequence, as they support, revise, or challenge the situation’s working definition. Milgram set out to create a morally charged situation by design. He sought to confront Teachers with a moral dilemma that required them to make moral choices, whether they wanted to make such choices or not. Indeed, Teachers were effectively forced to make a moral decision, since choosing not to choose was not possible in Milgram’s lab. They could not cooperate

Conclusion  213 with the Experimenter without neglecting the Learner’s complaints, and they could not seek remedy for those complaints without resisting the Experimenter. Yet, we have seen that not all Teachers explicitly treated the situation in moral terms. Insofar as they cooperated with the Experimenter and accepted the working consensus that the situation was benign and ordinary, they sustained the appearance that everything was essentially okay. There was no need for moral action because there was no problem that called for a moral solution. In practice, this meant accepting an increasingly incongruous situation, the incongruity being between what the Experimenter claimed was happening and what actually seemed to be happening. Faced with this incongruity, Obedient Teachers persisted in constituting the setting as an ordinary study of learning and memory through their acts of compliance with the Experimenter’s directives and their inattention to information that could “contradict, discredit, or otherwise throw doubt upon” (Goffman 1959, 12) his competence and defintion ot the situation. In this way, they achieved the situation’s “nothing out of the ordinary” character. Of course, this does not mean that Obedient Teachers were always compliant. Though much of their resistance remained tacit and they eventually resumed cooperating with the Experimenter, we have seen that Obedient Teachers did resist, and that when they did so, they at least temporarily marked a threat to the underlying morality of interaction. Futhermore, when a few did call on the Experimenter to check on the Learner or reassure them that he was okay, they were showing an explicit orientation to interaction order obligations, to the obligations members of society owe one another as participants in a moral order. What separated the majority of Obedient Teachers from the Disobedient ones was not attention to the moral implications of interactional trouble per se, but the sense they made of those implications: the Disobedient Teachers refused to treat them as indications of ordinary, benign trouble, instead holding the Experimenter accountable for meeting his interaction order obligations to the Learner and themselves, and persisting in doing so. In this way, they achieved the situation’s character as a moral problem. Our analysis of resistance and compliance has also shown how the moral self is reflexively tied to the social situations where it is produced, or rather coproduced. Teachers variously constituted themselves as Obedient and Disobedient selves throughout the experiment. Their identities were fluid

214  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self and in flux, a fluidity that was only fixed at the end of the experiment—​by which point they had become categorizable as Obedient or Disobedient—​ and only fully erased by the act of scientific categorization itself, particularly in Milgram’s published accounts of his research (cf. Hoffman, Myerberg, and Morawski 2015). There, active participants appear as one-​sided subjects, “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel 1967) whose actions are reducible to a single dimension—​Obedient versus Disobedient. In re-​examining Milgram’s experiments in their lived details, we have restored some fluidity to the situated identities of his Teachers. We have also shown how this fluidity came into play in the postexperiment debriefing interviews, as Milgram’s Experimenter engaged Teachers in reparative facework that allowed them to distance who they “really” are from who they appeared to be in the laboratory. Time and again in the interviews, we hear Obedient Teachers profess their concern for the Learner and reluctance to continue. They describe what they would have done had the experiment gone on—​for example, put a stop to it—​and insinuate (or assert) that they are not the sort of person who ordinarily behaves in a cruel or callous way. The Experimenter, for his part, assists this reparative facework by reporting on Teachers’ apparent discomfort and distress (“It didn’t seem like you wanted to continue”)—​states compatible with reluctance to inflict harm on another person. It was thus that the Experimenter and Teachers collaboratively redefined the experiment and its meaning, in the process shifting Teachers’ attitudes toward it from negative or ambivalent to largely positive (see Chapter 7). Overall, our analysis demonstrates the value of an interaction-​centered approach to moral action. When we center interaction rather than individual action and its correlates (attitudes, values, demographic attributes), we resituate the study of morality. Factors that are usually treated as given in advance, including moral identities and moral meanings, become respecified as outcomes of concerted actions produced on a turn-​by-​turn basis. This move effectively dissolves such traditional dichotomies as agency-​structure, material-​ideal, and subject-​object. It also changes, or at least revises, the questions we may ask of our data. Rather than searching primarily for correlations between individual-​level variables and individual or collective outcomes, we might now ask which social order properties make those correlations possible in the first place. Correlations, after all, document and describe patterns but do not explain their origins. Doing so requires close attention to what members of a collectivity, which can be as large as a nation

Conclusion  215 or as small as a dyad, are doing together that makes their behavior describable in terms of correlations and descriptive statistics as such (cf. Garfinkel [1962] 2019).4 More generally, it requires attention to the processual dimension (Abbott 2016; Martin 2011) of social life, the historicity of (seemingly) settled histories, and the achievement of sense and self as social facts (Rawls 1987, 2005).

Concluding Remarks: Milgram and Ourselves We conclude this chapter and the book with a reflection on how Milgram has influenced the way members of our society understand themselves and what people are capable of under the right conditions. In the 60 years since Milgram performed his experiment, it has entered the stock of common cultural knowledge not only among the college-​educated, whose introductory psychology textbooks invariably feature some discussion of Milgram’s results, but also among the general population, who are more likely than ever to encounter Milgram in news articles, social media feeds, film, art, and music. For many, Milgram’s (1963) disturbing finding that 65% of people will act against the dictates of conscience if directed to do so by an authority figure is a sobering commentary on the human condition: under certain circumstances, many otherwise ordinary, morally upright individuals will become passive instruments of malevolent authority. In this book, we have reinterpreted Milgram’s results and qualified their scope. While the Milgram situation indeed has much to teach about the dynamics of obedience and resistance, until recently one of its key lessons was largely erased from history: all Teachers displayed at least some resistance to the Experimenter’s commands. While Teachers differed in terms of whether they explicitly formulated the trouble in moral terms, a majority of those who treated it as ordinary trouble did so under the assumption that no one was really being hurt. At no point were these Teachers passive instruments of the Experimenter, nor were they acting against the dictates of conscience. Rather, they made the ordinary judgment that the Experimenter could be trusted to protect his subjects from harm, and that what appeared to be a moral violation would in the end turn out to be benign after all. Insofar as this wait-​and-​see (Garfinkel 1967) approach meant denying reciprocity to the Learner and ignoring his claims that he was being harmed, their actions were morally problematic. But they were not expressions of a callous,

216  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self Eichmann-​like disregard for the welfare and safety of a fellow human being that many have made them out to be. Things were more complicated than that: as we have seen, a majority of Milgram’s Obedient Teachers were only willing to go on with the experiment because they managed to reconcile their actions with the belief that the Learner was not in any actual danger. What does all of this mean for the reflection we see in the mirror Milgram holds up for us? On the one hand, we do not see an Eichmann who lies dormant in most of us, just waiting for a Milgramesque situation to awaken him. Contrary to popular belief, Milgram did not show that under the right circumstances, almost anyone can be made into a monster who acts without conscience or a sense of responsibility. On the other hand, we can clearly see the harm that results when participants in interaction do not adhere to the ground rules of an interaction order by granting reciprocity to all coparticipants. That is, we see how inequality is corrosive of sense and self and a threat to the well-​being of all who produce it, even where those involved act in good conscience with the best of intentions and do not think anyone is being harmed. This lesson remains as important today as ever and is one we cannot afford to ignore.

APPENDIX 1

Data and Methodology In 2011–​2012, one of us (Hollander) hired undergraduate assistants to make preliminary, rough transcripts using copies of the audio recordings in the Stanley Milgram Archive (Kaplan 1996) maintained by the Manuscripts and Archives Department at Yale University Library.1 Hollander then edited each transcript according to the conventions of conversation analysis (Jefferson 1974; see Appendix 2 for transcription conventions), paying particular attention to the detailed accuracy of passages where subjects display resistance. He also transcribed two experiments—​one Obedient, one Disobedient—​from Milgram’s Obedience film (1965b), which we refer to as our two “video cases.” While an exhaustive transcription project of all 23 conditions—​approximately 780 experiments (Haslam, Loughnan, and Perry 2014)—​is beyond the scope of the book (and impossible given the archive’s incompleteness),2 this body of transcripts makes it possible to address many questions concerning the details of social interaction in the series of experiments as a whole, and both within and across the five represented conditions. Table A.1 provides a breakdown of the data collection (omitting here the two video cases). Most transcripts start at the first nonsilent display by Teachers (T) of resistance to continuation, which usually occurs between 75 and 150 volts with one of the Learner’s (L) first complaints, and end when the Experimenter (E) discontinues the experiment, either in the face of T’s defiance (Disobedient outcome) or after the 450-​volt switch has been used three times (Obedient outcome). However, some transcripts start much earlier, at the beginning of the practice lesson or second lesson. When editing, Hollander listened carefully to the entire recording of the session to ensure that the transcript did not omit any unusually early instances of resistance by T. In addition to the experiment itself, the recordings also contain postexperiment debriefings that the Experimenter—​or, in some cases, Milgram himself—​conducted with participants immediately after each session. During these interviews, subjects were asked, among other things, to account for their actions and, in some instances, explain who was morally responsible for the Learner being shocked against his will. As noted, the Milgram Archive is incomplete. According to Yale Manuscripts and Archives (email communication: July 13, 2010), some of the original audio tapes and subject files are missing for the 23 experiments (conditions). Owing to these circumstances and to the nature of data selection in conversation analysis, Hollander chose the 117

Table A.1  Collection of Transcripts Condition

2

3

20

23

24

Total

Obedient outcome

25

6

22

9

2

64

Disobedient outcome

15

15

15

5

3

53

Total

40

21

37

14

5

117

218  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self sessions purposively (not randomly), focusing on Conditions 2, 3, and 20 because of the relative completeness of tapes there. An additional selection consideration was the added cost of having digitized and “sanitized” tapes (removing spoken references to subjects’ names on the recordings; see Kaplan 1996) that researchers had not previously requested; for budgetary reasons Hollander chose tapes that had already received these treatments. Despite these considerations, our data corpus contains a complete, or nearly complete, collection of transcripts for Conditions 2 and 20, and half the transcripts for Condition 3. As noted, for projects of this sort, conversation analysts typically assemble a collection of as large a number of instances of the same interactional phenomenon as possible: in our case, instances of resistance to experimental continuation and, during debriefings, news deliveries revealing the experiment’s purpose and subjects’ accounts for their actions.

APPENDIX 2

Audio Transcribing Conventions 1. Overlapping Speech1 A:  Oh you do? R[eally ] B:        [Um hmmm]

Left-​hand brackets mark a point of overlap, while right-​hand brackets indicate where over lapping talk ends.

2. Silences A:  I’m not use ta that.   (1.4) B:   Yeah me neither.

Numbers in parentheses indicate elapsed time in tenths of seconds.

3. Missing Speech A:  Are they? B:  Yes because . . .

Ellipses indicate where part of an utterance is left out of the transcript.

4. Sound Stretching B:  I did oka::y.

Colon(s) indicate that the prior sound is prolonged. More colons mean more stretching.

5. Volume A:   T h at’s where I REALLY want to go.

Capital letters indicate increased volume.

6. Emphasis A:  I do not want it.

Underline indicates increased emphasis.

7. Breathing A:  You didn’t have to worry about having the .hh hhh curtains closed.

T h e h indicates audible breathing. T h e more h’s, the longer the breath. A period placed before it indicates inbreath; no period indicates outbreath.

220  Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

8. Laugh Tokens A:  T h a(h)t was really neat.

9. Explanatory Material A:  Well ((cough)) I don’t know.

10. Candidate Hearing B:  (Is that right?) ()

11. Intonation

T h e h within a word or sound indicates explosive aspirations (e.g., laughter, breathlessness, etc.). Materials in double parentheses indicate audible phenomena other than actual verbalization. Materials in single parentheses indicate that transcribers were not sure about spoken words. If no words are in parentheses, the talk was indecipherable.

A:  It was unbelievable. I ↑had a three    point six? I ↓think. B:  You did.

A period indicates fall in tone, a comma indicates continuing intonation, and a question mark indicates increased tone. Up arrows (↑) or down arrows (↓) indicate marked rising and falling shifts in intonation immediately prior to the rise or fall.

12. Sound Cutoff

Dashes indicate an abrupt cutoff of sound.

A:  T h is-​this is true

13. Soft Volume A:  ˚Yes.˚ T h at’s true.

Material between degree signs is spoken more quietly than surrounding talk.

14. Latching A:  I am absolutely sure.=​ B:  =​You are.

Equals signs indicate where there is no gap or interval between adjacent utterances.

A:  T h is is one thing [that I=​ B:    [Yes? A:  =​really want to do.

Equals signs also link different parts of a speaker’s utterance when that utterance carries over to another transcript line.

15. Speech Pacing A:  What is it? B:  >I ain’t tellin< you

Part of an utterance delivered at a pace faster than surrounding talk is enclosed between greater than and less than signs.

Notes Introduction 1. See Cooper, Haberman, and Philipps (2019). 2. Thanks to Art Miller for providing us a copy of Spencer’s letter. 3. Over the years, scholars have proposed a variety of contrasting interpretations of Milgram’s findings as due to processes other than obedience to authority. Recent theories are engaged followership (Haslam and Reicher 2018), web of obligation (Russell and Gregory 2011), rhetorical persuasion (Gibson 2019), and normalizing Trust (Hollander and Turowetz 2017). Throughout the book, although we describe the process as “obedience,” and Teacher-​participants as “Obedient” or “Disobedient,” we don’t mean to imply agreement with Milgram’s interpretation. See Chapter 6 for our theory. 4. See Milgram (1974, 2): “The moral question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience was argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in every historical epoch.” 5. In Milgram’s postexperiment discussions with male participants, comparisons were commonly made to the military (commanding officer-​soldier), and with females to healthcare (doctor-​nurse). Milgram’s reasoning was that these situations were familiar to American men and women, less than two decades after World War II and Korea (nursing being a “female” profession at the time). 6. A convenient, if somewhat arbitrary, date for the renewal of interest is Burger’s 2006 partial replication (2009), which generated extensive commentary and debate. Cf. Gibson (2019): “During the first decade of the twenty-​first century, however, there was a reawakening of interest in the experiments, stimulated in part by the increasing availability of material from the experiments in Milgram’s archive” (14). See our Chapter 1 for details about this recent wave of research. 7. See Gibson 2019 (Chapters 1–​2) for a comprehensive review of the older and newer Milgram literatures. In Milgram’s theory, “participants no longer see themselves as being the authors of their own actions, but instead undergo a psychological change (the agentic shift) in which they come to experience themselves as merely an agent of the authority figure. According to Milgram, this shift is facilitated by a range of binding factors and sources of strain” (Gibson 2019, 173, original emphases). 8. In this book (and following Rawls and Duck 2020), we adopt the practice of capitalizing Obedient and Disobedient, both to mark the fact that these are Milgram’s categories and to remind the reader of the concrete practices they gloss, through which practices Teachers became categorizable by Milgram as “Obedient” or “Disobedient” in the first place. Similarly, we capitalize Teacher, Experimenter, and Learner to mark their status as interactional accomplishments.

222 Notes 9. As we explain in Chapter 2, equality is also important to interaction. Although interaction can proceed without equality, inequality frequently produces trouble, impeding coparticipants from making sense and self together by interfering with their ability to successfully initiate repair when they receive turns that they do not expect. In an unequal interaction, participants cannot count on interlocutors to cooperate in repair sequences, with the result that they may end up being put in a marginal identity that they do not recognize or accept but cannot correct or challenge (Rawls and Duck 2020; Turowetz and Rawls 2021a). This is not to say that persons of unequal statuses cannot have a successful interaction, but rather that such interactions can easily become troubled as soon as the higher-​status participant uses their status as a resource for denying reciprocity to the lower-​status participant. In cases like this, the higher-​status person may assume that everything is going “just fine” without realizing that although their coparticipant is giving them the turns that they expect/​ require (e.g., shows of deference), that person is not getting the turns that they expect/​ require to make sense and self in return (Turowetz and Rawls 2021b). Accordingly, it is not uncommon for the higher-​status person to express genuine surprise upon discovering in retrospect that they and their coparticipant did not achieve mutual intelligibility after all, and that the other person in fact felt marginalized and unrecognized. The Milgram case provides a perspicuous (though admittedly rather extreme) illustration of the harm interactional inequality can produce. 10. There are 64 Obedient Teachers in our collection in total. The 72% figure is based on the Obedient cases where Teachers produced at least one account in post-experiment debriefing interviews with the Experimenter, and in some cases Milgram himself (n=33/46). It does not include the Obedient cases for which we do not have accounts (n=18), either because the participant did not offer one or because we do not have a full recording of the interview. Our analysis in Part II of the book, which focuses on the experiments themselves, includes all 64 Obedient cases in our collection, while Part III, which focuses on the accounts participants gave in debriefing interviews, deals primarily with the 46 Obedient cases where Teachers offered one or more accounts for their actions.

Chapter 1 1. Milgram’s “pie of responsibility” interview question (see Chapters 3 and 6). 2. By focusing on the actor’s point of view, many sociological studies of morality, qualitative and quantitative alike, treat interaction as a process through which separate actors coordinate their individual interpretations of a situation and reach agreement on its meaning. This conception of interaction, rooted in the American sociological tradition derived from Comte and developed by Small, Park, Cooley, Mead, Blumer, and Strauss, is grounded in the notion that “all actors start from their own unique positions in a culture and then, using the symbols and practices of that culture, try to convey to one another—​through a process of interpretation—​what they mean [which] Symbolic Interactionists . . . call ‘the negotiation of meaning’ ” (Turowetz and Rawls 2021b, 92). The interaction order tradition, by contrast, centers

Notes  223 interaction as the site where all social facts, including meaning and self, are cooperatively assembled: the focus is on shared sets of practices for creating the kinds of social objects presupposed but not explained by the American tradition. Here, the meaning of an action depends not on the actor’s point of view or private intentions, which are inaccessible to others anyhow, but on the response it gets from its recipient, the response to that response, and so forth, across sequences of interactional turns. 3. This goal aligns in important ways with Gibson’s (2019) interactionist analysis of Milgram and “obedience to authority.” See also Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig (2011) for conversation analytic research on the morality of knowledge in interaction. 4. Recent scholarship (Rawls and Turowetz 2019a, 2019b) on the collaboration between Garfinkel and Parsons, which occurred roughly between 1958 and 1966, as well as Parsons’s relationship to Clifford Geertz (Cossu 2021), shows that this view of Parsons’s theory is a misconception traceable to Geertz, Bellah, and others. These authors reduced Parsons’s two-​sided conception of culture as symbols and interaction to a unidimensional system of symbols that is autonomous from (but somehow regulative of) society. The result was a dualistic notion of culture—​misattributed to Parsons—​that has created intractable problems in explaining how semiotic systems interact with the material world (cf. Biernacki 2000; Lizardo 2016). 5. Luft’s (2020) critique builds on psychologist Joshua Greene’s (2017) “digital camera” model of moral judgment—​which posits that Haidt’s moral intuitionist model breaks down when we find ourselves in unfamiliar situations requiring conscious deliberation about the best course of action—​but goes further by incorporating research on how situational variation may activate beliefs about and prejudices toward social groups. Our own approach is to take a step back, in a sense, to not only emphasize the importance of the situation but also ask how the situation is coproduced by two or more interacting parties in the first place. In other words, rather than conceptualize the situation as a kind of container for social action, we treat it as a dynamic accomplishment by and for its participants, whose own identities are reflexively tied to it (see Chapter 2 for an elaboration of this argument). More generally, while our argument that the ordinarily tacit moral order of interaction becomes explicit in troubled situations has definite affinities with Greene’s argument that moral intuitions become explicit in unfamiliar or problematic circumstances, we are not so much concerned with cognitive processes as with social ones. The moral order of society resides in the mundane, publicly witnessable details of everyday interactions among its members—​who are expected to display a grasp of that order as a condition of their competence (Garfinkel 1967)—​rather than in the heads of actors (whatever personal psychological attachments they may form to it), and so it is there that we must look for a full picture of its workings. 6. Other notable exceptions to the tradition of positing self as prior to society include Hume’s ([1739] 1896) theory of the social constitution of the self, Mead’s (1934) pragmatist theory of self as social object, and Merleau-​Ponty’s ([1945] 1962) phenomenology of the self. 7. To be clear, although our book discusses morality in terms of background and foreground, with the underlying morality of interaction being the background against which moral claims can be made in interaction (see Chapter 2), we do not mean by these terms what Abend (2014) means by them. Our background is not conceptual,

224 Notes but empirically grounded and recognizably oriented to by interactants. That orientation is usually tacit and taken for granted, but can be made visible when the expectations it comprises are violated, as Garfinkel (1967) demonstrated in his classic “breaching tutorials” and studies of “natural troublemakers.” This sort of background is very different from the tacit, episteme-​like conceptual structure Abend associates with his notion of moral background. 8. We rely on Blass (2004) and Russell (2011) for much of the overview of Milgram’s experiments. 9. An article on Milgram’s sampling procedures would make an excellent contribution to the new archival research on Milgram. Generally, he used both volunteer sampling (newspaper ad) and random sampling (New Haven phone book). Problems with his randomization procedures (nonresponse; undercoverage [phone book sampling bias]) is apparent in the following transcript from a postexperiment interview: Subject 2006 (Disobedient, 38:02): T: “How are you getting your uh applicants? Is it a random sample?” E: “No, there was an ad in the paper last summer (.) for people to come down. And also uh they sent out cards uh to people’s names and addresses in the phone book.” . . . (41:05) E: “No, actually what we have is a whole pile of cards of people who replied that we’ll come, you see. So then the night before we just call up uh five . . . just make our appointments that way.” “The number of no shows is very-​very slight.” “Probably one or two out of twenty.” 10. Milgram’s first pilot studies in 1960–​1961 used Yale undergraduates as subjects and involved discussion with and participation by members of his undergraduate seminars. In the summer of 1961, the pilots were composed of nonstudent volunteers from New Haven (Russell 2011). 11. Baumrind’s was the first and most celebrated condemnation of the Milgram paradigm. She noted that Milgram’s 1963 paper is sketchy on the details of Teachers’ reactions to the experiment. But his readers can surmise, argued Baumrind, that the experimental situation was sufficiently anxiety inducing to warrant discontinuation. In the short term, Teachers faced great anxiety; in the long term, Milgram forced them to live with the fact of their obedience, something he had no “right” to do. 12. For psychological obedience research predating Milgram, see Benjamin and Simpson (2009). 13. A further important contribution to the Milgram paradigm was Thomas Blass’s series of papers in the 1990s, which culminated in an edited volume (2000) and his well-​researched, detailed biography of Milgram (2004). A particularly innovative paper from the edited volume is Tarnow (Blass 2000, Chapter 7), which examines the phenomenon of obedience to authority in the naturalistic setting of commercial airline cockpits. Tarnow finds that voice-​recorder data from crashed flights reveal alarming interactional patterns of submission of copilots to domineering captains (cf. Frankel 1985). 14. Even today, “we have yet to fully get to grips with what happened in Milgram’s lab. Before we can even begin to consider why the behaviour observed by Milgram occurred, we therefore need to spend some time establishing what happened in Milgram’s experiment and, fundamentally, how the experiments unfolded” (Gibson 2019, 42).

Notes  225

Chapter 2 1. See Chapter 3 for a detailed definition of “resistance” in Milgram’s lab. 2. Beginning in the early 1950s, Garfinkel and Goffman influenced each other in the development of these ideas (Rawls 2010, 110; Rawls and Turowetz 2019a, 2019b). This relationship is apparent in letters exchanged between them that are preserved in the Garfinkel Archive. 3. A common mistake by social scientists is to describe institutions in causal terms, as if they produced the social practices under analysis (cf. Bittner 1965; Coulter 1996). This conception, characteristic of everyday talk (e.g., “The county summoned me for jury duty”), is highly misleading. While institutions furnish resources with which to account for and legitimate social practices, they do not generate those practices. As such, explanations of institutional processes that focus on accounts wind up producing accounts of accounts, rather than the practices those accounts describe and legitimate. Durkheim ([1912] 1995) criticized a similar tendency among scholars of religion who conflate beliefs with practices and view beliefs as primary—​when in fact it is practices that generate beliefs. 4. By accountable, we mean that the Experimenter makes the Teacher’s actions intelligible and warrantable in terms of the experiment. See Chapter 3 for a more detailed explanation of how ethnomethodologists understand accountability. 5. We develop this claim further in Chapter 8, where we draw on Hegel and Goffman to argue that because self is made in interaction and depends on the cooperation of all involved, denying one participant the reciprocity they need to make sense and self can also compromise the selves of coparticipants, whose own situated identities become less stable in the process. 6. The data excerpt heading refers to “0311 Disobedient” (subject 11, experiment condition 03, Disobedient outcome) and “90V, 386” (excerpt starts at line 386 of the original transcript; 90 volts is the highest shock delivered at that point). Analogous headings appear in all subsequent excerpts. See Chapter 3 for more on each experimental condition, and Appendix 2 for CA transcription conventions (Hepburn and Bolden 2013).

Chapter 3 1. Chapter 3 reproduces material from Turowetz and Hollander (2022). 2. We see Gibson’s (2019) rhetorical approach to interaction in Milgram’s lab as broadly complementary to our own sequential approach. See Chapter 6 for important differences between our respective approaches. 3. The summary of tape recordings sent to us by Yale Manuscripts and Archives lists 24 conditions (email communication: July 13, 2010). However, Perry et al.’s (2020, 95) Table 1 reports a total of 23 conditions. These authors find that Condition 21 was actually a survey of predicted Milgramesque behavior, rather than an actual

226 Notes experiment. Thus, throughout the book we refer to the total number of conditions as 23, rather than 24. Also, we thank an anonymous reviewer for informing us that “no records of audiotapes for the new baseline conditions (#5) or change of personnel (#6) [are] in the Milgram archives.” See below for more on the conditions. 4. Twenge (2009) describes the subjects as almost uniformly “White.” Although it does appear that very few African Americans participated (e.g., 0234), in our five conditions alone there is a variety of European American ethnicities, including many first-​or second-​generation immigrants: Austrians, Canadians, Dutch, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Swedes, Turks, and more. Some of these groups had only recently started to be accepted as “White” (whitening) by a post–​World War II US society dominated by white, Anglo-​Saxon Protestants. 5. Gibson’s (2019, 18) Table 1.1 lists the 18 conditions presented in Milgram’s book (1974), and the obedience rate for each. 6. As noted in Chapter 2, Milgram used the following notation for referring to the experimental session of a given Teacher: [Condition number +​subject number]. For example, “0209” indicates the ninth subject in Condition 2. We use this convention here and throughout the book. See Appendix 2 for CA transcription conventions. 7. Box 3.1 is our reproduction of Milgram’s interview schedule performed by “Experimenter” John Williams. It is what we hear on the recordings, not an archived paper document. 8. Experimenter: “We’re giving [a]‌much more elaborate uh dehoax, if you will, to uh the women because we don’t want them going out of here panicked, you see. . . . Just the women. The men were never told” (session 2006, 29:44). 9. In CA, the term “preference” refers not to a psychological state, but to a feature of the organization of interaction that is visible in the particulars of turn design. A turn is preferred if it performs the action projected by a prior turn, and dispreferred if it does not. The preferred response to a directive is compliance, to an offer an acceptance, to an assessment a display of agreement, etc. Preferred turns tend to be produced immediately and without hesitation, whereas dispreferred turns are regularly delayed and accompanied by accounts and hedging (see Schegloff 2007). In the Milgram experiment, resistance is a dispreferred response to the directives issued by E. 10. Stop-​tries are attempts to stop the experiment and constitute the most explicit of the six forms of Milgramesque resistance we have identified (see Chapter 4). 11. For more on minimal/​maximal (Dis)Obedience, see Chapter 5. The counts here include the two video cases (see Appendix 1). 12. “First” is used advisedly, since Teachers don’t necessarily treat first resistance as first in a series. We use it here in a “formal analytic” sense (Garfinkel 2002), one based on Modigliani and Rochat’s similar usage (1995, 113). 13. Chapter 4 provides a detailed discussion of how we ground our analysis of silence as performing tacit resistance in the data. Here, we can note briefly that our prototypical case of resistive silence is a silence sequentially positioned immediately after one of E’s directives, making it analyzable as resistance to compliance and therefore continuation. Indeed, in many instances E displays his analysis of such silences as resistive, for example, by prompting T to go on with the experiment.

Notes  227 14. In prompting remedial action from E, T may be said to orient to interaction order obligations that are being violated by the conduct of the experiment and treating this as a problem for continuation. 15. This prod is the only instance of E offering T any sort of reciprocity (i.e., by checking on L’s well-​being) in our data. It is telling, then, that Milgram deleted this prod from future iterations of the experiment, thereby creating a situation where Trust Conditions are maximally violated. 16. See Chapter 7 for how this looseness and flexibility in E’s use of the prods worried Milgram. 17. We don’t know if the Disobedient Teacher in the video performs nonsilent resistance prior to 150 volts, the point where his video segment begins.

Chapter 4 1. See Chapter 1 for more on Milgram’s sampling procedures and the respective roles of volunteer versus random sampling in his project. 2. Chapter 4 is based on Hollander 2015. 3. As discussed in Chapter 3, there are additional types of sequence organization in the experiment; for example, the Experimenter must instruct the Teacher and Learner in how to perform the teaching and punishment sequences central to their roles. 4. While these overt acts are important and consequential, it is also important to recognize that many, if not most, acts of resistance in the Milgram situation are closer to the implicit end of the spectrum, and that this is true of both Obedient and Disobedient Teachers. 5. We identified our implicit-​explicit continuum of six forms in 2014, before reading Modigliani and Rochat’s (1995) paper on six forms of increasingly strong participant resistance. Although the number is the same, the content of the two groups is quite different. 6. We categorize laughter as a relatively implicit form of resistance because, like silence and imprecation, it can postpone continuation by orienting to problems with continuation due to the Learner receiving shocks. However, laughter differs from silence and imprecation in ways that we discuss below. Thanks to Geoff Raymond, who brought this point to our attention during a 2013 conference presentation. 7. Milgram conceptualized such competing interactional relevancies as social psychological forces attracting T toward either an Obedient or Disobedient outcome. See his Obedience film (1965b), which depicts a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. 8. “First position” and “second position” are conversation analysis terms indicating an utterance’s positioning within adjacency pair relationships of sequence organization. For example, in a question/​answer pair, the question is in first position (it initiates the pair, projecting an answer’s relevance), and the answer is in second position. See Schegloff (2007). 9. We aren’t claiming all these phenomena are identical. Swearing, for example, may work differently than sighing in complaint sequences (cf. Dersley and Wootton 2000; Sacks [1964–​1972] 1992 on oaths/​expletives). The rubric “imprecation” (Goffman

228 Notes 1981), literally denoting a curse, highlights their shared features with respect to accomplishing resistance to experimental continuation. 10. Just as responses to threats can take the form of what Hepburn and Potter (2011, 114) call “minimal compliance” or “compliance with a flavor of defiance,” so too can responses to (explicit or implicit) directives. 11. Milgram (1974, 161) proposed that nervous laughter allows Obedient participants to convert “psychological stress into physical symptoms” that not only exhibit strain “but also serve to reduce it,” such that “the strain, instead of eventuating in disobedience, is deflected into physical expression, and the tension is thereby dissipated.” 12. This way of treating the Learner’s response is one practice for what Sacks (1984) calls “doing being ordinary,” which involves orienting to events in ways that emphasize their mundane, unremarkable, and expectable character. See Chapter 6. 13. Jefferson’s term “troubles resistance” refers to troubles of the speaker rather than talk-​ recipient: it is self-​attentive (1984, 351). To avoid confusion over resistance to troubles, on the one hand, and resistance to continuation, on the other, we refrain from using the term in the main text. 14. Unlike queries, however, statement prompts can be used to account for stop-​tries. The resulting device (stop-​try +​statement prompt that also accounts for the try) proves by far the most common technique by which Teachers bring sessions to a Disobedient outcome (see below for stop-​tries). 15. There are a few instances of T’s chair making scraping sounds in a context of sustained verbal resistance, suggesting that T might be “trying to stop” by displaying an intent to walk out (e.g., in transcript Example 1 above, line 36). Since we’re using audio-​ recorded data, our analysis necessarily focuses on utterances rather than nonverbal gestures. However, future research would certainly be worthwhile on unspoken dimensions of resistance (e.g., body torque, gaze, standing up) visible in the small number of videos that Milgram made. Cf. Gibson (2019, 175–​177, 187) on “physical action as rhetoric” in Milgram’s lab. 16. These are subjects 0216, 0220, 2012, and 2430. A possible fifth example is 0240, who abandons a second try mid-​turn.

Chapter 5 1. Schegloff (2007) distinguishes between a turn’s positional and compositional properties: position refers to the turn’s placement in an interactional sequence, whereas composition refers to its contents (lexical, semantic, etc.). This chapter gives particular attention to the compositional properties of resistive turns, though without neglecting their positional aspects. 2. An important variation current in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion scholarship and activism is termed the “Platinum Rule”: treat others as they themselves would like to be treated. 3. As noted in Chapter 3, it’s not uncommon for E to deliver the scripted prods somewhat out of order.

Notes  229 4. We can also observe that this exchange between T and E occurs after 315 volts have been delivered. This is late in comparison with most Disobedient Teachers, who mobilize repeated stop-​tries earlier in the experiment and never reach 315 volts. 5. Expressing sympathy is similar to, but distinct from, the characteristically Disobedient practice of empathetic Golden Rule accounting (discussed in detail below). 6. Recall from Chapter 4 that although both groups use stop-​tries, Obedient Teachers do so far less frequently than Disobedient ones: only 12/​64 (19%) performed stop-​tries, and only 4 followed up with a further one. Moreover, Obedient Teachers often design stop-​tries in ways that simultaneously display willingness to continue by requesting clarification about directives. By contrast, Disobedient Teachers tend to avoid such requests in the context of stop-​tries, and thereby sustain resistance in that sequential environment more effectively. In what follows, we examine the composition of Disobedient Teachers’ explicitly resistive practices. 7. Polarity is a feature of yes-​no interrogative (YNI) design that projects a positive or negative response as the relevant next action. Positively polarized YNIs, such as “Would you like some more?,” are said to structurally prefer an affirmative response because of the grammatical properties of some (i.e., “I want some more” is grammatical, whereas “I do not want some more” is not grammatical). By contrast, negatively polarized YNIs, such as “Would you like any more?,” prefer a negative response because of the grammatical properties of any (i.e., “I do not want some more” is not grammatical, whereas “I do not want any more” is grammatical) (see Heritage 2002). 8. Another Golden Rule instance is performed by Teacher 0437: “He’s [L]‌a human being like I am I wouldn’t want it done to myself ” (Gibson 2019, 152, Extract 6.7, lines 7–​8). It’s unclear from Gibson’s discussion where in the series of shocks this account was used and whether this Teacher ended as Obedient or Disobedient. We don’t have access to Condition 4 recordings, and so can’t supply this information. 9. It may be that in Condition 3, L’s physical and psychological proximity to T enhances the likelihood of empathetic responses. See Gibson (2019, Chapter 5). 10. In early experimental conditions such as Condition 2, E sometimes uses the “forgotten prod” (i.e., checking on the Learner: Gibson 2013b) to counter this practice. 11. Cf. Gibson’s (2019, 102) rhetorical analysis of the same transcript (his Extract 4.1a).

Chapter 6 1. Here, following Sacks (1984), we speak rather of doing being ordinary, which better describes the practices Teachers engaged in. The argument is essentially the same as in Hollander and Turowetz (2017)—​that many Teachers normalized an increasingly anomic situation by searching for and finding its “ordinary after all” features—​but without the somewhat ambiguous phrasing that makes trust, which is part of doing being ordinary, seem like the object being normalized—​as opposed to being the orientation behind the normalizing practices associated with doing being ordinary, per its intended meaning.

230 Notes 2. See Chapter 7 for more on Milgram’s research design. Gibson (2019) argues that “the obedience experiments were not designed to test specific hypotheses derived from one or more theoretical perspectives. Instead, they are perhaps best understood as the outcome of an exploratory process of inductive research in which Milgram gradually moved through a series of situational variables that might affect the extent to which people obey orders from an authority figure” (24). 3. “The person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person. . . . An element of free choice determines whether the person defines himself in this way or not, but given the presence of certain critical releasers, the propensity to do so is exceedingly strong, and the shift is not freely reversible” (Milgram 1974, 133–​134; Gibson [2019, 25] also quotes this passage). Gibson (2019) reviews Milgram’s theory at pp. 24ff. 4. Cf. Gibson (2019, 8) on the midcentury “physical metaphor” in social psychological interpretation: “Individuals in Milgram’s laboratory are typically seen as having been buffeted by forces beyond their control.” For Milgram, “These forces can be controlled in the laboratory so that their impacts on the individual can be specified more clearly, but ultimately, it is the forces themselves that enable and constrain the actions of the person. Someone may be able to resist those forces, but that would be largely due to the countervailing forces that press on them to act otherwise” (Gibson 2019, 190, original emphases). 5. In his lectures, Sacks ([1964–​1972] 1992, 253–​254) describes a practice he calls “subversion” whereby people engaged in illegal activities take advantage what is and is not seeable by those in an ordinary cast of mind: “When a woman walks away from a supermarket with the baby carriage filled with a baby that’s not hers, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about with ‘subversion.’ It’s not seeable.” That is, because our perception of activities is structured by “sets of norms” that specify when “some activity is correctly occurring,” and because one such normative expectation is not only that mothers push babies in carriages but also that they are the mothers of those particular babies, persons in an ordinary cast of mind will not suspect anything is amiss. They will see the woman as doing that (ordinary, expected, predictable) activity, and nothing else. Indeed, doing otherwise, in the absence of clear evidence of wrongdoing, could lead to accusations that one is being paranoid or overly suspicious. 6. The relationship of behavior to retrospective accounts for that behavior is a classic topic in the social sciences. Russell and Gregory (2011) raise the possibility that the accounts of Milgram’s Obedient Teachers should be regarded with skepticism, in that they were likely self-​serving attempts to justify wrongdoing. However, it is not obvious to us that many Teachers clearly sensed that what they had done, in a highly ambiguous situation, was wrong (see Hollander and Turowetz 2017). 7. When interviewing Disobedient Teachers, E observes that they continued for at least one shock after L indicated he wanted to be released. This prompted accounts for shocking L at least once against his will. 8. As we explain in the Introduction (see endnote 10), our analysis in Chapter 6 is based on the cases for which we have complete recordings of the debriefing interviews.

Notes  231 Thus, the 72% figure represents the percentage of Obedient Teachers for whom we have fully recorded interviews. 9. Accounts often appear in interview components 1, 2, 8, and 12, but also in other components. As noted, this chapter mostly refrains from more detailed discussion of accounts’ interactional context and of many organizational features of talk-​in-​ interaction displayed by the data excerpts below. Our primary goals are to document the content of Teachers’ accounts and discuss their implications for theories of Milgramesque behavior. 10. Other account types are rare (used by no more than 3 of the 91 Teachers) and aren’t included in the tables. For example, inability to stop due to E’s pressure: 2035 claimed to be fearful of repercussions from E (Obedient, 27:36): “I thought you’d h(h)it me if I st(h)opped! ((laugh)).” 11. Interviewees often provided multiple types of account. Thus, the total of Table 6.1, 103 accounts, is greater than 91, the number of Teachers in our collection who offered at least one account in the interview. Also, if a Teacher provided the same type of account more than once, we only counted it once. 12. Data excerpt heading refers to “component 8” (excerpt appears in the context of the “pie of responsibility” interview component: see Box 3.1). Some excerpts contain more than one account type; the type under discussion appears in bold. 13. In even the most mundane interactions, the participants are continuously constituting their relationship to one another. Compare Schegloff (1986, 113) on routine telephone openings: “Another job that gets done in openings is the constitution or reconstitution of the relationship of the parties for the present occasion, whether the occasion is a first for these parties or involves a next encounter with a history to it.” This observation can be generalized to the turn-​by-​turn conduct of interaction as such: the parties are always implying something about who they are for the other, and who the other is for them, though this work is usually invisible. 14. For example, we categorized 0209 (Obedient, 38:44) as following instructions: E: “Why did you proceed to the end?” T: “Because I wasn’t in charge of the experiment.” 15. Moreover, sometimes it was the same Teacher using more than one of these words, and sometimes not an Obedient but a Disobedient one. Our word counts exclude a small number of instances of the word clearly deprecating the experiment’s importance. For example, 2425 (Disobedient, 30:35): T: “It may be important to you [E]‌but it ain’t important for me.” 16. Similarly, a female Teacher (2030, Obedient, ff.19:28) proposed L’s male gender as a reason he overreacted to the shocks. She argued that women are more capable than men of withstanding pain, using as an example childbirth. 17. Perry et al.’s (2020) findings support this argument, and the importance of Teachers’ assumption that L was not being harmed. Based on a statistical reanalysis of Milgram’s archival data, they find that most Obedient Teachers were not completely taken in by the cover story and did not believe that L was actually in danger. As such, they find that what distinguished the outcome groups had less to do with a propensity to obey than with credulousness, an argument reminiscent of longstanding claims by Orne and Holland (1968) and Mixon (1971, 1989).

232 Notes 18. Cf. 0205 (Obedient, 46:40): T: “Well to be perfectly frank I don’t believe the intensity of the shock (.) uh:: of any of those was any greater than the one I received.” Here, the prefacing honesty phrase is “to be perfectly frank.” 19. The same goes for Disobedient Teachers: should we treat the fact that they ultimately did not comply with E’s directives as prima facie evidence that the experimental apparatus failed to persuade them? After all, the Disobedient Teachers would have been subject to the same contextual influences and pressures as the Obedient ones. 20. To be fair, Gibson concedes that the expansive definition of rhetoric on which his argument rests will not convince everyone: “For some, this may be stretching the idea of rhetoric too far. To suggest that the definition of rhetoric should be extended beyond text and speech may be unpalatable. However, any such objections can be put to one side if we frame the extension of rhetoric as a self-​consciously metaphorical move” (2019, 202–​203). 21. For a more extensive debate between RP and conversation analysis views, see the 1999 exchange between Billig and Schegloff in Discourse & Society (Schegloff 1999). 22. What Bourdieu (1991) calls the “scholastic fallacy.” 23. Here, we should note that Disobedient Teachers are also displaying a commitment to Trust Conditions, but in a way that involves coming to mistrust the Experimenter over the course of the interaction and, via continued resistance, in effect demanding that he demonstrate/​renew his commitment to Trust Conditions by granting reciprocity to both the Teacher and Learner (i.e., that he make it possible to small-​t trust him). In other words, Disobedient Teachers oriented to Trust Conditions by insisting on reciprocity with all coparticipants, including the Learner, whereas the majority of Obedient Teachers oriented to them by prioritizing reciprocity only with the Experimenter and small-​t trusting that he too was committed to Trust Conditions, such that he was looking out for the Learner’s well-​being and the situation would turn out to be benign after all. 24. The full debate appears in the 2018 British Journal of Social Psychology articles.

Chapter 7 1. The term “care work” has been used in various ways by feminist scholars. We use it to mean the work of caring for the details of a practice (e.g., scientific practice), as described by Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) and Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa (2013). See below for elaboration. 2. In our collection, we find that debriefings in Condition 20 have a mean duration of 9.2 minutes (median =​8 minutes). In Condition 23, the mean duration is 4.4 minutes (median =​4 minutes), and in Condition 24, it is 7.6 minutes (median =​6.5 minutes). These lengths are all significantly longer than Perry’s “minute and a half of delivery” (Perry 2013, 85). Debriefing was the final component of the postexperiment interview (see Box 3.1). 3. What we find in the turn-​by-​turn organization of debriefing contradicts unqualified claims that the Experimenter exercised power over Teachers by suppressing their

Notes  233 voices (e.g., Perry 2013). Heath (1992) reports a similar finding in his analysis of doctor-​patient interactions. While on the surface it seems that doctors are not giving patients the chance to talk, detailed analysis of tape recordings reveals that doctors will often leave space between turns where patients can speak. That they do not do so makes the paucity of patient contributions to these conversations a joint achievement: doctors do most of the talking, but in part because patients refrain from taking their own turns. This is not to say that power is absent from doctor-​patient encounters or from Milgram’s debriefings, but that the picture is more complicated than popular commentaries tend to let on. 4. Cf. our discussion in Chapter 6 of engaged followership theory.

Chapter 8 1. In an ironic dialectical twist, the slave winds up experiencing freedom through the master, who is capable of recognizing her/​him, whereas the master finds bondage in the slave, who is incapable of recognizing the master in return. 2. As an example of this compact, Goffman (1961, 97) describes how in group therapy, “the inmates are given the privilege of spending some time in a relatively ‘unstructured’ or equalitarian milieu, and even the right to voice complaints” in return for accepting a definition of self (sick patient in need of treatment) that staff require of them. 3. Anne W. Rawls, personal communication, August 2022. 4. As Garfinkel puts it ([1962] 2019, 212), “The realistic character of the sociologist’s categories like age, sex, occupation, class, family practices, and the like depends on the fact that persons are so engaged in normatively governed activities as to make the sociologist’s categories realistic descriptions of their actions. For example, the realistic character of the census categories depends not on physical and biological facts of life but depends instead and exclusively on the extent to which persons, within the terms of normatively regulated actions, engage in those activities which are described with the census categories.” The same is true of moral identities, meanings, and situations: in all cases, we ask what participants are doing that makes it possible to (retrospectively) describe their practices in terms of statistical patterns, concepts, etc. The patterns do not explain the practices but emerge from and are reflexively tied to them. Indeed, it is because of this essential reflexivity that social facts are moving targets. The act of measurement can eventually create feedback loops that lead people to change their behavior and thus what is being measured (cf. Hacking 2004).

Appendix 1 1. Hollander acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation (doctoral dissertation development grant #1103195).

234 Notes 2. Gibson (2019, 93) estimates that the archive contains 661 audio recordings of the experiment. Our collection thus consists of roughly 15% (117/​780) of the total experiments conducted, and 18% (117/​661) of the archived audio recordings.

Appendix 2 1. Adapted from Jefferson (1974). See also Atkinson and Heritage (1984, ix–​vi), and Hepburn and Bolden (2013, 57–​76).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Tables and boxes are indicated by t and b following the page number Abend, Gabriel, 15, 22–​23 accountability, 58–​60 accounts, 8, 23, 116 accounts in debriefing interviews for dis/​obedience, 8, 150, 151t addressing the Learner (form of resistance), 96, 105 affective labor, 177 agentic state theory (Milgram), 3 care work, 177 civil disobedience, 1–​2, 36 commands in conflict with conscience, 1–​2 competing sequential relevancies, 81–​87 complaint-​remedy (sequence), 94 deceptive vs. full debriefing, 186–​87 directive-​response (sequence), 73 discursive psychology, 165–​66 doing being ordinary, 8, 146–​49 dual-​processing model of cognition, 18–​19 Durkheim, Emile, 40–​41 Eichmann, Adolf, 89, 174–​75, 210 engaged followership theory (Haslam and Reicher), 8–​9, 34, 168–​72 ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), 58–​64 following instructions (account for continuation), 150, 151, 151t, 152t fulfilling a contract (account for continuation), 151t, 152t Garfinkel, Harold, 59 genocide, 165, 203

Gibson, Stephen, 164–​65 Goffman, Erving, 19–​20, 41–​42 Golden Rule (accounts), 50, 118t, 129 high-​impact experimentation, 177 Holocaust, the, 2, 203, 209–​10 importance of the experiment (account for continuation), 151t, 152t, 172 imprecation (form of resistance), 100–​1 indexical expressions, 60 institutional review boards (IRBs), 2 interaction order, 6, 38–​39 interaction order tradition in sociology, the, 5, 39–​45 laughter (form of resistance), 101–​4, 102t Learner was not really being harmed (account for continuation), 151t, 152t, 157–​64 Letting the Learner decide, 106, 118t, 129 limits of Milgramesque compliance, the, 205–​12 master-​slave dialectic (Hegel), 206 maximal dis/​obedience, 10, 76, 117 Maynard, Douglas W., 61 middle range (of shocks), 124–​25, 126 Milgram, Stanley Milgram Archive at Yale University, the, 2–​3 Milgram audio-​recordings, 33–​34, 64–​65 Milgram interview schedule, 72b Milgram paradigm, the, 29–​34 Milgram renaissance, 33–​34 minimal dis/​obedience, 76 multiple processes of compliance, 172–​75

252 Index news delivery sequence (NDS), 186, 189 new sociology of morality, the: See science of morality (sociology) nonresistive question-​answer sequence, 74 obligations (institutional or interactional), 5–​6, 37 other-​attentiveness, 116–​40, 118t other-​orientation: See other-​attentiveness perspective display sequence (PDS), 187–​ 89, 188t preference for director’s remedy, 112–​14 prods, 81b prompting the Experimenter (form of resistance) query prompt, 107–​8 statement prompt, 108 Rawls, Anne W., 4, 38–​39, 40, 41, 53 reciprocity, 5–​6, 37 reconciliation (in debriefing), 179–​ 80, 184–​87 reflexivity, 60 relevance constraints, 21–​22, 99–​100 research ethics, 2, 204 resistance compositional versus positional, 121 counter-​resistance, 77–​81 first overt resistance, 77–​81 forms of, 89–​115 other-​oriented, 123–​24, 129

self-​oriented, 119, 127 sequential context of, 73–​87 sequentially organized, as, 94–​96 sequential pattern of, 95 situated moral practice, as, 57 rhetorical persuasion (Gibson), 165–​68 rhetorical psychology, 165–​66 Sacks, Harvey, 61 science of morality, the circularity, 4, 36–​37 neuroscience, 3–​4, 17 psychology, 16–​18 sociology, 18–​19 self-​attentiveness, 116–​40, 118t self-​orientation: See self-​attentiveness silence and hesitation (form of resistance), 97–​100 social facts, 36–​37, 40, 59 stop-​try (form of resistance), 110–​12, 110t Swidler, Ann, 22–​23 teaching sequence, 74–​75 total institution (Goffman), 206–​7 Trust Conditions (Garfinkel), 5–​6, 35, 38–​40, 41 Vaisey, Stephen, 22–​23 video cases, 65 Working Consensus (Goffman), 5, 39–​40, 41