Rhetoric and resistance

摘要

When he conducted his experiments on 'obedience' to authority in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram recorded the majority of his experimental sessions on audiotape. Despite the comment, extensions and critique generated over the years by Milgram's studies, there have been surprisingly few attempts to use these recordings as the basis for secondary analysis. However, recent qualitative analysis of the archival materials points to some intriguing insights concerning the interactions that took place in the 'obedience' laboratory, and even suggests that we may have misunderstood the nature of the studies themselves: rather than demonstrations of people's propensity to obey orders from an authority figure, they may in fact show just how ineffective the issuing of direct orders might be.