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

For over half a century, Stanley Milgram's classic and controversial obedience experiments have been a touchstone in the social and behavioral sciences, introducing generations of students to the concept of destructive obedience to authority and the Holocaust. In the last decade, the interdisciplinary Milgram renaissance has led to widespread interest in rethinking and challenging the context and nature of his Obedience Experiment.

In Morality in the Making of Sense and Self, Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz offer a new explanation of obedience and defiance in Milgram's lab. Examining one of the largest collections of Milgram's original audiotapes, they scrutinize participant behavior in not only the experiments themselves, but also recordings of the subsequent debriefing interviews in which participants were asked to reflect on their actions. Introducing an original theoretical framework in the sociology of morality, they show that, contrary to traditional understandings of Milgram's experiments that highlight obedience, virtually all subjects, both compliant and defiant, mobilized practices to resist the authority's commands, such that all were obedient and disobedient to varying degrees. As Hollander and Turowetz show, the precise ways subjects worked out a definition of the situation shaped the choices open to them, how they responded to the authority's demands, and ultimately whether they would be classified as "obedient" or "defiant."

By illuminating the relationship between concrete moral dilemmas and social interaction, Hollander and Turowetz tell a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about morality--and immorality--in the making of sense and self.

Matthew M. Hollander is Sociology Faculty at Marion Technical College (Marion, Ohio). He has authored or co-authored over 15 academic articles and chapters in social psychology, sociological theory, and health science. His race textbook Racial and Ethnic Diversity: A Sociological Introduction (2021) contributes to diversity education in central Ohio at the high school and two-year college levels.

Jason Turowetz is Sociology Instructor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-author (with Douglas W. Maynard) of Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis (2022) and has authored or co-authored over 30 academic articles and chapters on the sociology of medicine and diagnosis, autism, the Milgram experiments, race, social psychology, and social theory.