Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Social Influence and Power Work?
Compare commitments to a person, a cause, and competing obligations.
Why you’re reading it. Question what the label obedience explains.
A question to consider. What evidence would distinguish following a supervisor's purpose from complying because refusal threatens valued opportunities?
Why this reading
Following an authority need not mean abandoning all judgment. This paper proposes identification with a cause as an explanation for variation in Milgram's studies.
Before you read
Social identification means understanding oneself as a member of a relevant group. The original experiments presented conflicting appeals from an experimenter and a learner; the apparent shocks were not delivered to the learner.
Read for
- Compare the proposed identification account with explanations based on transferring responsibility.
- Trace who rated identification and whose behavior the ratings predict.
- Distinguish a correlation across experimental variants from a direct causal test of identification.
Consider afterwards
- How could an ethical study separate identification with an authority's purpose from dependence on that authority's rewards?
Editorial context
Later observers rated likely identification, not the original participants themselves. The authors acknowledge this indirect design. Their account is a theoretical challenge, not a definitive replacement explanation or proof that laboratory behavior explains historical atrocities.