Russell's forensic archival investigations reveal the great lengths that Milgram went to in order to construct an experiment that would 'shock the world'. However, in achieving this goal it is also apparent that the drama of the 'basic' obedience paradigm draws attention away both from variation in obedience and from the task of explaining that variation. Building on points that Russell and oth...

Most studies on the current fertility transition in the developing countries show that when the educational level of women rises, they bear fewer children. But Jennifer JOHNSON-HANKS observes that in Cameroon, premarital fertility is higher among women who have had schooling than among those who have not. By broadening the analysis to include ethnographic data, however, she is able to resolve t...

One outgrowth of Milgram's (1974) research is the study of public opinion about obedience norms. Extending Kelman and Hamilton's (1989) research on crimes of obedience in the military, this article explores crimes of obedience and crimes of conformity in the workplace. Random samples of the residents of Washington, DC, Moscow, Russia, and Tokyo, Japan were pre.^ented four vignettes about organi...

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This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It coruists of ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more w e r e punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment. Punishment is .administered by means of a shock generator with 30 graded switches ranging from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The victim is a confederate of th...

The present study examined children’s responses to directives from teachers and student teachers in the classroom. According to previous interview data, children should demonstrate greater obedience to a teacher than to a student teacher due to her higher social position and greater knowledge. Seventeen second grade children were observed in their classroom as they interacted with the different...

BACKGROUND Stanley Milgram's 1960s experimental findings that people would administer apparently lethal electric shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure remain critical for understanding obedience. Yet, due to the ethical controversy that his experiments ignited, it is nowadays impossible to carry out direct experimental studies in this area. In the study reported in this pape...