Using Person-Perception Vignette Methodologies to Uncover the Symbolic Meanings of Teacher Behaviors in the Milgram Paradigm

Abstract

Behavior in the Milgram paradigm is rich with meanings for the identities of all three interactants—experimenter, teacher, and learner. The desire to construct desirable self-images and social impressions is among the causal forces driving behavior in the Milgram paradigm. American college students valued disobedient teachers over obedient teachers, but they also valued polite disobedience over defiant disobedience. It is not only necessary to find the will to disobey the experimenter, it is also necessary to find a socially appropriate way to disobey. Russian participants' perceptions of teachers who were politely obedient, politely disobedient, and defiantly disobedient differed only in an interaction with the participants' SES. Russian participants looked to the hierarchical structure of the social situation (experimenter, teacher, learner) and not the behavior of individual teachers when they assigned responsibility for the learner's shocks. The person-perception vignette methodologies used in the present study can tap the conclusions of the automatic inferences that create the symbolic meanings of behaviors in the Milgram paradigm. The range of mediating mechanisms necessary to explain the shock-delivering lever presses in the Milgram paradigm includes some that fall outside the “obedience” metaphor in general and Milgram's “Agentic State” in particular. Behaviors observed in the context of the Milgram “Obedience” Paradigm are, at once, the most visible, puzzling, and unimaginable acts quantified in experimental social psychology.