How Ideology Shapes What We Teach about Authority: A Comparative Analysis of the Presentation of Milgram's Experiments in Textbooks

What is it about?

If you’re interested in social psychology, you’ll likely know about experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the 1960s. Participants believed they were taking part in an experiment about the effects of punishment on learning. They were given the role of ‘teacher’ and ordered by a man in a lab coat to administer electric shocks to a ‘learner’ who they could hear but not see. 15 volts was given for the first wrong answer to a quiz question, with the voltage increasing for each subsequent error by the learner. Despite their cries, more than half the participants went to the maximum, 450 volts. The lesson is that humans are susceptible to blindly following authority when working in organizational settings and that challenging questionable authority (like the participants who refused to administer the shocks did) can be good for society. Milgram’s experiments should feature in management textbooks then, right? But they don’t. Our article compares coverage of Milgram’s experiments in psychology and management textbooks and considers how the fields’ ideological commitments explain the differences. Drawing on new interpretations of Milgram’s studies, we argue why and how they should be included in the business school curriculum.

Featured Image