ABSTRACT
Stanley Milgram's obedience studies showed an "agentic shift" in which individuals shift responsibility for their actions to an authority. Milgram's reputation was based primarily upon his research on obedience to authority. Milgram's first works were concerned with levels of conformity to peer pressure* among people of different nationalities. His conformity studies were followed by 24 studies on obedience to authority. Milgram's research into obedience flowed from his studies on conformity: originally he had sought to identify levels of conformity to peer pressure and then look at obedience to authority, hoping to observe the extent to which these tendencies were present in the cultures of different nations. Milgram believed that obedient participants had handed over responsibility for their harmful actions to the experimenter. He believed that participants only carried out such actions because it was a requirement of the experiment in which they had agreed to participate.
