ABSTRACT
Famed psychologist Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies, as documented in his classic book on the subject, Obedience to Authority, have been highly influential in the field of legal ethics, with a wide body of scholarship exploring and applying his work to various practice settings. A central theme of this scholarship is that Milgram’s findings are a testament to the situationist perspective in social psychology, which posits that even small changes in circumstances can have an outsized effect on behavior, including how people resolve ethical dilemmas. The result for many legal ethics scholars has been to focus on the situational variables that Milgram studied to determine how changes in context can influence obedience to authority in legal work settings.
This chapter adds a different perspective by considering an approach developed by a team of psychologists over the last decade that reinterprets Milgram’s work. Drawing on reanalysis of Milgram’s own data and original research, this approach, which has been dubbed the ‘engaged followership’ model, does not deny that situational variables influence how people respond to authority. Rather, it argues that these variables are part of a larger picture in which the social identity of participants plays a central role. Given the importance that social identity can play in legal work environments, this reassessment of Milgram’s work adds a valuable new perspective on how Milgram’s studies should be considered in the field of legal ethics.
