The repertoire of resistance: Non-compliance with directives in Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments

This paper is the first extensive conversation-analytic study of resistance to directives in one of the most controversial series of experiments in social psychology, Stanley Milgram's 1961–1962 study of ‘obedience to authority’. As such, it builds bridges between interactionist and experimental areas of social psychology that do not often communicate with one another. Using as data detailed transcripts of 117 of the original sessions representing five experimental conditions, I show how research participants’ resistance to experimental progressivity takes shape against a background of directive/response and complaint/remedy conversational sequences – sequence types that project opposing and competing courses of action. In local contexts of competing sequential relevancies, participants mobilize six forms of resistance to the confederate experimenter's directives to continue. These range along a continuum of explicitness, from relatively subtle resistance that momentarily postpones continuation to techniques for explicitly trying to stop the experiment. Although both ‘obedient’- and ‘defiant’-outcome participants use all six of the forms, evidence is provided suggesting precisely how members of the two groups differ in manner and frequency of resistance.