‘Please Continue’: Implicit Communication and the Experimenter's Interventions in Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Series

ABSTRACT Stanley Milgram's ‘Obedience to Authority’ study demonstrated that an experimenter can lead participants to obey orders that seemingly causes others harm. To examine the nature of the experimenter's influence, we analysed the experimenter's non‐procedural interventions in 136 sessions, across four experimental conditions. Results showed that, with a sole exception, Milgram's experimenter used each of his non‐procedural interventions in less than half of both fully obedient sessions and the obedient phases of disobedient sessions. In stark contrast, the intervention ‘Please continue’ was used in virtually all obedient sessions as well as the obedient phases of disobedient sessions, and with substantial frequency. Indeed, results also demonstrated that had Milgram defined a session ‘disobedient’ when any standard prod other than ‘Please continue’ is required, the obedience rates obtained would have already been historic. These findings challenge both the neglect of the experimenter's interactional involvement in Milgram's original account and the focus on explicit acts of argumentation, manipulation, order or the forging of common identity in more contemporary research. Instead, the findings are congruent with the hypothesis that the experimenter operated implicitly, via minimal interpersonal gestures. The paper ends by discussing the claim that, belying their minimal content, these gestures may have contributed to obedience by symbolically deleting participants as active agents, and hence, coercing them.