In Defense of Human Agency: Protection of Self-Image in the Milgram Obedience Experiments

This essay won or received an honorable mention for The Boothe Prize for excellence in first-year writing. The Boothe Prize recognizes and rewards outstanding expository and argumentative writing by undergraduate students in first-year classes that satisfy the WR 1 requirement. In each award-winning essay, student writers demonstrate clarity of argument, excellent integration of research-based evidence, and compelling prose style. This essay re-examines the Milgram experiments -- a now-classic study of humans' obedience to authority figures conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1961 -- from the lens of egoism. Whereas analyses of the experiment have tended to emphasize the situational factors that powerfully "bound" participants to follow the authorities' instructions, restoring to the picture the powerful drive to preserve one's self-image is crucial to gaining a clear picture of the fact that participants have agency, and complicity in the outcome.