William Gibson's Essay

The subject of obedience has long been discussed all around the world. What is it that makes individuals follow orders or fall into line when told to by people in authority? Milgram (1963) became increasingly interested in the subject after the tragedies of the Second World War. He himself was of Jewish descent which situated him and informed his research and choices. Obedience as a determinant of behaviour can have catastrophic consequences, and through his studies of obedience Milgram was looking at the extent a participant will go with administering electric shocks to a victim in the presence of an individual in authority. That unconscious drive or tendency to obey was questioned by Gibson (2012) who was particularly interested in participants’

Milgram’s experiment displays how much was situated in a time and how his life affected his choices, and his experiments have gained notoriety. The discursive approach to attitudes builds on a criticism of key assumptions and methods of the cognitive social approach and highlights the limitations of the experimental method for developing a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon such as obedience. Through Gibson’s rhetorical analysis he highlighted the importance of the interaction between participant and experimenter which suggests that the standard view on experiments could do with revising. The experimental setting although it is great in most cases it can create a hostile environment with individuals acting out of character and therefore not creating the best results. Gibson has highlighted that the nervous anxious participants that were portrayed in the original papers were in fact passive and argumentative and that’s just by looking at it differently and examining different things such as the language people use to be persuasive. However A critique of all the methodologies is that they only look for what they intend and ignore other possibilities. The findings therefore support their respective perspective and must be considered only