Morality in the Making of Sense and Self

This book offers a new explanation of obedience and defiance in Milgram's lab. Examining one of the largest collections of Milgram's original audiotapes, Hollander and Turowetz scrutinize participant behavior in not only the experiments themselves, but also recordings of the subsequent debriefing interviews in which participants were asked to reflect on their actions. Introducing an original theoretical framework in the sociology of morality, they show that, contrary to traditional understandings of Milgram's experiments that highlight obedience, virtually all subjects, both compliant and defiant, mobilized practices to resist the authority's commands. By illuminating the relationship between concrete moral dilemmas and social interaction, Hollander and Turowetz tell a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about morality-and immorality-in the making of sense and self.