Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?

# Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?
By David Gross
Published: 2026-03-28
A landmark of social psychology research was “The Milgram Experiment,” but a new look at the audio tapes and other evidence collected during that experiment suggests that we may have been interpreting it incorrectly. Here is the [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) summary of the experiment, showing how it is typically portrayed:

> Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram… intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
> 
> The experiments unexpectedly found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts.

I don’t know about that “unexpectedly” part. I think the researchers suspected, in the wake of e.g. the Holocaust, that people were generally willing to obey awful instructions in ways that they failed to account for. Their experiment was designed to answer not w*hether* but *how much*.

Interpreting the results
========================

The results have since been interpreted as a kind of cynicism or caution about human nature, and about people’s tendencies to let their consciences be silenced by the trappings of authority.

But such takes may have been too optimistic.

Milgram interviewed his subjects after the experiment and found that those who stopped giving shocks felt that *they* were responsible for what they were doing, while those who continued giving shocks felt that *the experimenter* (the one giving the instructions to the subject) was responsible. Milgram theorized that his subjects, in the presence of an authority figure, stepped into a corresponding role: the “*agentic state*.” Once you are in that state, you stop considering yourself responsible for what you are doing and for the effects of what you are doing, and judge your actions only on whether you are doing it according to how the authority wants it done.

Arne Johan Vetlesen, in [*Evil and Human Agency*](https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=18May07#item4) (2005), pointed out that there is another possible interpretation: Milgram’s subjects may have had genuine sadistic impulses. In subjecting their victims to pain, they were not being somehow coerced by their situation to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, but that they were being *allowed* by their situation to do things they were ordinarily *inhibited* from doing.

He quoted [Ernest Becker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker), who took a second look at Freud’s take on mob violence:[^b1y7q0

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