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Normalizing trust: Participants’ immediately post‐hoc explanations of behaviour in Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments

We bring an ethnomethodological perspective on language and discourse to a data source crucial for explaining behaviour in social psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic 'obedience' experiments - yet one largely overlooked by the Milgram literature. In hundreds of interviews conducted immediately after each experiment, participants sought to justify their actions, often doing so by normalizing the situation as benign, albeit uncomfortable. Examining 91 archived recordings of these interviews from several experimental conditions, we find four recurrent accounts for continuation, each used more frequently by 'obedient' than 'defiant' participants. We also discuss three accounts for discontinuation used by 'defiant' participants. Contrary to what a leading contemporary theory of Milgramesque behaviour - engaged followership - would predict, 'obedient' participants, in the minutes immediately following the experiment, did not tend to explain themselves by identifying with science. Rather, they justified compliance in several distinct and not entirely consistent ways, suggesting that multiple social psychological processes were at work in producing Milgram's 'obedient' outcome category.