ArticleScientific reports2021
A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effect of experimenter identification on (dis)obedience and its mechanisms.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Moral conformity: Neurocognitive mechanisms of social influence in dyadic harmful decisions.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- A cross-cultural EEG study of how obedience and conformity influence reconciliation intentions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Relative to females, male rats are more willing to forego obtaining sucrose reward in order to prevent harm to their cage mate.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Becoming a teacher can reduce obedience compared to being solely an examiner. Agentic state and obedience in the Milgram paradigm.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Unraveling the neural basis of repeated moral decisions with mouse tracking and fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neuro-cognitive specificities in prosocial disobedience: A comparative fMRI study of civilian and military populations.PloS one · 2025Article
- Obedience induces agentic shifts by increasing the perceived time between own action and results.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- When the brain says "No!": An MRI study on the neural correlates of resistance to immoral orders.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- On the cognitive mechanisms supporting prosocial disobedience in a post-genocidal context.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Fifty years after the experiments of Stanley Milgram, the main objective of the present paper is to offer a paradigm that complies with up-to-date ethical standards and that can be adapted to various scientific disciplines, ranging from sociology and (social) psychology to neuroscience. Inspired by subsequent versions of Milgram-like paradigms and by combining the strengths of each, this paper presents a novel experimental approach to the study of (dis)obedience to authority. Volunteers are recruited in pairs and take turns to be 'agents' or 'victims', making the procedure fully reciprocal. For each trial, the agents receive an order from the experimenter to send a real, mildly painful electric shock to the 'victim', thus placing participants in an ecological set-up and avoiding the use of cover stories. Depending on the experimental condition, 'agents' receive, or do not receive, a monetary gain and are given, or are not given, an aim to obey the experimenter's orders. Disobedience here refers to the number of times 'agents' refused to deliver the real shock to the 'victim'. As the paradigm is designed to fit with brain imaging methods, I hope to bring new insights and perspectives in this area of research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.