The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know About Obedience to Authority' zyxw THOMAS zyxw BLASS~ zyxw University zyxwvuts r?f Matyland Baltimore Couny Guided by the belief that we cannot make broad extrapolations from the obedience studies without first firmly establishing what has and has not been found using the paradigm itself, this article draws on 35 years of accumulated research and writings on the obedi- ence paradigm to present a status report on the following salient questions and issues sur- rounding obedience to authority: (a) How should we construe the nature of authority in the obedience experiment? (b) Do predictions of those unfamiliar with the obedience experi- ment underestimate the actual obedience rates? (c) Are there gender differences in obedi- ence? and (d) Have obedience rates changed over time? What have I learned from my investigations? First, that the con- flict between conscience and authority is not wholly a philosophi- cal or moral issue. Many of the subjects felt, at the philosophical level of values, that they ought not to go on, but they were unable to translate this conviction into action. It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with aware- ness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (Milgram, 1974b, p. 568) SAFER: zyxwvu . . . are you suggesting that-that it could happen here? MILGRAM: I would say, on the basis of having observed a thou- sand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in 'Quotes from letters and most information given without citation are from the Stanley Milgram Papers, Yale University Archives. I want to express my thanks to Annamarie Krackow for her help with some of the analyses presented in this article. 2Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Thomas Blass, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle. Baltimore, MD 21250. e-mail: blass@umbc2.umbc.edu. 955 Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1999, 29, 5, pp. 955-978. Copyright zyxwvuts 0 1999 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.