Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology © 2014 American Psychological Association

2014, Vol. 20, No. 2, 124 –134 1078-1919/14/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/pac0000021

Bad Examples: How Thinking About Blind Obedience Can Induce

Responsibility and Courage

Verena Graupmann Dieter Frey

DePaul University Ludwig Maximilian University

The effect of watching a documentary film about Milgram’s obedience experiment on

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

personal responsibility, civil courage, and societal engagement in a student sample was
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examined in two studies. In Study 1, after watching the film, the perception of personal
responsibility and the inclination to show civil courage were increased after watching
the film. The change in personal responsibility was associated with the experience of
higher negative affect after watching the film. In Study 2, instructions for students’
reflections on the film were varied from writing about reasons for the behavior of
Milgram’s participants as originating in the person versus in the situation. Intentions to
get involved in a volunteering project teaching civil courage to high-school students
were highest for those who reflected on reasons for Milgram’s participants’ behavior
originating in the person.

Keywords: civil courage, obedience, responsibility, attributions, Milgram experiment

In 2010, French television broadcasted a doc-
umentary on a fictitious game show that in-
volved game show contestants giving increas-
ingly heavy electric shocks to another person
when the other person failed to give a correct
answer to a question. The media uproar that
followed the show was due to the alarming
results of the show. The show contestants con-
tinued to administer electric shocks, even when
the person, supposedly attached to the elec-
trodes, screamed in pain and begged them to
stop (Jarett, 2010). Learning about the extreme
consequences of obedience never fails to shock
the public and spark discussion. How do such
media-induced learning experiences affect the
willingness to assume personal responsibility
when basic values are violated?
The game show staged for the documentary
was based on Stanley Milgram’s (1963, 1965,
VERENA GRAUPMANN, Department of Psychology, DePaul
University.
DIETER FREY, Department of Psychology, Ludwig Maxi-
milian University, Munich Germany.
CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THIS ARTICLE should be
addressed to Verena Graupmann, DePaul University, Col-
lege of Science and Health, Department of Psychology,
2219 North Kenmore, Chicago, IL, 60614. E-mail:
vgraupma@depaul.edu
124
1974) famous series of experiments on obedi-
ence. In Milgram’s original study, participants
learned that they were involved in an experi-
ment about learning and punishment and under-
went an allegedly random draw of who was
going to be the learner and who was going to be
the teacher in the experiment. In fact, the actual
participant received the role of the teacher
whereas the other participant, a confederate of
the experimenter, took the role of the learner.
The teacher was instructed to administer paired-
association word-learning tasks to the learner by
intercom. For every mistake made, the teacher
was instructed to deliver electric shocks in in-
crements to the learner by means of the inter-
face of a shock machine, showing a range of
shocks ranging from 15 to 450 V, the highest
stage indicated by “xxx.” There were no actual
electric shocks coming from the machine. The
learners in the experiment made many mistakes,
putting the participants under the pressure of
administering increasingly high shocks. When-
ever a participant wanted to discontinue the
experiment, the experimenter told them to con-
tinue. Only when a participant had ignored four
requests to continue was the experiment abort-
ed. Otherwise, it was ended after the participant
had pressed the button with the highest voltage
for the third time. In the described version of the
 OBEDIENCE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND COURAGE
experiment (Milgram, 1974, Experiment 5),
65% of participants carried on with the proce-
dure up to that point. The Milgram study has
been replicated in many countries, finding very
similar results (e.g., Scotland [Burley &
McGuinness, 1977], Jordan [Shanab & Yahya,
1978], Spain [Miranda, Caballero, Gomez, &
Zamorano, 1981], Holland [Meeus & Raaij-
makers, 1987], and Austria [Schurz, 1985]).
Not only the recent French documentary, but
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(also) a replication of the experiment from 2009
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(Burger, 2009), suggests the validity and actu-
ality of such alarming tendencies of obedience
and conformity in modern Western society.
Burger’s study was conducted with Californians
recruited from different areas of life, and he
found very similar results in an—for ethical
reasons—abbreviated version of the original ex-
periment that entailed recorded screaming from
75 V and only going up to an alleged 150 V
(because 79% of Milgram’s participants that
had continued up to 150 V followed through
with the punishment until the end). In Burger’s
recent study, 70% of participants were ready to
go past 150 V, making it difficult to attribute
Milgram’s original results to different obedi-
ence standards in the 1960s.
Effect of the Milgram Study
The Milgram experiment has received much
criticism, a great part of which was directed at
the obvious ethical problems the study poses in
regards to human participants’ well-being: Mil-
gram’s participants had to endure a great
amount of emotional stress in the experiment
itself and in the aftermath when having to rec-
oncile value-discrepant actual behavior (even if
under artificial conditions) with the desire for
general moral integrity (e.g., Baumrind, 1964).
In addition, the internal logic of the study has
been questioned in terms of how the inconsis-
tencies in the situation (e.g., giving little reason
for why the role of the teacher was not simply
taken by the actual experimenter if what the
study allegedly looked at was only the learner’s
learning behavior) made it more likely for par-
ticipants to obey because the usual context for
judgment was taken away (Orne & Holland,
1968; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). On the other hand,
it has been argued that it is exactly this so-called
“pact of ignorance” (i.e., the scientistic aspect
of the situation) leading to “fake obedience”
125
that exposes the degree to which participants
gave up personal responsibility and the respec-
tive consequences (DeVos, 2009).
Despite the debates and criticisms in the lit-
erature, the Milgram study is intriguing not only
for its alarming results in regard to how easy it
is to make people perform actions that are very
likely to be at odds with their values but (also)
for the simple fact of its immense notoriety
across and beyond the field of psychology,
probably being one of the most famous psycho-
logical experiments. Given the effect of its rev-
elations about human nature on public interest
and discussion, which caused indignation and
shock as well as attempts to verify them by
replication again and again, there is an obvious
potential in making people aware of the exper-
iment’s implications. For example, being aware
of automatic stereotyping and its negative con-
sequences has shown to be an ingredient in
controlling those stereotypes (Bargh, 1999;
Lowery, Hardin, & Sinclair, 2001). This is con-
gruent with the assumptions of social learning
theory (Bandura, 1975) that observing the neg-
ative consequences of a behavior should lead to
a lower probability of that behavior later shown
by the observer.
Therefore, what happens when somebody
learns about the Milgram experiment by watch-
ing a documentary film about it? Does such a
learning experience raise feelings of personal
responsibility as opposed to the blind obedience
of the majority showcased in the experiment?
Does it increase a person’s inclination to show
civil courage? Does a person’s interpretation of
the situational and personal components of Mil-
gram’s participants’ behavior have an effect on
their subsequent behavioral tendencies? We ex-
pected that watching a film about the Milgram
experiment, showing models of obedience as
well as models of disobedience, would affect
perceptions of personal responsibility as well as
the inclination to show civil courage and actual
behavioral intentions to assume responsibility.
The Role of Affect
Negative affect serves as indication to the
individual that something is not right (Schwarz,
1990). Consequently, negative affect has been
proposed to play an important role in self-
regulation (Carver & Scheier, 1990). In the do-
main of controlling automatic stereotypes in
 126 GRAUPMANN AND FREY
favor of an equal treatment of every one, neg-
ative affect has been looked at as a consequence
of becoming aware of one’s own automatic
stereotyping, which stands in contrast to an in-
dividual’s desired nondiscriminatory behavior.
In this context, negative affect functions as a
cue for inhibiting automatic stereotyping of Af-
rican Americans by White participants (Monte-
ith, Ashburn-Nardo, Voils, & Czopp, 2002). In
line with the notion that negative affect can be
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used as a cue to the individual in guiding future
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behavior while becoming aware of core values
such as responsibility, we expected negative
affect in response to watching a film about the
Milgram experiment to moderate the film’s ef-
fect on responsibility.
In a related vein, research on the vicarious
experience of cognitive dissonance (Cooper &
Hogg, 2007) suggests that the arousal that is
associated with dissonance motivation and gen-
erally experienced as negative affect (Higgins,
Rhodewalt, & Zanna, 1979) is also experienced
when another person, perceived as an in-group
member, engages in inconsistent behavior (Nor-
ton, Monin, Cooper, & Hogg, 2003). To the
extent to which people identify with Milgram’s
participants in the film, they might therefore
experience negative affect as a consequence of
dissonance, resulting in a desire to rectify the
imbalance by affirming their own responsibility
and civil courage inclination (cf. extent of en-
gagement in self-affirmation to reduce disso-
nance; Tesser, Crepaz, Collins Cornell, &
Beach, 2000).
Responsibility
The social psychological take on responsibil-
ity is located in the domain of helping behavior.
The so-called “bystander effect” (Darley & La-
tané, 1968) describes the phenomenon that peo-
ple tend to watch an emergency without helping
with greater likelihood if more people (bystand-
ers) are present. The central construct to explain
this pattern is diffusion of responsibility. Ac-
cording to Darley and Latané (1968), the re-
sponsibility of a person to intervene in an emer-
gency is diffused when there are others because
then the person is not the only one to take
action, to be blamed for not taking action, and it
is no longer certain that action has not already
been taken by somebody else.
However, when people perceive themselves
as part of a group that is responsible for helping
in a situation, they are more likely to actually
show responsible behavior. In a study by Falo-
mir-Pichastor and colleagues, not knowledge
about the flu virus and the vaccination, but the
identification with the own professional group,
predicted whether nurses decided to get a flu
vaccination. This behavior was associated with
the motive of protecting patients (not the self)
from the virus (Falomir-Pichastor, Toscani, &
Huyghues Despointes, 2009).
Likewise, relating strongly to the effect of the
social situation, behavioral models and norms
have shown to be important factors affecting
personal responsibility in a replication of the
original experiment. Here, Milgram (1974)
could show that when observing another partic-
ipant disobeying to continue with the shocking,
the rate of obedience fell from 85% to 50%.
In a related vein, it has been demonstrated
that playing prosocial games is associated with
more actual prosocial behavior (Greitemeyer &
Osswald, 2009, 2010, 2011). Furthermore, stud-
ies on superhero priming have shown that being
exposed to individuals acting responsibly leads
to more prosocial behavior than being exposed
to the general idea of acting responsibly (Nelson
& Norton, 2005).
Civil Courage
What really makes Milgram’s experiments so
relevant for societal discourse is the clear result
of a lack of civil courage (i.e., an inclination to
intervene and/or oppose a majority opinion in a
situation on the basis of one’s authentic values
while taking into account disapproval by au-
thorities and social rejection; Jonas & Brand-
stätter, 2004; Lopez, O’Byrne, Koetting, & Pe-
terson, 2003). It has been empirically
established that in contradistinction to pure
helping behavior, civilly courageous behavior is
characterized by the negative social conse-
quences the actor is willing to face (Greit-
emeyer, Fischer, Kastenmüller, & Frey, 2006).
Civil (or moral) courage relates to the motiva-
tion to protect democratic and humane values.
A lack of civil courage in a society is generally
associated with the oppression of minorities and
the danger of a blind trust in authorities, result-
ing in an imbalance of power in a society (Os-
swald, Frey, & Streicher, 2012). Milgram’s re-
 OBEDIENCE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND COURAGE
search program was motivated by the desire to
understand how a collectively committed crime
against humanity such as the Holocaust could
be explained using a social psychological per-
spective. The findings have added to under-
standing how the power of a social situation can
lead to atrocious behavior in people who deem
themselves as innocent research participants
just following the instructions of an authority.
However, none of the study variations show
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100% obedience (Milgram, 1965). Instead, the
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findings for those who did disobey clearly show
that—apart from the experimentally devised
variations in the situations that increased dis-
obedience—what differentiated those who did
not follow the instructions from those who did
was the presence or lack of civil courage in
the individual: Those who did not obey with
the instructions to carry on had to engage in
behavior that opposed the implicit rules of the
experimental situation against conformity
pressures. How does learning about Mil-
gram’s study via watching a film about it
affect individual inclination to civil courage?
Attributions and Willingness to Take
Responsibility
People’s judgment of and behavior toward
others who need help is influenced strongly by
the causes they think have led to the situation
(i.e., by their attributions). When a situation is
attributed to a person as opposed to situation,
people are less likely to be willing to help
alleviate the negative consequence brought
about (Reisenzein, 1986; Weiner, 1980). How
do attributions of events more generally affect
behavioral intentions? In other words, how do
people’s subjective theories about Milgram’s
participants’ behavior influence their own be-
havioral intentions in terms of societal engage-
ment? When people watch the film about Mil-
gram’s experiment, it is expected that they will
not approve of participants’ compliant behavior.
A situational interpretation of the behavior im-
plies that there is not much one could control
about the behavior if the cause lies in the situ-
ation itself. However, dispositionally attributing
the behavior allows the observer to distance the
own person from the observed person. Seeing
examples of people showing disobedient behav-
ior might even strengthen the inclination to not
identify with those who obey. The latter per-
127
spective might result in the experience of more
control over the situation and therefore more
motivation to behave according to a standard of
personal responsibility.
The Current Research
Several psychological mechanisms are at
work not only in the actual Milgram study but
(also) in how it is perceived by people who
learn about it in the media or in educational
contexts. Affective responses and active cogni-
tive processing of the value-discrepant behav-
iors shown by normal citizens under particular
circumstances can be assumed to play a role in
how the awareness of Milgram’s findings af-
fects individual thinking and behavior in terms
of responsibility and civil courage, the very
qualities that seemed to be lacking in most of
Milgram’s participants.
To examine the effect of viewing a film about
the Milgram experiment, we collected the ques-
tionnaire responses on feelings of responsibility
and the inclination to show civil courage before
and after student participants had watched the
film. In a second study, we asked the students to
elaborate on situational versus dispositional rea-
sons for the behavior of Milgram’s participants.
We also assessed the effect of the induced at-
tributional style on behavioral intentions to pro-
mote civil courage.
Study 1: Responsibility and Civil Courage
Participants and Design
Fifty-two (46 female, 6 male; age M ⫽ 22.6)
undergraduate students participated in the con-
text of an introductory psychology lecture at a
German university. The study was based on a
repeated-measures design; that is, data were
collected at two points of time— before watch-
ing the film and directly after watching. The
dependent variables were at both times respon-
sibility and civil courage. After watching the
film (i.e., at the second measurement point)
positive and negative affect were measured.
Procedure and Materials
Milgram film. The students watched a
German 30-min black and white documentary
about the version of the Milgram experiment
 128 GRAUPMANN AND FREY
conducted by the Max-Planck Society in Mu-
nich, Germany, in 1970, titled “Abraham—An
Experiment.” The movie introduces the setup of
the Milgram experiment and shows several par-
ticipants go through with the procedure, but
then it also shows participants who disobey the
instructions and protest but then continue or
protest and then discontinue the experiment.
Responsibility. Personal acceptance of re-
sponsibility was measured as a within-subjects
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factor at both points of time with seven items
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asking participants to indicate their responses to
questions such as “ How responsible do you feel
for solving societal problems?”, “How respon-
sible do you feel in respect to the maintenance
of human rights?”, and “How responsible do
you feel to help a stranger in an emergency?”
(1 ⫽ strongly disagree; 11 ⫽ strongly agree;
␣ ⫽ .67).
Civil courage. The inclination to show
civil courage was assessed with a scale devel-
oped by Kastenmüller, Greitemeyer, Fischer,
and Frey (2007) that asks participants to indi-
cate how likely they would be to intervene in 13
situations requiring civil courage (i.e., helping a
person or stand up for a value while risking
negative consequences for the own person). Ex-
amples of the situations include “Some of your
colleagues are trying to isolate another col-
league” and “While riding on a train, you wit-
ness a group of youngsters loudly exchanging
racist jokes.” (0 ⫽ not likely at all; 6 ⫽ very
likely; ␣ ⫽ .81). Civil courage was assessed
before or after watching the film.
Positive and negative affect. Participants’
affective reactions to watching the movie were
assessed with the Positive and Negative Affect
Schedule (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen,
1988; positive affect: ␣ ⫽ .77; negative affect:
␣ ⫽ .84).
Results
Responsibility. Feelings of responsibility
were slightly higher after viewing the film (M ⫽
8.21, SD ⫽ 1.25) than before (M ⫽ 8.00, SD ⫽
1.25), t(51) ⫽ 2.21, p ⫽ .016, d ⫽ .17.
We also looked at how the difference be-
tween feelings of responsibility before and after
viewing the film were related to affective reac-
tions to the film and therefore correlated the
difference score for responsibility after minus
before viewing the film with positive and neg-
ative PANAS scores. It is interesting to note
that although there were no significant correla-
tions with positive affect, there was a significant
positive correlation between the increase in
feelings of responsibility after viewing the film
and the experienced negative affect, r ⫽ .32,
p ⫽ .009. This indicates that the increase in
feeling responsible after viewing the film was
associated with the negative affect experienced
after the viewing.1
Civil courage. The inclination to show
civil courage had been assessed before or di-
rectly after viewing the film, and, consistent
with our hypotheses, there was greater inclina-
tion to show civil courage after viewing the film
(M ⫽ 4.24, SD ⫽ 0.75) than before (M ⫽ 3.83,
SD ⫽ 0.94), t(51) ⫽ 1.76, p ⫽ .042, d ⫽ .48.
Discussion
Seeing a film about other people’s irrespon-
sible behavior in the Milgram experiment had a
positive effect on feelings of personal responsi-
bility and on the inclination to show civil cour-
age. Providing some initial evidence for an in-
crease in variables crucial for civic engagement
after watching a film about the Milgram exper-
iment, the results from Study 1 point at the role
of negative affect in fostering aspirations of
responsibility and courage. This suggests that
negative evaluations of other people’s behavior
as depicted in the documentary are associated
with a motivation to be more responsible and
courageous personally.
However, the results clearly are affected by
social desirability at both points of measure-
ment: Even at the first point of measurement
students are likely to have a motivation to ap-
pear responsible and socially courageous, and
especially after having viewed the film they
might feel compelled to display the effect they
assume the film was supposed to have on them.
In a second study we explored how different
styles of reflection about the film affect actual
1
In a pilot study (N ⫽ 84; 70 female; Mage ⫽ 22.5 years),
we compared participants who had indicated responsibility
either before and after or only after viewing the film. There
were no significant differences in postfilm responsibility
(p ⫽ .22) or postfilm civil courage inclination (p ⫽ .58),
suggesting that measuring responsibility at two points of
time per se does not increase the extent to which partici-
pants respond positively on measures of responsibility and
inclination to show civil courage.
 OBEDIENCE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND COURAGE
behavioral tendencies toward taking responsi-
bility. We were especially interested in how
attributing the cause of the “bad example” be-
havior displayed in the film to personal versus
situational reasons in the reflection affected how
the film influenced behavioral tendencies.
Study 2: Attributional Style and
Behavioral Intentions
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The effect of watching a documentary on
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experimentally induced failure to act morally
responsibly should be influenced by how it is
interpreted and reflected afterward. Previous
research has established that information
given as a frame of an observed situation can
have a huge effect on how this situation is
evaluated and remembered. For instance,
knowing that a message is intended to per-
suade the audience to a behavior can affect
perception of that message even if it is given
after the message has been communicated
(Silvia, 2006). Memory and the long-term
consequences of message processing have
been shown to be extremely malleable de-
pending on the questions asked to retrieve
memories of an event (e.g., Loftus, 1975).
In Study 2, we compared instructions of
reflecting on the film, focusing on the situa-
tional determinants or on the characteristics
of the individual leading to the behavior of
Milgram’s participants. These instructions are
intended to affect the attributional style used
when thinking about the situation. Disposi-
tional attributions have been studied exten-
sively in regards to how observers construct
them in light of the available situation (e.g.,
Reeder & Brewer, 1979). It has further been
well established that situational attributions
for causes of events are more associated with
willingness to help whereas personal attribu-
tions lead to fewer helping intentions (Reisen-
zein, 1986). However, it is unclear how own
future behavior is affected by attributional
style; that is, when ascribing morally discrep-
ant behavior to the individual observed rather
than the situation, how does this behavior
influence the observer’s future behavior in a
related domain? We predict that a personal
attribution of the morally discrepant behavior
will be associated with more intentions to act
responsibly oneself in the future because it
allows detachment from the observed person
129
whereas a situational attribution emphasizes
that the observed behavior is beyond individ-
ual control.
Participants and Design
One-hundred and eleven (78 female, 32 male,
1 missing data; age: M ⫽ 27 years) undergrad-
uate students participated in the context of an
introductory psychology lecture at a German
university. One week after participants had
watched the film about the Milgram experiment,
students were instructed to engage in different
styles of reflecting about the film that varied in
attribution style (dispositional, personal, con-
trol). We assessed participants’ willingness to
volunteer in a project of teaching civil courage
at schools.
Procedure and Materials
Milgram film. The students first watched
the German documentary “Abraham—An Ex-
periment” about the Milgram experiment in the
week before participating in the study as part of
an introductory psychology lecture.
Attributional style. Participants read one
of the following instructions to reflect upon
the movie, inducing an attributional style:
“Please elaborate on why one might argue
that it was primarily due to Milgram’s partic-
ipants’ own responsibility that the alleged
shocks were administered” (dispositional at-
tribution style), “Please elaborate on why one
might argue that it was primarily due to the
extreme situation that the alleged shocks were
administered” (situational attribution style),
or “Please describe how the documentary film
was presented dramaturgically” (control con-
dition).
Behavior and behavioral intentions. At
the end of the questionnaire, there was a
separate page on which participants were
asked to leave their e-mail addresses if they
were interested in volunteering as trainers in
civil courage training at local schools (which
the Psychology Department is actually con-
ducting; i.e., this manipulation was a genuine
effort to recruit interested trainers). They
were informed that their e-mail information
would be separated from the other data to
keep their answers anonymous. This informa-
tion served the additional purpose of empha-
sizing that this was indeed an unrelated proj-
 130 GRAUPMANN AND FREY
ect (the credibility of this project being
unrelated to the study was validated by the
reception of a considerable number of e-mails
after the study that requested details regard-
ing the selection for participation in the train-
ing project). Also, we asked participants to
indicate how likely they thought they were to
actually get involved in the trainings on a
scale from 1 (not at all likely) to 11 (ex-
tremely likely).
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Results
Samples of attribution narratives.
Dispositional attribution style. “Possibility
to stop the participation was always there. Ev-
erybody has a conscience. No absolute order—
participants did not have to show obedience and
there would have been no negative conse-
quences”; “There was no actual obligation for
the participants to execute the electric shocks,
they were merely told to continue by the exper-
imenter. If they had stopped, there would not
have been any negative consequences. The par-
ticipants had to press the button that gave the
shocks to the alleged ‘learner’ themselves.”
Situational attribution style. “People are
not responsible for their behavior in the situa-
tion of a scientific experiment, since they cannot
assume that the experimenter would allow
something bad to happen”; “Pressure from ex-
perimenter. No possibility to reflect (time!).
Trust in research/ science. Persuasive power of
experimenter. No visual representation of vic-
tim/ no eye-contact/gaze. One goes through all
the steps of the experiment (without thinking
about it, like a “fish in the stream”).”
Main analyses. Forty-four percent (i.e., 40
people) left their e-mail address to be contacted
about volunteering in civil-courage training in
schools. This was dependent on the attribution
condition they had been assigned to, reaching
marginal significance, ␹2 ⫽ 5.42, p ⫽ .066.
Only among those participants who had written
about dispositional attributions did more (20)
than probabilistically expected (14) indicate
their e-mail address. In the control condition
and the situational attribution condition, how-
ever fewer than expected (control: 16; situa-
tional: 14) actually indicated their e-mail ad-
dresses (control: 13; situational: 11).
Comparing the control with the dispositional
attributions condition, this difference was sig-
nificant, ␹2 ⫽ 3.75, p ⫽ .044; also the compar-
ison between situational and dispositional attri-
butions conditions, yielded a significant
difference, ␹2 ⫽ 4.20, p ⫽ .035, whereas the
control and situational attributions conditions
did not differ, ␹2 ⬍ 0.40, p ⬎ .52.
Looking at how likely participants thought
they would be to get involved in a volunteering
program, such as the one described, we found
that those who had written about dispositional
attributions for why Milgram’s participants
acted the way they did expressed the highest
personal likelihood to get involved in volunteer-
ing to train civil courage, (M ⫽ 8.38, SD ⫽
2.60) whereas those who had written about sit-
uational reasons expressed less personal likeli-
hood (M ⫽ 7.09, SD ⫽ 2.95), t(84) ⫽ 20.49,
p ⬍ .001, d ⫽ .46. Those who wrote about
dramaturgical style lay in between the two ex-
perimental conditions (M ⫽ 7.37, SD ⫽ 2.60)—
not significantly different from the dispositional
attribution style condition, p ⬎ .12, but margin-
ally different from the situational attribution
style condition, t(84) ⫽ 1.9, p ⫽ .059, d ⫽ .39.2
Discussion
In Study 2, students were more likely to leave
their e-mail address and therefore more likely to
get involved with a volunteering program when
they had reflected on the Milgram experiment as
represented in the film in terms of the personal
responsibility of Milgram’s participants.
We have conceptualized writing about “per-
sonal responsibility” as making a dispositional
attribution. However, although it implies that
the individual himself or herself made a deci-
sion to act in a certain way, this decision might
not only be influenced by personality traits but
(also) by other factors such as experiences
growing up or a particular belief system. On the
other hand, thinking about the personal respon-
sibility might have induced a sense of counter-
factual thinking (Roese, 1997). These counter-
factuals might have served as guidance to what
should have happened and how the current par-
ticipants should behave.
2
The decrease in the size of the sample here is due to
some participants not leaving their e-mail address or not
filling out the last item regarding their general likelihood to
participate in such a project.
 OBEDIENCE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND COURAGE
Without direct additional measures on how
much control participants attributed to the obe-
dient participants in the Milgram study or how
much counterfactual thinking was evoked, it is
difficult to conclude which cognitive route was
taken here. However, the content of partici-
pants’ writing in response to the personal re-
sponsibility prompt that sought to induce a dis-
positional attributional style seems to point to a
greater reliance on the idea of actual control in
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
the situation and lack of real situational forces
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
in the experimental situation than to the use of
counterfactuals.
Nevertheless, both explanations concur in the
conclusion that thinking about individual re-
sponsibility in somebody else’s immoral behav-
ior can help the individual to detach from the
possibility to engage in such behavior oneself.
This suggests that the instruction to reflect on
the Milgram experiment in terms of personal
responsibility, and for that matter, being re-
minded of individual causality rather than the
power of the situation, might be a meaningful
intervention when trying to increase levels of
societal engagement.
General Discussion
Viewing a film about the Milgram experiment
had an effect of increasing personal feelings of
responsibility and the inclination to show civil
courage. Reflecting about dispositional reasons for
the morally discrepant behavior shown in the film
increased intentions to act more responsibly in
terms of societal engagement.
In addition, in Study 1, we saw more negative
affect after watching the film being related to an
increase in feelings of personal responsibility—
this suggests an emotionally activating element
of watching a film about the Milgram experi-
ment: Higher negative emotion has shown to be
related to higher responsibility at after viewing
the film. This finding is in accordance with
research on the motivating nature of negative
affect—for instance, in research on cognitive
dissonance, and in particular, in this case, vicar-
ious dissonance (i.e., observing another person
showing inconsistent behavior; here: value-
discrepant; Cooper & Hogg, 2007). Although
dissonance arousal can be framed as positive
affect (e.g., Cooper et al., 1978), the motivation
to reduce dissonance is only associated with
negative arousal (Higgins et al., 1979). This
131
finding is reflected further in more general ob-
servations regarding the function of negative
affect, in which negative emotions are defined
as signaling that some action is required to
uphold efficient interaction with the social and
physical environment (Rozin & Royzman,
2001).
In a meta-analysis, mood induction via film
has emerged as the most efficient method of
manipulating affective states (Westermann,
Spies, Stahl, & Hesse, 1996). This suggests
that the association of an increase in respon-
sibility with negative emotion after learning
about the Milgram experiment might be par-
ticularly strong because of the use of film as a
medium.
Reminding people of what other people are
capable of when they negate personal respon-
sibility and showing people who do take re-
sponsibility, even as they are being dissuaded
to do so, as achieved by a film on the Milgram
experiment, appear to have beneficial effects
regarding individual aspirations of civic re-
sponsibility and civil courage. Therefore, in
addition to its value of providing scientific
insight into the influence of authority on obe-
dience, the Milgram experiment can serve as
a reminder to think of the personal responsi-
bility of the individual and activate civilly
courageous thinking and behavior.
Still, there is some reason to be cautious about
generalizing our findings regarding the responsi-
bility increases after viewing the Milgram film.
Because the current studies do not provide data
from a control condition in which a neutral-
content film is shown, we cannot completely rule
out the influence that demand characteristics
might have played in people’s responses to the
questionnaire items.
It is important to note that we saw that the
specific interpretation of the material in this con-
text plays a role in how subsequent behavior is
affected: Thinking about Milgram’s participants
as responsible individuals, in contrast to individ-
uals merely influenced by the situation, made peo-
ple more likely to want to engage in action. This
shows how easily personal responsibility can be
evoked and increased (or reduced) by suggesting a
specific perspective of attribution. Attributions to
stable attributes of a person (e.g., in the form of
spontaneous trait inferences) have been linked
with stereotyping (Moskowitz, 1993) and dys-
functional reactions to failure (Weiner, 1985);
 132 GRAUPMANN AND FREY
however, in the current context they seem to pos-
itively affect people’s motivation to compensate
the discrepancy between the viewed behavior and
their own standards and values for behavior. In a
broader sense, this relates to the notion of values
as an internal compass that can guide a person
despite the pressures of conformity and authority
in a given situation.
Our findings resonate with findings on the dif-
ferential effect of feared selves, depending on how
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close or distant these are perceived to be to the
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
current self (Carver, Lawrence, & Scheier, 1999).
More approach motivation was observed when a
negatively discrepant actualization of the self was
perceived as being relatively distant from the cur-
rently experienced self, whereas more avoidance
motivation was observed when the feared self was
perceived as close to the current self. This can be
transferred to our participants engaging in dispo-
sitional attributions that allow them to detach from
the obeying participants in Milgram’s study. Con-
sequently, such attributional processing results in
intentions to actively engage in the promotion of
civil courage, moving toward a more moral self.
On the other hand, the situational attributional
style should lead to more perceived closeness or
identification with the obeying Milgram partici-
pants as “feared selves” because the emphasis on
the power of the situational factors suggests that
one might not be immune to such behavior one-
self. Therefore, fewer intentions to engage in civil
courage training programs in this condition can be
interpreted as avoidant behavior. Being exposed to
the morally discrepant behavior of Milgram’s par-
ticipants via film and given the opportunity to
draw a line between oneself and the observed
participants using guided reflection can make this
famous demonstration of the fatal consequences
of obedience a powerful lesson in civil courage
even today.
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