The author conducted a partial replication of Stanley Milgram’s (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies that allowed for useful comparisons with the original investigations while protecting the well-being of participants. Seventy adults participated in a replication of Milgram’s Experiment 5 up to the point at which they first heard the learner’s verbal protest (150 volts). Because 79% of Milgram’...

We present an analysis for modelling social norms. In social psychology three different normative behaviours have been identified: obedience, conformity and compliance. We show that this triad is a useful conceptualisation of normative behaviour and that current models only ever deal with conformity and obedience two, neglecting compliance. We argue that this is a result from modelling having s...

Intuitively, obedience – following the order that a human gives – seems like a good property for a robot to have. But, we humans are not perfect and we may give orders that are not best aligned to our preferences. We show that when a human is not perfectly rational then a robot that tries to infer and act according to the human’s underlying preferences can always perform better than a robot tha...

In "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?" Jerry M. Burger reported a high base rate of obedience, comparable to that observed by Stanley Milgram (1974). Another condition, involving a defiant confederate, failed to significantly reduce obedience. This commentary discusses the primary contributions of Burger's study in terms of (a) its novel methodological variation on Milgram's o...