Milgram Experiment
People will obey authority even when asked to harm others.
"The uniform matters more than most people admit."
What is Milgram Experiment? People will obey authority even when asked to harm others. Authority can override individual moral judgment.
Employees follow unethical orders because they came from a boss.
Authority can override individual moral judgment.
Create explicit stop-rules and protect whistleblowers.
Use the model. Pick the move.
People will obey authority even when asked to harm others. You've just seen this: Employees follow unethical orders because they came from a boss. Which lever does the model recommend?
Pick a lever. There are no neutral ones — every incentive funds a behavior somewhere.
Pick a reaction to Milgram Experiment
One tap. We'll point you at the most useful next surface based on how this hits.
The full taxonomy entry
Every concept in the Atlas uses the same structure — so Milgram Experiment can be compared, recombined, and cited like an element on a periodic table.
- Business
- Leadership
- Government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Sales
- Marketing
- AI
- Negotiation
- Media
- Public Policy
- Relationships
- Where in our org would Milgram Experiment most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Milgram Experiment?
- If we removed every payoff for Milgram Experiment, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Milgram Experiment persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of milgram experiment.
- Decisions cluster around the easiest narrative rather than the strongest evidence.
- New data changes the slide deck but not the decision.
- Anyone naming the pattern is treated as the problem.
Every Atlas entry is a node in a knowledge graph. See the related rail below to follow the connections.
See Milgram Experiment through 3 lenses
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
Do you actually know Milgram Experiment?
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Which best describes Milgram Experiment?
Worked example, counter-example & concept map
On-demand AI analysis grounded in the Lab's research. Cached on your device after first run.
When you encounter Milgram Experiment, your default mode network folds the experience into your ongoing story-of-self — which is why the same fact lands differently depending on who you think you are.
Self-referential thought, mind-wandering, narrative-of-self, mental time travel. Most of your waking thought is this network running scenarios about you, your status, your past, and your future.
See Default Mode in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
A group decides on a course of action that nobody actually wants, because everyone assumes others prefer it.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We attribute our own actions to situations but others' actions to their character.
We favor people who are similar to us or who like us.
Sacrificing for others without expecting a personal reward.
Masking the sponsors of a message to make it appear grassroots.
Send the card, not just the link
A pre-rendered social card with the title, eyebrow, and URL. Copy the link, post it anywhere, or download the SVG for slides.
More definitions to follow
Every term in the Atlas connects to a dozen others. Pick any of these and see where it takes you.
Threshold past which small inputs cause disproportionate change.
Presuming a purposeful actor behind events that may have no actor at all.
Combine extreme safety with extreme risk; avoid the middle.
Know the perimeter of what you actually know.
Groups sometimes behave as foolishly as the worst individuals.
The capacity to recognize, understand, and manage emotions — your own and others'.
A solution works in the short run and creates a worse version of the original problem in the long run.
We overvalue things we built ourselves.
Aggregating many niche markets equals or exceeds the mainstream.
The achievement-driven, rational, strategic, market-oriented value system. Most of Western corporate life.
Public companies optimize for 90-day numbers, starving long-horizon investment.
The ratio of useful information to irrelevant information.