Stanley Milgram's Purloined Letter: A Plea for a Normative Interpretation of the "Obedience to Authority" Experiments.

This article critically reevaluates Stanley Milgram's "experiments on obedience to authority," arguing that the central interpretive key—an explicit set of rules presented to subjects before the shock administration phase—has been overlooked by mainstream scholarship. Contrary to the dominant view that subjects obeyed authority figures' orders, the author contends that participants were primarily applying a justified normative rule, making the experiment an investigation of norm-following rather than obedience per se. This normative framework explains subjects' behavior without relying on psychological submission to authority, reframing Milgram's findings as a study of collective rule application and its moral implications. The article calls for renewed archival research focusing on the initial rule presentation and training phases to better understand subjects' interpretations and decisions.