Authority plays a prominent – perhaps obvious – role in the legal system. Police, lawyers, and judges all wield prestige and authority. Psychologists have been interested in people’s tendency to obey authority for decades, and much of our understanding of the psychology of authority is built on the work of one man. If you’ve taken an introductory psychology class, you have probably heard about Stanley Milgram’s studies on obedience to authority. Milgram’s program of obedience research is some of the most famous – if not the most famous – work in psychology. Many people have heard of Milgram’s work, but most people don’t know the details of his experiments or about the follow-up work of researchers who came after him. In the most well-known version of Milgram’s obedience experiment procedure 1 , an experimenter first greets two participants and explains that they are to take part in a study on the role of punishment in learning. The experimenter (apparently) randomly assigns one...