6 - From Passive Agents to Active Rhetoricians

Summary

Chapter 6 focusses on the arguments employed by naïve participants as they sought to extricate themselves from the experiments, and on how different conditions made different rhetorical affordances for participants. For example, in a condition where naïve participants were joined by additional confederates whose role involved withdrawing from the experiment at a predetermined point, these individuals and their acts of defiance became available as rhetorical resources on which the participants could subsequently draw in negotiating their own exit from the experiment. The chapter then considers how participants tailored their arguments to the specific context in which they found themselves. Finally, the chapter explores how some strategies that might not ordinarily be thought of as rhetorical can be recast as performing particular argumentative functions. These include displays of emotion, breaking conversational norms, and articulating doubts concerning the ‘reality’ of the experiment. This necessitates moving from a view of Milgram’s participants as being passive subjects of psychological forces, to one that conceives of them as being able to actively engage in negotiating the continuation of the study, and also begins to hint at the necessity of an expanded conception of rhetoric