The Harm We Both Give

It goes like this: men, following men, inside the pyramids of male authority. The soldier and his commanding officer. The corporate drone and his boss. The original Milgram experiment — conducted in 1961 with an overwhelmingly male sample — handed us a portrait of obedience as a masculine pathology, something encoded in the same cultural circuitry as dominance and hierarchy. We built decades of theory on that portrait.

A 2026 replication study published in Social Psychology has come to remove a piece of that exit.

Researchers ran 80 participants through a modern version of the classic shock experiment — teachers administering what they believed were increasingly painful electrical shocks to learners who answered questions incorrectly. Half the participants took orders from a male professor; half from a female professor. The authority figure gave the same commands, wore the same institutional coat, occupied the same structural position.

Compliance rate with the male professor: 90%. Compliance rate with the female professor: 88%.

Not statistically significant. In other words: indistinguishable.

The researchers concluded that "pathological authority knows no gender." Professional rank, they found, overrides the stereotypes we hold about who gets obeyed and who doesn't. When someone occupies the role of expert, the compliance machinery runs. It doesn't care whose face is on the authority figure. It cares about the uniform.

This is where it gets uncomfortable.

We've been telling a story in which obedience-as-harm is primarily something they do — the men in the hierarchies, the soldiers following orders, the yes-men in the boardrooms. It's been a useful story because it locates the pathology somewhere other than in the general human architecture. If harmful obedience is masculine, then fixing it is a matter of changing who holds power, not how all of us respond to power.

The Milgram replication doesn't say gender is irrelevant. It says gender is irrelevant to the mechanism. The mechanism is older and more democratic than any particular demographic. It lives in the brain state that activates when institutional authority says continue and you haven't yet decided, at a cellular level, that this particular authority isn't worth obeying.

There's a secondary finding worth noting. Participants with higher sexism scores showed greater willingness to inflict harm — but equally across both authority conditions. Male professor or female professor, the people most likely to keep pulling the lever were those most disposed toward authoritarian compliance in general. The variable wasn't the gender of the person in the lab coat. It was the psychological architecture of the person holding the dial.

That's the actual machinery. Not the authority's gender. The follower's disposition toward authority itself.

The story we tell about harmful obedience being a gendered phenomenon has always been partly accurate and partly self-serving. Accurate because the data we had — mostly from male samples, mostly in male-dominated institutions — reflected real patterns in specific contexts. Self-serving because it let everyone outside that demographic believe the mechanism didn't live in them.

It lives in you. The study doesn't say you're bad. It says the compliance circuitry is present, it responds to rank, and it doesn't need a masculine authority figure to activate. The professor in the white coat is enough. The voice that says the experiment requires that you continue is enough.

You already knew there were conditions under which you'd go further than you'd like to admit. This is just the paperwork.

i · sources

• Female leaders command equal obedience in a modern replication of the Milgram experiment — PsyPost, 2026-04-23
• Authority Knows No Gender: Gender Effects in Exerting Obedience in Milgram's Experiment — Social Psychology (Hogrefe), 2026