Neuroticism and negative affect influence the reluctance to engage in destructive obedience in the Milgram paradigm.

The present study employed a variation of Milgram's (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience paradigm that required undergraduate participants (N = 33) to administer noise blasts rather than electric shocks. We found that the individuals who were the most reluctant to obey the commands of the experimenter to continue with the procedure were those with low levels of neuroticism who reported the highest levels of negative affect during the session. This suggests that our procedure may offer a relatively benign means for examining the mechanisms underlying destructive obedience as well as individual differences in the willingness to obey authority.