Dialogic Partners and the Shaping of Social Reality: Implications for Good and Evil in Milgram’s Studies of Obedience

• Published in: Pastoral psychology Vol. 64; no. 1; pp. 51 - 61
• Main Author: Sampson, Edward E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.02.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Clinical Psychology; Cross Cultural Psychology; Good & evil; Pastoral counseling; Psychology; Religious Studies; Sociology; Obedience; Good vs. evil; Dialogism; Social reality
• ISSN: 0031-2789; 1573-6679
• DOI: 10.1007/s11089-014-0596-2

The concept of the dialogic partner refers to those others who help shape person’s social reality. Using the ideas proposed by Schutz ( 1971 ) and Geertz ( 1973 ), a fourfold typology of such partners is developed: consociates (those involved with the person on a face-to-face basis); contemporaries (part of the anonymous background of culture and cohort); predecessors (those who once lived and can be known about); and successors (those yet to be born into the person’s world). The scheme suggests that the person’s world is constituted not only by those in the here-and-now present (consociates, the favorite type in psychological research), but also by an extensive array of others, some of whom are not yet here, nor now. Milgram’s well known research on obedience is used to illustrate this typology and to enrich our understanding of the processes by which both good and evil are created and sustained.