Abstract
Psychologist Stephen Gibson published an article in 2013 in the British Journal of Social Psychology that offers a rhetorical analysis of the transcripts and audio recordings of Stanley Milgram’s mid-20th century obedience experiments. Gibson’s rhetoric of inquiry project has the potential to advance both the fields of psychology and rhetoric. He uses rhetorical methods to examine both the experimenter’s deployment of rhetorical strategies to influence research participants and the participants’ deployment of rhetorical strategies to resist the authority of the experimenter. Despite its relevance to the field of rhetorical inquiry, Gibson’s research has been overlooked by scholars of rhetoric, and Gibson himself does not engage with contemporary rhetorical scholarship. This article encourages a transdisciplinary exchange that will benefit both the field of research known as the rhetoric of science, technology and medicine and the subfield of social psychology known as rhetorical psychology.
Keywords
rhetorical analysis, Milgram's obedience experiments, resistive rhetoric, body rhetoric, transdiciplinarity
How to Cite
Kang, R. & Ceccarelli, L., (2026) “Introducing Rhetorical Psychology to RSTM and RSTM to Rhetorical Psychology”, POROI 20(1): 2. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/2151-2957.33948
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