Obedience to Authority

You can look to other books, articles, and essays for various interpretations on the validity and ultimate meaning behind Stanley Milgram's "shocking" experiments. But if you want to know what the experimenter (Milgram) himself thought, then you should read this book. The book contains Milgram's comments on basic human nature and what he thought the individual person became when placed in a position of subordination. He recognized that humans exist in a hierarchical society that is civil partially because we are obedient to authority figures. Only a minority of of his subjects were willing to dissent and stop shocking the victim, even when the victim complained of pain and suffering! For me, the book's greatest asset was the description of different manipulations and variables that Milgram tinkered with. These variations are typically not described in other places and reveal the conditions under which obedience is highest. For example, Milgram carried out some experiments in a different location (a less impressive basement lab), asked the demonstrator to feign a heart condition, had an ordinary man give orders, had an authority figure as the victim, and many other situations. You will be surprised to what lengths Milgram had to go in order for the subject to disobey orders from an authority figure. The results really argue for an innate basis for obedience. In democratic America, where dissent used to be considered a patriotic act (but is now suppressed by the State), Milgram's results remind us how easy it is to do wrong. If we do not take personal responsibilty for our actions and question authority when it is appropriate, then we deserve to be treated like cogs in a machine.

Although the studies that are contained in this book are a little over 40 years old, they are as relevant as ever. Although Milgram wrote with his eye to the past - he looked back to the Holocaust and to My Lai (he finally wrote the book in 1972, 10 years after the studies were completed) - his voice has proven to be not only prophetic, but of continuing insight and relevance for understanding group dynamics of power and violence.Milgram's studies were done between 1961 and 1962 while he was at Yale; they were all variations on a theme: a unknowing participant (the subject-teacher) was brought to believe that s/he was participating in a learning study. The other two main participants were a man who posed as the student (the learner) and one who posed as the principal investigator (the authority figure).The subject-teacher was told that the learning would occur in this way: the student would be hooked up to an electric shock generator while the teacher would read a set of word pairs, which the student would repeat back. When the student missed one of the word pairs, he would be shocked by the "teacher" in increasingly higher shocks (the shocks increased in 15 volt increments), up to 450 volts (which was marked, along with the 435 volt mark, with XXX).The basic goal of the study was to find out how far the "teachers" would go despite the cries, pounding and eventual silence on the part of the students. The frightening finding was that more often than not, the vast majority of teachers followed through with the command to continue the experiment, which was given by the man acting as the principal investigator every time one of the "teachers" wanted to quit. [It should be noted, however, that the experiment was designed such that the "student" was never shocked, as the student was an actor, typically in a connected room and could only be heard via microphone.]One of the things that makes reading Milgram's studies so chilling is the scientific exactness of Milgram's own writing style as he describes the studies. The moral and ethical issues raised in these studies, although addressed by Milgram in his narrating the book, are also expressed in this same mathematically cold style. It's almost like a bad science fiction movie where our whole human story is narrated - moral failures and all - with robotic precision. It's unsettling.Of course, it *should* be: any experiment that deals with human interaction on such a violent and perversely authoritarian level ought to get us a bit uncomfortable. Of course, Milgram also notes that when the subjects were confronted with their own complicitness, they often blamed others or excused themselves in some way. It really does give a tremendous insight into the psychology of human beings: when faced with our own evil, we try to excuse it rather than deal with it.If, at the end of reading Milgram's book, we aren't questioning ourselves and our ability to be violent and to promote the spread of violence by be

This book is a very revealing commentary on the human condition. While reviewers here have pretty much covered the details, I wish to disagree with some comments BEING SHOUTED BY THE REVIEWER BELOW. Speaking in general terms, while Americans are often not greatly loved outside their own country, they should not be considered to be any different than other nationalities in regard to obedience. (That they are, IMHO, heavily programmed by political and commercial campaigning is another matter!) In a later review of similar studies Milgram biographer Thomas Blass "compared the outcomes of obedience experiments conducted in the U.S. with those conducted in other countries. Remarkably, the average obedience rates were very similar: In the U.S. studies, some 61 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, while elsewhere the obedience rate was 66 percent."Blass' article in Mar/Apr 2002 Psychology Today also highlights this sobering comment by Milgrim in 1973: "We do not observe compliance to authority merely because it is a transient cultural or historical phenomenon, but because it flows from the logical necessities of social organization. If we are to have social life in any organized form - that is to say, if we are to have society - then we must have members of society amenable to organizational imperatives."

While I must concur with the first reviewer's description of this as a less than uplifting book, I do not agree with his advice not to buy it; this book should be widely read. Drawing the subjects for his experiment from a varied cross-section of contemporary American society, Milgram shows what "normal" people are capable of doing when they can justify their actions or deny responsibility. With the exception of one single person, all the subjects obeyed each and every order issued by the authority figure no matter how brutal, many explaining that in real life they would never be able to do what they were in point of fact in the middle of doing. The one person who refused to participate did so because of what he had observed in Nazi Germany. That so many people willingly and in some cases eagerly inflicted nothing less than torture on others is unsettling, to be sure. More unsettling still is that the person who refused did so on the basis of acquired, as opposed to innate, values. Both show us how thin the veneer of civilization is, and how easily it can be ignored. This book should be read so people will know what they are capable of and can take it into account.

This book presents a mind-blowing revelation on every page, and yet you will recognize everything in it from your everyday life. That is what makes it so chilling. Milgram demonstrates in definitive experiments how typical people recruited from off the street can, using no more than a veneer of authority, easily be persuaded to commit torture and even murder on innocent victims. The book thereby essentially explains the psychological mechanics of the Nazi and other concentration camps, the Death Squads in El Salvador and across the World, and the many other forms of atrocity that have become so characteristic of the 20th Century, this "Century of barbed wire and watchtowers". Ever wonder how you can find air force pilots willing to drop the bombs to start a nuclear holocaust? Answer: It's the easiest thing in the World! A certain percentage of the population will have the proper psychological profile, and you just select them. If psychologists and social scientists really wanted to know what are the ruling principles of civilization and what are the sources of so many of its ills, they'd be running experiments like Milgram's year-round in labs across the planet. Instead, very little work of this kind has since been done. Why? Because it's considered "ethically questionable"! In a classic case of "kill the messenger", the very man who shows us concretely how torture has been so thoroughly integrated into the political structure and who exposes the blatant hypocracy of our rulers, is accused of abusing his subjects and of betraying their trust! In the back of the book Milgram, by the way, faces all ethical objections head-on and refutes them all convincingly. Buy this book if you want to find out what is "really going on", but you may be upset by what you find.