Customer Reviews

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (Perennial Classics)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 being passive, we have missed the entire point of the book. Milgram's goal is to not simply report the collection and analysis of data, but to engage the reader on a fundamentally moral level. He cites Hannah Arendt's work Eichman in Jerusalem and notes that evil is not necessarily expressed in a pro-active way; indeed, it can be far more subtle but no less dangerous.

Milgram's book is one well worth the effort. It reveals an element of human being that is so easy to forget, especially given that our culture is so bent on *denying* any element of - or at least any potential for - evil within ourselves. Of course, such blindness to the reality of evil and tragedy is what makes *letting it happen* so easy.

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.

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.

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.

Stanley Milgram's book is a mind-blower.

Not so much in its insights into everyday life but, in its insights into what normal people are truly capable of doing - no room for argument.

To check out the nature of his work go to w3 dot stanleymilgram dot com and see the Stanley Milgram Basics section of the site. (reason for cryptic site address above is because this here online retailer seems to frown on such data)

Here's some quote's from Milgram (who sadly, died at age 51yrs) (- see the above mentined site for more quotes)

"...The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." (1974)

[From Milgram's reply to Baumrind's ethical critique of the obedience experiments] "I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals." (1964)

I wonder if other books that deal with issues relating to mass actions of evil, allow for the truly scientific insights given to us by Stanley Milgram?

Lots has been said about both the book and the experiment; I see other reviewers lay out the experiment in detail. So, I'll skip ahead to my opinion.

This book will scare the poo out of you. I hope you chuckled a little, but don't take it TOO lightly. This book seriously caused me to reexamine my faith in other people. Milgram's experiment rocked the world, and to hear the man's take on what happened will bring you further into this great study. There's lots of detail about the study and tables of data, which can get tedious but elevate the books credibility, and help you play along at home once Milgram starts to interpret the data. You'll notice other reviewers farther down debating w/ Milgram based solely on reading his book. That should tell you he did a good job of providing the data, not just the "correct" (his) conclusions.

I also really found the book a gripping read. Milgram has an accesible writing style, and you'll have no trouble keeping up with him even when his mind starts humming. So while the subject is about as rough as it gets, the information in the book is easy to get at, even if you don't really like what you find. If you are interested in the subject matter, I believe you'll really enjoy this.

Stanley Milgram's experiments in human response to authority in the 1970's offer as much insight today as when they were originally conducted. The experiemnts are best known as a series of tests performed through Yale University, where a subject was told to administer an increasingly high level of electrical shock to a victim attempting to learn a series of word relationships. The frightening results showed the majority of subjects, at the bequest of the authority involved, applied maximum voltage despite the begging and pleading of the victim to stop the test (the victim being an actor pretending to be shocked).

We still have a lot to learn from the evidence gathered by Milgram. His book presents scientific and psychological studies in lay terms that are accessible to anyone.

Although I appreciate calmly's critical reading, it is clear that he or she is unaware of the 40 years of social science research that has followed the original Milgrim experiment and built on its findings.

No research exists in a vacuum, and indeed a single study is the beginning of understanding. But research in social science has replicated this study (albeit in ways more kind to its participants) many times with very similar results.

The Milgrim Experiment has been supported by data from the Stanford Prison Experiment, research on fraternity and military hazing rituals (particularly in the death squads of Central and South America), research on whites in Apartheid, etc. The list goes on.

It is true that there are always those who rise above the rest, the Nazi prison guard who used his own money to buy medicine for the concentration camp prisoners. But Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur, the slaughter and maiming of Quakers by American Puritans, the slaughter of Protestants by the French Catholics, the slaughter of English Catholics by Anglicans, the slaughter of all non-confomists by the Spanish Inquisition, remind us that race, creed, ethnicity, or religion are no magic bullet at resisting evil.

All the book is trying to say is look at your own hubris. We may all feel that we are above all reproach. We may shudder in horror at the final scenes of Biko saying, Who could shoot those children?

But it's much scarier when you realize the answer may be you.

I want to begin by saying I think this insightful and disturbing book should be required reading for those in power, or heck, maybe for just anyone who's going to graduate high school. Like most who read it, I think, I was surprised at how far ordinary people were willing to go in submission to authority and how easily they were willing to harm innocent strangers. I think Milgram's experiments tell us a lot about human nature and provide some insight in to how we can better ourselves and overcome our weaknesses.

I would also like to respond to calmly's lukewarm review that appears on this page.

I completely agree with his assertion that readers should be as critical of the author in this case as Milgram asserts we should be in our day-to-day encounters with authority figures. We shouldn't trust him simply because he says we should.

Nor should we simply trust calmly.

He writes: "At most the volunteer who stopped might expect to be yelled at as he/she exited." This is false, in my judgment. Milgram writes that most of the experimental teachers understood the actor to be experiencing pain, in some cases they believed his life could be in jeopardy (because of the previous mention of a 'heart condition'). I think it's a monumental understatement to claim that the worst they could expect was to be verbally reprimanded. Many of them certainly had a realistic expectation that the actor could be seriously harmed, and yet many of them persisted in the experiment because of the authoritative presence. This bothers me, as it did Milgram.

calmly later suggests that the "information" about the actor's suffering was provided in the competing authority variations (by the dissenting 'scientist'), and that this is what was missing in single authority experiements where the single scientist insisted 'we must go on.' The implication is that because in these variations there was a good angel on one shoulder, the 'teachers' had a better understanding of the 'information' about what's right and wrong. I'd simply ask, what more information should the learners have needed than hearing the screams of the actor who was 'receiving' the shocks? Wasn't that disincentive enough? Apparently not.

Again, Milgram's experiment is incisive, disturbing, and relevant, and it is certainly worth your time and money.