Obedience to Authority

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.