Obedience to Authority
2017 • 256 pages
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15
Ratings3
Average rating4
A part of Harper Perennial’s special “Resistance Library” highlighting classic works that illuminate our times: A special edition reissue of Stanley Milgram’s landmark examination of humanity’s susceptibility to authoritarianism. “The classic account of the human tendency to follow orders, no matter who they hurt or what their consequences.” — Washington Post Book World In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects—or “teachers”—were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human “learner,” with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences. “Milgram’s experiments on obedience have made us more aware of the dangers of uncritically accepting authority,” wrote Peter Singer in the New York Times Book Review. With an introduction from Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, Obedience to Authority is Milgram’s fascinating and troubling chronicle of his classic study and a vivid and persuasive explanation of his conclusions.
Reviews with the most likes.
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
How I wish Milgram had lived to see Jonathan Haidt's research. I get the feeling he would've nodded thoughtfully, “yes, that makes sense” — and then, more importantly, leaped two steps ahead on the implications and come up with new ideas for areas of research, perhaps even ways to educate, to help us overcome these worse aspects of ourselves. But maybe that'd be asking too much: he already changed the world once; that's more than most of us get to do.
Milgram was just as surprised and horrified by his findings as you or I when we first learned of them. Unlike you and I, he devoted years of his life to trying to understand them. This book is, I think, his cry to the world for help solving the problem: it's much too big to be solved by any one person. The book is two parts: the experiments, and his analyses. The first half describes the initial experiment as well as the many followups, each intended to suss out which factors are at play. The second half, written ten years later, is his distillation of his findings: basically, evolutionary pressures that have become maladaptive in a modern environment. This is what he struggles to understand, in an age before Facebook or remote-controlled drone bombings or the Cult of the Orange Traitor. (But after My Lai.)
Milgram is an unexpectedly good writer, conveying humility and compassion and great insight. And concern: he struggles to come to term with his findings — I wonder if he ever did? I wonder if any of us can?
Recommended reading for anyone with a moral sense, or anyone trying to develop one.
