Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View [Paperback]

Rarely has a book had so much impact on me. What is really so frightening is that those experiments were real and they conclusively show that obedience to authority can quite possibly be the greatest of evils. After reading the book, the big question kept nagging me: Would I have been obedient in those situations? It shows how enormously important it is for each and every one of us to personally assess the impact of our actions, regardless of whether they are sanctioned by authority. I'd recommend this book to everyone.

As a subject, you are asked to attend at a Yale University laboratory in order to aid an experimenter examining the effects of punishment in the process of learning. Upon arriving at this laboratory you meet the experimenter and another subject like yourself. This other subject is to be the 'learner', you are to be the 'teacher'. Your task is to punish this person should they fail some simple memory tests. To do this you are instructed to administer electric shocks to this person, increasing them by 15 volts each time they make an error.
In this book, Milgram lucidly recounts his experiment, which is in fact designed to test the extent to which one person would hurt another in the name of science(the learner is actually an accomplice and never receives a real shock). His motivations for this seem to derive from his concern about historical atrocities, such as the holocost, and works to reveal how easily one might equit themselves of guilt and be obedient to some extenal authority. Due to the clarity with which Milgram recounts individual responses to the experiment, coupled with the startling results, this book is incrediably powerful and at times extremely moving.

This experiment shows that people go along too readily with an experimenter. How readily should we as readers go along with Milgram's claims? Before reaching the experiment, there's a front cover claim that this is "the unique experiment that challenged human nature" and a back cover quote that this is "one of the most significant books I have ever in more than two decades of reviewing". Then a glowing foreword then a preface in which Milgram already is already wondering if a connection exists to Nazis. So what mere mortal wouldn't already be convinced without even readng the experiment?

But we can think critically, can't we, even if we are not scientists or acclaimed writers. Otherwise, we may be as guilty of lack of responsibility as those who went ahead and shocked the learner despite his pleas. The volunteer teachers in Milgram's experiment trusted the experimenter. Are we to trust Milgram to spoon feed us his interpretations? Maybe he's right but don't concede that yet.

The volunteer can't be court-martialed, can't spend years in a prison. At most the volunteer who stopped might expect to be yelled at as he/she exited. Was the volunteer who continued acting out of obedience or because he/she gives undue respect to an apparent scientist? There seems to me a difference. In the military one is trained to obey a command from a superior no matter what the superior is like. In Milgram's experiment, he found himself that volunteers became more likely to stop when an ordinary person was in charge.

Milgram notes differences between his experiment and some military occurrences but focuses on the similarities. In doing so, he may have failed to investigate deeply the differences. Milgram himself reports that when two experimenters disagree on how to proceed, the volunteers stopped giving shocks. He interprets that as a conflict of authorities, but it can be understood by recognizing one of the experimenters was supplying information (that the shocks were indeed harmful. A judgment based on weighing inputs and not obedience may have been key.

If you read this or any other scientific book and just take the author's word for it, you may be over-esteeming authority in a rather similar way to how Milgram's volunteers over-esteemed the experimenter. When reading this book, imagine that you are unknowingly participating in a Milgram experiment to see how much you'll swallow if the author is said to be famous and the work a classic

Several chapters near the end of the book offer some speculation by Milgram as to why people "obey" to such an extent. One might accept Milgram's skill in setting up the experiments and collecting results without accepting his analysis of obedience. He appeals to "human nature", evolution and cybernetics. He invents the term "agentic state" and then discusses the acts he considered obedient in terms of this "agentic state". This is mentalism, the unscientific practice of creating fictions and locating them inside our heads. Mentalisms may be useful as a convenience for everyday conversation, but they add nothing to scientific inquiry except superfluous complication.

I'm not a social psychologist. I'm not a famous or capable author. But I'd suggest when you read this book, you'll get more out of it if you don't fall victim to Milgram's authoritative posturing. Those of Milgram's volunteers who didn't discount their own evaluation and stopped are the people I respect ... and I hope you do to. This book may be a classic, but please err by questioning it too much and not too little.