Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View - Hardcover

Milgram, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0422745804 ISBN 13: 9780422745802

Publisher: Tavistock Publications Ltd, 1974

Synopsis

Volunteers are invited to a scientific laboratory under the pretense of participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. They are instructed by an experimenter to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity every time a 'learner', strapped to an electric conductor, makes a mistake. How many, if any, would go right up the scale to 450 Volts? The implications of Stanley Milgram's extraordinary findings (up to 65 per cent of subjects administered the full shock) are devastating. From the Holocaust to Vietnam and Iraq, "Obedience to Authority" goes some way towards explaining how ordinary people can commit the most horrific of crimes if placed under the influence of a malevolent authority. This title is presented with a new foreword by Jerome Bruner.

About this title

Review:

"Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to malevolent authority seemed to me to be the most important social psychological research done in this generation.... The quality of exposition in the book is so high that it qualifies as literature as well as science" -- Roger Brown, Harvard University"This well-designed and brilliantly executed research study, reported in an unusually fascinating and very readable style, reveals the elusive and sometimes shocking conditions under which men obey authority regardless of the morality involved">

About the Author:

Stanley Milgram is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tavistock Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 1974
• ISBN 10: 0422745804
• ISBN 13: 9780422745802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240