Obedience To Authority: An Experimental View

Description

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE THE EXPERIMENTER "The classic account of the human tendency to follow orders, no matter who they hurt or what their consequences." - Michael Dirda, 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. Featuring a new 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.

Author description

Stanley Milgram taught social psychology at Yale University and Harvard University before becoming a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received several honors and awards including a Ford Foundation fellowship, an American Association for the Advancement of Science socio-psychological prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He died in 1984 at the age of 51. Philip Zimbardo is a professor emeritus at Stanford University, known for his infamous Stanford prison expriment of 1971. He graduated suma cum laude from Brooklyn College, completed his M.S. and Ph.D at Yale, and taught at Yale, NYU, and Columbia before joining the faculty at Stanford. He has written several introductory psychology textbooks for college students.