I’m motivated to write this post because of a new book that, according to an NPR interview with its author, attacks the late Stanley Milgram for having misled us about the human propensity to obey. He overstated his case, she claims, and also conducted unethical research.
The Milgram obedience studies of the 1960’s are probably the most famous research in the history of social psychology. As the reader almost certainly knows, subjects were ordered to give apparently harmful – perhaps even fatal – electric shocks to an innocent victim (who was, fortunately, an unharmed research assistant). The studies found that a surprising number of ordinary people followed orders to the hilt .
Accounts of these studies in textbooks and in popular writings usually make one of two points, and often both. (1) Milgram showed that anybody, or almost anybody, would obey orders to harm an innocent victim if the…
View original post 1,307 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments