Sunday, March 20, 2011

Book Reading #34: Obedience to Authority Microblog

Reference Information
   Title: Obedience to Authority
   Author: Stanley Milgram
   Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)


Summary
Chapter 1: Milgram discusses obedience. He talks about how the Nazi experimentation was an example of obedience gone bad. The goal of his experiment was to explore a person's willingness to obey authority under trying circumstances. He discussed possible reasons for obeying and disobeying.
Chapter 2: Milgram talks about how he performed his study. He goes over how they got participants, locations, procedures, the task involved, the shock generator, the instructions given to the experimenter, and data they focused on when interviewing and debriefing the subject.
Chapter 3: Milgram discusses the hypotheses offered by psychiatrists, college students and middle-class adults. They all predicted that the subject would mostly refuse to obey the experimenter.
Chapter 4: Milgram talks about the effect of proximity (victim "to be shocked" and subject). He talked about 4 experiments. In the 1st, the subject's feedback from the victim was pounding on the wall. In the 2nd, the victim had vocal protests. In the 3rd, the victim was placed in the same room as the subject. In the 4th, the victim only was shocked when his hand was on the plate. When the victim refused, the subject was ordered to force the victim to put his hand on the plate.
Chapter 5: Milgram talks about information regarding several of the subject including background info and survey info.
Chapter 6: Milgram did 7 to see how his results would vary. He even included women in the study.
Chapter 7: Milgram talks about one of the subjects from Germany. She stopped at 210 volts. He concluded that this could be because of exposure to Nazi propaganda.
Chapter 8: In this chapter he provided 6 more experiments. In these, he changed the position, status and action to see how the results would change.


Discussion
I was surprised by how many  experiments Milgram performed. I had no idea there were so many variables and stuff that Milgram had to take into account before making his conclusions.

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