Obedience to Authority
Stanley Milgram
Harper Collins Publishers New York, NY
Chapters 1-8:
In these chapters we are introduced to the Milgram obedience experiments and we are given a lot of really in depth information on the design, setup and process of his experiment. We are given all the details as well as some of the variations on the study and how the study started and then was changed to test different factors such as location, actor, groups of people and relative closeness to the person who was the "learner". We are also shown lots of graphs that tracked peoples progress and quantitatively showed how many people proceed to each level of obedience. We also were introduced to various subjects and told about their lives and backgrounds and then were able to see their results as well as their reactions to what they did and their thoughts in the followup interviews. Milgram finishes each of these by explaining from a psychology standpoint what the user was doing and why they made the decision they did.
These chapters were very interesting and it was neat to get to see some of the pictures and the various devices used. Unfortunately for me I have seen videos of a lot of this before that were crudely shot and I have even seen a person performing the activity and heard the voice of the actor as he demands to be let out. I think the most interesting thing I got from this were the graphs. Being able to see it that clearly and drawing lines showing how someone did were very eye opening and you don't realize what percentage of people go all the way until it is in numbers in front of you. One thing I really didn't like was how Milgram seemed to give his view on how each person reacted the way they did. A lot of times it almost felt like he was trying to stick up for the user or make excuses for what they did when really they were no different from the average participant of the experiment. I suppose this comes from the fact that I have my own views on how they reacted and in some cases disagreed with him. Either way it was very interesting and this is one of my favorite books from class so far.
Chapters 9-14:
In these chapters Milgram goes over various aspects of the study in depth and tell us about the psycological factors assocaited with them. He dicusses things suhc as how the experiment is setup and why the design of the experiment leads to the reults that were attained. He talks about how in different places the results are the same and even across different cultures. He talks about how the fact that the person conducting the study was established to be a researcher helps the cause and makes it more believeable. He even discusses things that will make his results less such as having multiple confederates that act against the experimenter first or do all the steps for the person and how they drastically skew the results. It is simply him talking about all the variations on his tests and how the simplest things can change the results completely. He finishes by talking about the successes of the experiment and even other researchers who had doubled his experiments in different settings to see if the results were the same.
The most interesting part again were Milgrams personal views on these and in these cases he did give the Freudian approach which I appreciated. Again, in some cases he gave his rather partial views on how the people were reacting and WHY they reacted the ways they did. I think probably the most interesting of all of it was the last part where people actually duplicated the experiment and showed rather fascinating results. It is strange that the results would ever be higher and apparently this was a really new thing because it did not gather media attention and it was amazing to see how many people had never heard of this. I guess it seems like an experiment that is so known and cultural now that its hard to thing there were people who didnt know.
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