Obidience to Authority

Reference Information:

Title: Obedience to Authority

Author: Stanley Milgram

Publisher: Harper Perennial (1983)

Summary: In Obedience to Authority, Milgram outlines his classic experiment. A subject is brought in, told that they are going to be doing a leaning experiment with another subject. However, the second subject, the "student", is an actor, pretending to be another participant in the experiment. The legitimate subject plays the part of the "teacher", and is tasked with reading a list of words to the student, who then repeats them back. If the student cannot remember the word list, the teacher is instructed to shock them.


Before the experiment, most psychologists predicted that people would be obedient to a point, but stop before a "lethal" voltage was applied. However, the experiment found that the majority of people will in fact continue to apply the shocks long after the "student" is in visible amounts of sever pain.

Naturally, people were skeptical of Milgram's results at first, but he continued his research and did a good job of accounting for all variables, inside of the experiment and externally as well. While taking into account the dissenting opinions, Milgram made an incredibly convincing argument for his experiment's findings that people are much more obidient than originally hypothesized.

Discussion: I found Obedience to Authority an incredibly compelling novel. Milgram's experiment, while questionable in it's ethics, brought up very interesting questions about the extent of people's limits of obedience. It helped greatly in explaining how things such as the Holocaust could have happened. It is unfortunate that Milgram's experiment remains so controversial today, since it no longer can be performed due to the aforementioned ethical concerns.