An Experimental View
Stanley Milgram
Foreword: Jerome Bruner
2005 | paperback | 256 pages | 198x129mm
psychology
ISBN-10: 0-9530964-7-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-9530964-7-3
List price: £8.99
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Volunteers are invited to a scientific laboratory under the pretence of participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. They are instructed by an experimenter to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a 'learner' every time he makes a mistake. How many, if any, would go right up the scale to 450 Volts?
The implications of Stanley Milgram's extraordinary findings are devastating. From the Holocaust to Vietnam's My Lai massacre, from Bosnia to Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Obedience to Authority goes some way towards explaining how ordinary people can commit the most horrific of crimes if placed under the influence of a malevolent authority.
With a new foreword by renowned psychologist Jerome Bruner.
Stanley Milgram was born in New York in 1933. A graduate of Queens College and Harvard University, he taught social psychology at Yale and Harvard Universities before becoming a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. read more
Jerome Bruner is one of the world's most renowned psychologist and revolutionised psychology as one of the founders of the cognitive theory. He inspired and informed countless of psychologists and disciplines and is the author of numerous books, including Acts of Meaning and The Process of Education.
'A masterpiece.' NEW STATESMAN
'Milgram's work is of first importance, not only in explaining how it is that men submit, but also in suggesting how better they may rebel.' SUNDAY TIMES
'The resonance is deep, from Auschwitz to My Lai, the connections unavoidable; the implications altogether cheerless.' ROLLING STONE
'Brilliant.' PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
'A great and terrifying study... a stunning series of experiments which hold a mirror up to our ethical dilemmas in a way few other experiments ever have managed to do.' THE OBSERVER
'We can argue that the experiments were cruel and should not have been undertaken. We can question whether much truth can be abstracted from such complex deceptions... But the results of the experiments remain: they are real, they have been repeated, their implications are appalling, and must not be dismissed.' NEWSWEEK
To read an extract from Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority click here
