Obedience to Authority

Summary:
This book is all about the obedience experiments performed by Stanley Milgram, and written by Stanley Milgram. Milgram wanted to test whether normal people would be willing to harm another individual under the direction of another. This has obvious parallels to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Milgram had a naive subject electrically shock another person to supposedly test the effect punishment has on learning. The shock machine did not actually shock the other person, but rather was just designed to see if the subject would administer what he/she believed to be incredibly painful shock levels, although the experimenter assured the subject that they would not cause any damage. Milgram performed 18 variations of the experiment to test each individual angle that could be dissected. People were generally obedient to an alarming amount. If there were group members there also proceeding in the experiment, then the obedience was even higher, almost total obedience. However, if the group members stopped participating, the obedience was almost non-existent. Milgram also studied the effects on proximity/closeness to the victim and to authority, as well as different roles of authority and levels of authority. He found virtually no difference between men and women and the levels of obedience.

Milgram's explanation for the obedience is that people slip into an "agentic" state, where they are no longer themselves per say, but rather an agent for someone else to perform a task. People do not use their own moral principles because they slip into this state and have the need to satisfy the authority figure. He rejects the notion that the aggressive nature of people is the reason for the obedience because people refused to do the experiment when the authority was weakened or not present. Finally he makes a brief comparison to what the Nazis did by saying that while the two events are hugely different, the same underlying principle in his experiment applies to those atrocities.
Discussion:
I have to admit, I really didn't enjoy reading this book. It's not horrible, but I didn't like his writing style. I felt it made it hard to read and lost my attention very quickly. The experiment itself is pretty fascinating, and I enjoyed reading the dialog accounts of the participants. However, the way Milgram analysed the findings or described the experiments was mostly excruciating. I believe his reasoning is correct. I do think there is a large basis for the agentic state, and he acknowledges all the forces in play, all the way down to a subject's upbringing. I also agree that it was not due the aggressive nature of people because of the reasons he described. Overall I think Milgram's experiments are very interesting, but the book itself is far from it.