Summary Of Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority

Milgram's book about his experiments, Obedience to Authority, was published in 1974. His findings, released in 1963, were considered alarming; critics, including the American Psychiatric Association, initially questioned the ethics of the experiment. In time, however, Milgram's experiment was considered a milestone in the study of the social aspects of obedience and the primary documentation of what came to be called "situationism," which was defined as the idea that external situations override internal perceptions and moral standards. It is widely regarded as the most powerful experiment ever conducted in social psychology (Encyclopedia Judaica, Stanley Milgram). The CBS television network dramatized a fictional account of the work in the

He preferred to tackles issues that affected the everyday-average man, rather than study an intellectual complex situation. Once, at Harvard, he devised a method for studying the "small world" effect (Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World). For example, individuals in one U.S. city were given the job of sending a packet to a particular stranger in a different part of the country via the acquaintances they knew on a first-name basis. Surprisingly, it took only some six intermediaries to reach the target stranger. Milgram published the first article about these findings in the premier issue of Psychology Today in May 1967. Furthermore, Milgram conducted a study of the effects of television on antisocial behavior and helped launch the psychological study of urban life with the publication of his article, "The Experience of Living in Cities," in Science magazine. This psychologist was also known for his creative take on studying social psychology. He was first inspired to study behavior on subways when his aged mother-in-law complained that none of the other riders had offered her a seat (Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World). This experiment had an interesting story behind it. Thirty years ago, first-year graduate students, were ordered by their “iconoclastic professor, Dr. Stanley Milgram, to venture into the New York City subway to conduct an unusual experiment” (Lou, Revisiting an Old