Mark Gridley - An Analysis of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View

Obedience to Authority
An Experimental View

Mark Gridley
with
William J. Jenkins

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ISBN 978-1-912303-64-9 (hardback)
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CRITICAL THINKING AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

Primary critical thinking skill: CREATIVE THINKING
Secondary critical thinking skill: REASONING

Stanley Milgram is one of the most influential and widely-cited social psychologists of the twentieth century. Recognized as perhaps the most creative figure in his field, he is famous for crafting social-psychological experiments with an almost artistic sense of creative imagination casting new light on social phenomena in the process.

His 1974 study Obedience to Authority exemplifies creative thinking at its most potent, and controversial. Interested in the degree to which an authority figure could encourage people to commit acts against their sense of right and wrong, Milgram tricked volunteers for a learning experiment into believing that they were inflicting painful electric shocks on a person in another room. Able to hear convincing sounds of pain and pleas to stop, the volunteers were told by an authority figure the scientist that they should continue regardless. Contrary to his own predictions, Milgram discovered that, depending on the exact set up, as many as 65% of people would continue right up to the point of killing the victim.

The experiment showed, he believed, that ordinary people can, and will, do terrible things under the right circumstances, simply through obedience. As infamous and controversial as it was creatively inspired, the Milgram experiment shows just how radically creative thinking can shake our most fundamental assumptions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL WORK

Stanley Milgram was born in 1933 to a Jewish immigrant family in New York City. A gifted student, he earned a PhD in psychology from Harvard; he joined the psychology faculty first at Yale, then at Harvard, before spending the rest of his career at the City University of New York. Like many of his generation, Milgram was deeply affected by the Holocaust, and haunted by the question as to how so many Germans and others could have participated in such an unimaginable crime. His whole career focused on exploring obedience and conformity. Milgram died in 1984 of a heart attack, aged 51.