The Man Who Shocked The World

-Thomas Blass

This is a well-written biography of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, famous for his ‘obedience’ experiments.

This is what I found interesting in this book:

“A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority…This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without out any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. - Stanley Milgram, 1974”

Page XVII

“Social psychology is the branch of psychology that studies the way our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are affected, directly or indirectly, by other people. Since most of our daily activities involve interacting with other people, a typical social psychology course covers a wide range of normal behaviors, such as first impressions, attraction, hostility, group pressure, and helpfulness.”

Page XVIII

“[Lewin] conceived of a person as a point in psychological space, con­strained to move in certain directions by the field of forces operating in that space. . . . A view of a human being as the product of long developmental history emphasizes the uniqueness and the distinctiveness of his or her re­sponses to a common environment. On the other hand, a view of a human being as a point at the intersection of environmental forces emphasizes the contemporaneous perceptions and related actions he or she shares with others in that same position. Through experimentation, one hopes that such common action patterns can be determined.”

Page XXIII

“Like most social psychologists, Milgram was a situationist-a strong be­liever in the power of the immediate situation in affecting a person's behav­ior.”

Page XXIII

“Among the students who graduated the same year as Stanley was Philip Zimbardo, another future social psychologist and a future president of the American Psychological Association, who would become famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which ordinary college students would undergo dramatic behavioral changes after being randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard in a mock prison. Zimbardo remembers Milgram as one of the smartest students in his year-the kind of kid who read the New York Times, while most others would be reading the Daily News.”

Page 9

“Asch had a more optimistic view of human nature: Rather than a passive reaction to social pressures, a person’s social behavior, he argued, was typically a more rational process, the end product of an active reasoned weighting of the behavioral alternatives available.”

Page 27

“We did not need Milgram to tell us what we have a deeply ingrained propensity to obey authority. What his findings revealed is the surprising strength of this tendency-strong enough to override a moral principle we have been taught since childhood-that it is wrong to hurt another person against his will.”

Page 94

“The four-part proximity series revealed an unwelcome truth about human nature. Together, the experiments showed just how unexpectedly strong is our readiness to obey authority-strong enough to make us violate our moral principles. But the series was important in another respect as well. Beginning in the late 1960s, a lively debate raged among personality and social psychol­ogists-"the trait/situation controversy." Stirred up by a provocative book, Personality and Assessment, written by Walter Mischel, the debate centered on the following question: Which is the stronger determinant of a person's behavior, his personality or the situation he finds himself in? Mischel argued that the traditional conception of personality traits as the broad underpin­nings of behavior was wrongheaded and that an individual's actions were much more a product of the immediate situation than the personal charac­teristics he brought to it. As the debate unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s, "sit­uationists" would often use Milgram's four-part proximity series as strong ammunition. They would point to the fact that obedience varied as a function of a situational characteristic-teacher-learner proximity-overriding differ­ences in personality. Milgram himself was sympathetic to the situationist per­spective. "The social psychology of this century," he wrote, "reveals a major lesson: often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of sit­uation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act."”

Page 101

“In line with the theory of cognitive dissonance, the longer subjects continue without obligations to carry out a very unpleasant collaborative task, the more they must convince themselves that some reasonable version of the “official” cover story is, in fact, correct-e.g., the experimenter knows what he is doing, the shocks are not really dangerous, the learner is really OK, the procedure must continue …Early verbal resistance is effective, then, because it reduces the pressures to rationalize that come with a more passive, lengthy and brutal complicity.”

Page 104-105

“When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority.”

Page 108

“But it was the research that Milgram carried out at Harvard that most defined his Cambridge years. Two areas in particular dominated his agenda: the lost-letter technique and the small-world phenomenon. Both would be come valuable as innovative research tools for social psychologists and other scientists. In addition, the small-world idea would, decades later, capture the imagination of researchers in the physical and biological sciences and also become part of the vocabulary of pop culture through the phrase “six degrees of separation”. But the lost-letter technique-a continuation of work he had begun at Yale after completion of the obedience studies-had also had lasting significance. The method is still used today by social psychologists to find out what people really think about controversial issues.”

Page 137

“The shift in Milgram’s research program-from the serious and elaborate obedience experiments to the relatively lightweight lost-letter technique-might seem strange. But several things account for it. First, after the emotionally draining experience of the obedience work, Milgram leaped at the opportunity to distance himself from direct contact with subjects. The lost-letter technique fit the bill perfectly. Moreover, the lost-letter technique was not all that different from the obedience experiments, when examined closely. In fact, they shared important features that would become hallmarks of Milgram’s work.”

Page 142

“Milgram’s article in Science laid the foundation for the newly developing filed of urban psychology. An offshoot of Milgram’s interest in the psychology of urban life was his research on the mental maps, or the subjective geography, of the residents of two major cities-first New York and, latter, Paris.”

Page 170

“People make many important decisions based on their conception of a city, rather than the reality of it. That’s been well demonstrated. So it is important for planners to know how the city sits in the mind.”

Page 170

“One of the abiding insights of Milgram’s work is the surprising degree of influence that seemingly invisible social rules, or norms, exert on our daily actions. Although powerful, these rules are subtle and generally unnoticed, except when they are violated. Have you ever taken an elevator ride in which you maintained constant eye contact with another passenger standing next to you? Have you ever indulged in a lavish meal in an upscale restaurant and, when the waiter gave you the tab, instead of leaving a generous tip, you asked him for a donation to your favorite charity? Have you ever stood at the corner of a busy downturn intersection and sung “The Star-Spangled banner” at the top of your lungs? Would you?”

Page 173

“On the surprising power of norms.”

Page 173

“Milgram noted that a pervasive characteristic of urban life is that, while we may become familiar with the faces of a number of people, we never in fact interact with them. He dubbed such individuals “familiar strangers”.”

Page 178

“Milgram felt that the tendency not to interact with familiar strangers was a form of adaptation to the stimulus overload one experienced in the urban environment. These individuals are depersonalized and treated as a part of the scenery, rather than as people with whom to engage.”

“In order to handle all the possible inputs from the environment we filter out inputs so that we allow only diluted forms of interaction. In the case of the familiar stranger, we permit a person to impinge on us perceptually, but close off any further interaction. In part this is because perceptual processing of a person takes considerably less time than social processing. We can see a person at a glance but it takes more time to sustain social involvement.”

Page 180

“One of the main axioms of social psychology is that situations are more powerful determinants of behavior, more powerful than we might suppose. To a surprising degree, our behavior is highly responsive to the concrete features of our immediate social environment. Different situations can bring different aspects of our personality to the force. As many of his students and colleagues have noted, Milgram was unusually sensitive to the fine-grained details of his surroundings. So, his sometimes enigmatic and erratic behavior may well have been evoked by nuances in others’ behavior to which most people would not have been attuned.”

Page 188

“You seem to forget that ambivalence, a blend of love and hate, is the rule in any social relationship (but only a dullard would take this to mean that there is no possibility of deep, honest love); don’t you know that people can be vile, and hateful …Goodness, delicacy, beauty of the spirit-these too are fundamental to the human picture; but they survive only within a particular set of conditions, and one must be grateful when these conditions prevail.”

Page 189

“Moscovici's main experimental work was in conformity, and it challenged the prevailing dominant approach to the subject. Most contemporary research on conformity, he argued, was too limited, because it focused mainly on how a group exerts its influence on the individual. Moscovici's research showed that under certain conditions, this process could be reversed, with the lone indi­vidual swaying the group to adopt his viewpoint. Moscovici believed that the power of majorities was derived from their sheer numbers. He demon­strated, by contrast, that minorities could convince majorities through their style of behavior-their forcefulness, unswerving persistence, and the con­sistency of their positions. This process is vividly illustrated in the spell­binding film classic Twelve Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda. Fonda plays the role of a member of a jury charged with deciding the fate of a teenager accused of knifing his father to death. An initial straw vote reveals that all the jurors are ready to vote "guilty" with virtually no discussion of the case-except the character played by Henry Fonda. The film depicts how Fonda, through dogged persistence and persuasive arguments, is able to change each juror's mind, one by one, until finally the jury ends up with a unanimous verdict of "not guilty.””

Page 205

“Despite Ralph Waldo Emerson's pronouncement that "a foolish consis­tency is the hobgoblin of little minds," the need for consistency is a hall­mark of human nature. Our relentless search for consistency and harmony when presented with contradictory information derives from a need to sim­plify our complex world and make it more predictable. Thus, for example, social psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated the operation of the sim­plifying principle "What is beautiful is good" in human perception-that is, we believe that outward appearance and inner character go together. In a different vein, an inconsistency between cause and effect-for example, a huge, important outcome having a small, insignificant cause-is jarring to the mind: According to some social psychologists, this may explain the en­during belief conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination among a large segment of the population. Milgram's cyranoid research showed-in a highly inventive manner-just how powerful this simplifying and unifying tendency is in human behavior.”

Page 243

“Milgram’s work has had a revelatory effect on how we think about the nature of human evil and destructiveness; about the role of moral principles in social life; about our malleability in the face of social pressure, especially in response to the demands of authority; and about the dehumanizing potential of the hierarchal forms of social organization so pervasive in modern society. He showed us that it doesn’t take evil or deranged individuals to act destructively against innocent human beings. Normal, ordinary people are capable of horrible actions-which they would not undertake on their own-if commanded by a legitimate authority.”

Page 260

“His work made us acutely aware of the unexpected power of the immediate situation, sometimes overriding our sense of right and wrong. He found that the degree to which participants in his experiments obeyed potentially harmful orders diminished when the victim was brought closer and increased when a buffer was introduced between subject and victim.”

Page 260-261

“Again, Milgram’s contribution was not in telling us that human beings have a propensity to obey authority but in demonstrating just how unexpectedly powerful this tendency is–and, further, by enlightening us about the factors that make such extreme obedience possible: relinquishing responsibility to the person in charge and accepting his definition of the situation.”

Page 261

“Countless people who have learned about the obedience work have been better able to stand up against arbitrary or unjust authority.”

Page 267

“He believed that his experiments spoke to all hierarchical relationships in which people become willing agents of a legitimate authority to whom they relinquish responsibility for their actions. Having done so, their actions are no longer guided by their conscience but by how adequately they have fulfilled the authority’s wishes.”

Page 269

“Could Milgram’s obedience experiments be conducted in the United States today? In principle, yes, but in practice, almost certainly not. Both the American Psychological Association’s ethical principles and federal regulations place a heavy emphasis on informed consent: Potential subjects must be given enough details about an experiment beforehand to enable them to make an informed decision about whether or not to participate.”

Page 281