The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life And Legacy Of Stanley Milgram

by Thomas Blass

Comments:
Comment #1
Comment #2
Comment #3


Summary:

The Man Who Shocked The World is a biography of Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a very bright child who always had an interest in science and was known to carry out many experiments. He went to college, and did predictably well. Even though he had a love for the natural sciences as a child, his graduate studies were focused on social psychology.

Milgram's most famous contribution to social psychology is his obedience experiments. In these experiments, he tested to see how long a subject would obey when put in a situation that contradicted with their morals. The subjects were told to shock another person with an increasing number of volts in order to "teach" them to remember a sequence of words. Unknown to the subjects, the person getting shocked was in on the experiment and was not actually getting shocked. The results were surprising to everyone. A very large percentage of people continued to obey the orders to shock the "learner" even after the shocks were apparently dangerous to his health.

The obedience experiments were very controversial and brought Milgram into the public eye. Even though he started other experiments, he could never fully move past the obedience experiments. His last years consisted of teaching at CUNY while studying city life.


Discussion:

The most discussed aspect of Milgram's life was whether or not his obedience experiments were ethical. It is hard for me to draw a conclusion on how I feel about this issue. The methods could have been detrimental to the subjects. The stress they were put under may have caused health issues if they had heart problems. They could have also been affected mentally if they were unable to accept the fact that they were willing to shock a person just because they were told to. Those are some of the unethical issues that I see with these experiments.

However, the participants reported that they were happy to be in the experiment and I do think the results are significant. So, since the outcome of the experiment was good, I approve of it. If it were to be done again, I think that more prescreening should be done to ensure that the participants can handle it physically and mentally.