Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) made several groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of human behavior. He was a master of particularly inventive research: for instance, he devised the experimental method to investigate path lengths in social networks, establishing what is variously referred to as the "small world" effect, the Kevin Bacon effect, or "six degrees of separation".



He will always be remembered, however, as the man who conducted the "obedience studies", a controversial series of tests performed at Yale in the early 1960s. These experiments investigated the degree to which people could be persuaded to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform cruel acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. The experiments were highly controversial, partly because of ethical questions raised by the study protocol, partly because the results were completely at variance with what psychologists had predicted.



The view of human behavior that emerges from the results of Milgram's experiments is thoroughly depressing. As Milgram puts it: "With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe". It seems that obedience to authority is hardwired very strongly into the human psyche, so strongly that in many cases it overrides the normal restraints that prevent us from lapsing into barbarism. This conclusion and the experiments that supported it were harshly criticized when Milgram's results first appeared. Subsequent work, such as Philip Zimbardo's infamous Stanford prisoner study, and events such as the My Lai massacre, or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraeb, has corroborated Milgram's conclusions many times over, and has shown that they appear to remain invariant across different countries and cultures. The (very thin) silver lining is that, even as the participants in Milgram's studies were demonstrating their repeated willingness to submit helpless strangers to (what they believed to be) near lethal electric shocks, they were doing so out of an exaggerated respect for "authority" and not, for example, because of some inherent latent streak of depravity that made them want to hurt the experimental subject.



In the book, Milgram gives an impressively clear account of the experimental objectives and procedures. For each of the 18 experiments in the series, main summary results are presented. Milgram includes summaries of subjects' prediction of their own behavior - the enormous discrepancy between predicted and actual behavior is one of the most interesting aspects of these studies. Roughly 700 to 800 subjects participated in total (roughly 40 per experiment) - the vast majority were male, though one of the later protocols enrolled women only (women's and men's results were essentially similar). Individual narratives (transcripts of a subject's comments during the experimental session) are included for about a dozen participants.



Final chapters of the book are given over to Milgram's interpretation of the results. He also addresses some of the criticisms that were leveled against the experiments (the book was written ten years after completion of the research). My edition contains an introduction by Philip Zimbardo, author of the Stanford Prison experiment, written in 2009.



This is an extremely well-written account of an important series of experiments. The results are simultaneously engrossing and horrifying.