Stanley Milgram

This book was a biography of Stanley Milgrim. It starts out with his childhood in New York. It goes through his education, and his high intelligence. He was able to get financial scholarships to go to Harvard and get into grad school. He was the center of moral controversy with his obedience experiment. In that experiment, his subject "shocked" one of his partners, but prerecorded screams of pain were recorded and played so the subject would hear. The results were that people would follow the commands of someone with supposed authority. The obedience levels were still relatively high even for people who had to hold the hand of the person to the shock plate. He did debrief the subjects afterward, and told them that there was no harm actually done. Even with this, people still were not pleased with his actions. After finishing grad school, he taught at Princeton, and then City University of New York where he continued his research. Other experiments he had done include the memory mapping of New York City and Paris and the six degrees of separation.

I believe that the obidience experiment may not have been ethical, but it is realistic to some situations that could happen in the real world. The goal of the experiment was to find out what would cause obidience to authority, and the results show that most people are willing to put aside their concerns if the authority figure commands them to. The stress felt by these people were probably similar to those felt by the people who were indirect accessories to atrocities in World War 2. So, even though the experiment may be unethical by the standards of the time, the results are realistic because in the real world, people go into stressful situations all the time and I don't think this experiment went too far in that respect.

Also, the other experiments like the mental mapping and six degrees of separation provided interesting results. I knew that some areas in cities are more familar than others, since that area may be the what the city is known for. However, I wouldn't have expected that sometimes, they knew the famous areas better than their own neighborhoods.