Rating: 
Summary: What is Milgram's teaching
Review: The reason why Milgram is scary is that it not only drives us to reconsider our role in society but it forces us to reconsider the society we take part into.
Actually Milgram's teaching has enormous political implications. Breaking the tasks in a society supresses the notion of responsibility. The global task takes a life of its own and is responsible to no one. The police which arrested people in occupied countries for interrogation didn't commit a crime. Neither did the bus driver taking them to the trains, nor the train driver... IG Farben was not making Zyklon B to kill Jews but to kill bugs, the nazi wardens didn't do the gassing themselves... A structure had been progressively put in place which generated monstruous results, just because none of the tasks was a crime and the thousand years Reich (an abstract System) was requiring it.
We hanged the nazi who committed tortures, but our militaries when they do the same are suspended from the military for a couple of years and no sanction is applied to the ones who brought about such atrocities just because they didn't directly order them. Not only in the US, nowhere in the occidental democratic world.
However we are bad citizens if we criticize the Force...
President Bush admitted he had been misled on arms of mass destructions: by whom? By a system of broken tasks where no one has to respond for having slightly biased reports in order to be well noted. That system already drove president Clinton not to respect UN decisions and establish a no-flight zone over the Iraki air space. Maybe all of this has nothing to do with president Bush and president Clinton, maybe we have built without realizing it an occidental kind of nazi (nationalist and social) structure which doesn't give a dam about democracy because it outlives elections and is not responsible to voters but only to the system meaning itself and its efficinecy. Well Heydrich and the concentrations camps were extremely efficient in nazi terms, it does not give value to the system and efficiency doesn't come out as a value in itself.
Let's read Milgram at every level, personal and political: what society are we building. The difference between leadership and domination is called respect for human beings with differing opinion and culture, or more simply it's called civilization (apparently a slow process).
Let's read Milgram again and again and let's talk about it. Let's also read Etienne de La Boetie The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" before getting once more into Milgram
By the way why did the trauma of the tested people succeed in getting Milgram type of experimentations forbidden in the entire free world?
Rating:
Summary: American bashing
Review: This book is a very revealing commentary on the human condition. While reviewers here have pretty much covered the details, I wish to disagree with some comments BEING SHOUTED BY THE REVIEWER BELOW. Speaking in general terms, while Americans are often not greatly loved outside their own country, they should not be considered to be any different than other nationalities in regard to obedience. (That they are, IMHO, heavily programmed by political and commercial campaigning is another matter!) In a later review of similar studies Milgram biographer Thomas Blass "compared the outcomes of obedience experiments conducted in the U.S. with those conducted in other countries. Remarkably, the average obedience rates were very similar: In the U.S. studies, some 61 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, while elsewhere the obedience rate was 66 percent."
Blass' article in Mar/Apr 2002 Psychology Today also highlights this sobering comment by Milgrim in 1973: "We do not observe compliance to authority merely because it is a transient cultural or historical phenomenon, but because it flows from the logical necessities of social organization. If we are to have social life in any organized form - that is to say, if we are to have society - then we must have members of society amenable to organizational imperatives."
Rating: 
Summary: Deference to Expertise?
Review: This experiment shows that people go along too readily with an experimenter. How readily should we as readers go along with Milgram's claims? Before reaching the experiment, there's a front cover claim that this is "the unique experiment that challenged human nature" and a back cover quote that this is "one of the most significant books I have ever in more than two decades of reviewing". Then a glowing foreword then a preface in which Milgram already is already wondering if a connection exists to Nazis. So what mere mortal wouldn't already be convinced without even readng the experiment?
But we can think critically, can't we, even if we are not scientists or acclaimed writers. Otherwise, we may be as guilty of lack of responsibility as those who went ahead and shocked the learner despite his pleas. The volunteer teachers in Milgram's experiment trusted the experimenter. Are we to trust Milgram to spoon feed us his interpretations? Maybe he's right but don't concede that yet.
The volunteer can't be court-martialed, can't spend years in a prison. At most the volunteer who stopped might expect to be yelled at as he/she exited. Was the volunteer who continued acting out of obedience or because he/she gives undue respect to an apparent scientist? There seems to me a difference. In the military one is trained to obey a command from a superior no matter what the superior is like. In Milgram's experiment, he found himself that volunteers became more likely to stop when an ordinary person was in charge.
Milgram notes differences between his experiment and some military occurrences but focuses on the similarities. In doing so, he may have failed to investigate deeply the differences. Milgram himself reports that when two experimenters disagree on how to proceed, the volunteers stopped giving shocks. He interprets that as a conflict of authorities, but it can be understood by recognizing one of the experimenters was supplying information (that the shocks were indeed harmful. A judgment based on weighing inputs and not obedience may have been key.
If you read this or any other scientific book and just take the author's word for it, you may be over-esteeming authority in a rather similar way to how Milgram's volunteers over-esteemed the experimenter. When reading this book, imagine that you are unknowingly participating in a Milgram experiment to see how much you'll swallow if the author is said to be famous and the work a classic
Several chapters near the end of the book offer some speculation by Milgram as to why people "obey" to such an extent. One might accept Milgram's skill in setting up the experiments and collecting results without accepting his analysis of obedience. He appeals to "human nature", evolution and cybernetics. He invents the term "agentic state" and then discusses the acts he considered obedient in terms of this "agentic state". This is mentalism, the unscientific practice of creating fictions and locating them inside our heads. Mentalisms may be useful as a convenience for everyday conversation, but they add nothing to scientific inquiry except superfluous complication.
I'm not a social psychologist. I'm not a famous or capable author. But I'd suggest when you read this book, you'll get more out of it if you don't fall victim to Milgram's authoritative posturing. Those of Milgram's volunteers who didn't discount their own evaluation and stopped are the people I respect ... and I hope you do to. This book may be a classic, but please err by questioning it too much and not too little.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing book, a MUST.
Review: Well written, "Obedience to Authority" gives a frightening perspective on our very nature. The only regret I might express is that the analysis could have been more detailed.
Rating:
Summary: People are really really bad things
Review: Well, if you have any faith left in the power of the human race to do anything productive (and if you've been reading my other reviews than you probably don't), get ready to lose it here. This book details experiments done in the 60s and 70s (I think) and repeated all over the world. People were tested on how long they would shock a person under the guise of a scientific authority figure. Many variations were used, but the central theme was for the most part similar. An authority figure would order a person to administer shocks to another person if that person answered a question wrong (there were questions obviously). The person answering was a trained actor, either in another room or sitting next to the shocker. The scientist and the actor knew that the experiment was a fake, the person shocking didn't. You will not believe the results. Here is an explanation for the unswerving obedience of people to the Nazis, to the Inquisition, Crusades, the police, anyone in authority. Most subjects shocked the actor past maximum voltage, to lethal doses; they "killed" the actor. Or would have killed if the experiment was "real." They were men, women, college educated or high school graduates, white and blue collar workers from every possible background. The results were the same almost every single time: People obey authority REGARDLESS of what the authority figure is telling them to do, even if it is to injure another human being. Don't buy this book, you'll regret it. Trust me.
Rating:
Summary: People are really really bad things
Review: Well, if you have any faith left in the power of the human race to do anything productive (and if you've been reading my other reviews than you probably don't), get ready to lose it here. This book details experiments done in the 60s and 70s (I think) and repeated all over the world. People were tested on how long they would shock a person under the guise of a scientific authority figure. Many variations were used, but the central theme was for the most part similar. An authority figure would order a person to administer shocks to another person if that person answered a question wrong (there were questions obviously). The person answering was a trained actor, either in another room or sitting next to the shocker. The scientist and the actor knew that the experiment was a fake, the person shocking didn't. You will not believe the results. Here is an explanation for the unswerving obedience of people to the Nazis, to the Inquisition, Crusades, the police, anyone in authority. Most subjects shocked the actor past maximum voltage, to lethal doses; they "killed" the actor. Or would have killed if the experiment was "real." They were men, women, college educated or high school graduates, white and blue collar workers from every possible background. The results were the same almost every single time: People obey authority REGARDLESS of what the authority figure is telling them to do, even if it is to injure another human being. Don't buy this book, you'll regret it. Trust me.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent study of conformity!
Review: What Milgram has shown in his study is that any person can become enslaved by authority and commit acts that they would under normal surcumstances never even consider.
Rating:
Summary: Know thyself...
Review: While I must concur with the first reviewer's description of this as a less than uplifting book, I do not agree with his advice not to buy it; this book should be widely read. Drawing the subjects for his experiment from a varied cross-section of contemporary American society, Milgram shows what "normal" people are capable of doing when they can justify their actions or deny responsibility. With the exception of one single person, all the subjects obeyed each and every order issued by the authority figure no matter how brutal, many explaining that in real life they would never be able to do what they were in point of fact in the middle of doing. The one person who refused to participate did so because of what he had observed in Nazi Germany. That so many people willingly and in some cases eagerly inflicted nothing less than torture on others is unsettling, to be sure. More unsettling still is that the person who refused did so on the basis of acquired, as opposed to innate, values. Both show us how thin the veneer of civilization is, and how easily it can be ignored. This book should be read so people will know what they are capable of and can take it into account.
Rating:
Summary: Know thyself...
Review: While I must concur with the first reviewer's description of this as a less than uplifting book, I do not agree with his advice not to buy it; this book should be widely read. Drawing the subjects for his experiment from a varied cross-section of contemporary American society, Milgram shows what "normal" people are capable of doing when they can justify their actions or deny responsibility. With the exception of one single person, all the subjects obeyed each and every order issued by the authority figure no matter how brutal, many explaining that in real life they would never be able to do what they were in point of fact in the middle of doing. The one person who refused to participate did so because of what he had observed in Nazi Germany. That so many people willingly and in some cases eagerly inflicted nothing less than torture on others is unsettling, to be sure. More unsettling still is that the person who refused did so on the basis of acquired, as opposed to innate, values. Both show us how thin the veneer of civilization is, and how easily it can be ignored. This book should be read so people will know what they are capable of and can take it into account.
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