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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Obedience: Why Ordinary People Do Terrible Things

Obedience: Why Ordinary People Do Terrible Things

Lane, Victor

Paperback

CriminologyGeneral Political ScienceGeneral Psychology

ISBN13: 9798195715052
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 5 2026
Pages: 148
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.32 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1961, a social psychologist at Yale asked ordinary volunteers to administer electric shocks to a stranger - increasing the voltage with each wrong answer, up to a level labelled Danger: Severe Shock. Sixty-five percent continued to the maximum. They were not sadists. They were not ideologically motivated. They were ordinary people who had been given an authority figure, a plausible reason to continue, and a sequence of small escalations that made each step feel like a continuation of the last.

Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments remain the most disturbing findings in the history of social psychology. Not because they revealed human evil - but because they revealed human ordinariness. The capacity for harmful compliance is not a property of damaged personalities. It is a feature of normal human social psychology, activated by conditions that are common in every institution human beings have ever built.

OBEDIENCE examines those conditions in full - what they are, how they operate, and what the decades of research that followed Milgram's original experiment have confirmed, challenged, and refined.

Inside this book:

  • The Milgram experiments - what they actually proved, and what they did not
  • The agentic state - how authority transfers moral responsibility away from the individual
  • The foot in the door - why gradual escalation makes each small step feel manageable
  • Conformity and Asch - how social pressure overrides the evidence of our own senses
  • Dehumanisation - how language prepares ordinary people to harm
  • The Holocaust, My Lai, Rwanda, Enron - how the mechanisms operate at historical scale
  • The rescuers and the whistleblowers - who refused, and what made refusal possible
  • What the science says about building institutions and individuals that resist

This is not a comfortable book. The science it describes is not comfortable. But it is the most important science there is - because the conditions it identifies are not historical relics. They are present in every organisation, institution, and authority structure that exists today.

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