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Stanley Milgram: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas and Legacy
Paperback
Series: Pioneers of Human Behaviour
Biographies GeneralGeneral Psychology
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 3 2026
Pages: 88
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.23 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Twenty-six of the first forty men pressed every switch on the board.
The last two carried no words at all - just XXX, past the point where the labels gave up. The men pressing them were not monsters. They were local volunteers who had answered a newspaper advertisement, and that is what has made this experiment so hard to put down for sixty years.
Stanley Milgram built it to answer the question the war-crimes trials had left hanging: how do ordinary people take part in atrocity? In a laboratory at Yale in the early 1960s he gave that question a number. Before he ran it, he described the procedure to psychiatrists and asked them to predict what would happen. They thought perhaps one in a thousand would go to the end. They were wrong by two orders of magnitude.
But the single famous figure is not the discovery - it is the doorway. Milgram ran the study twenty-four ways, and the variations are where the real finding lives. Bring the learner into the same room and obedience falls. Remove the experimenter and it thins. Let one other person refuse out loud and it collapses. Take the whole apparatus to a shabby office in Bridgeport with the Yale name stripped off, and it drops to around forty-eight per cent.
Stanley Milgram: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas, and Legacy is a clear, human introduction to the restless mind behind the most famous - and most contested - experiment in social psychology. It follows him from a Bronx childhood lived in the shadow of the Holocaust to Yale, Harvard and a career he did not live to finish, and it takes the ethics as seriously as the findings.
Inside, you'll discover:
- How the experiment actually worked - the thirty switches, the scripted learner, the four calm prods - and the single genuine forty-five-volt shock, given to the volunteer rather than the learner, that made the whole deception credible
- What the sixty-five per cent really describes, and why the book states it exactly as it stands: one arrangement, among local men recruited by advertisement and by post
- The condition almost nobody has heard of - participants asked to bring a friend, a genuine draw, and fifteen per cent going to the end - which Milgram ran last, named in a 1965 paper, described nowhere, and left out of his book
- What the American Psychological Association did to his membership in November 1962, after a colleague at Yale complained
- The small-world study that gave the world six degrees of separation - and the earlier trial whose figures point the other way: three chains of fifty arriving, and completed chains averaging eight intermediaries rather than five
- His stranger inventions - the lost letter, the familiar stranger, the cyranoid - and the curiosity that unites them: the hidden architecture of social life
- The television experiments CBS paid for, the Scottish verdict he returned on his own question, and the review that took his design apart
- The full ethical reckoning: the deception, the distress, Diana Baumrind's critique, and the safeguards that protect research participants today because of the storm he provoked
What survives sixty years of challenge is not a claim about how bad people are. It is a map of the conditions under which ordinary people bend - which is also, read the other way, a map of the exits.
Written for the general reader, not the seminar room. Verified sources, no invented scenes, and the criticism given its due.
Part of Pioneers of Human Behaviour - gateway books on the minds that shaped us.
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