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Quote by Stanley Milgram

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Obedience to Authority

This book delves into the psychological mechanisms behind obedience to authority, examining how individuals respond to directives from perceived leaders and the consequences of such compliance. The study investigates the factors that contribute to obedience and the potential for abuse of power, offering insights into human behavior in various social contexts. more

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Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 - December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist renowned for his obedience experiments conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s. Born in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents, he earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University in 1960. His obedience experiments demonstrated that ordinary people would inflict severe pain on others when instructed by an authority figure, sparking profound debates about human morality and research ethics. Milgram also conducted the "small world" experiment, which gave rise to the concept of "six degrees of separation." His research profoundly influenced social psychology, ethics, and political science. He died of a heart attack in New York at age 51. more

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“Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him.”

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“I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”

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