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In this important and compelling book Prof. Milgram describes his experiments concerning the nature of obedience and the form it takes when confronted by a malevolent authority. It can scarcely be denied that, as he says, ‘obedience as a determinant of behaviour is of particular relevance to our time’; although the stress must be on the word ‘particular’, for the relevance of this work would appear to be undeniable throughout the history of mankind. Many crimes were and are committed in the name of obedience. As a result, this is a long-awaited study and the quality of the experiments brings light to a problem which has puzzled humanity from Antigone to the present day and which has so often been casually explained away by describing men who acted against their fellow men in obedience to malevolent authority as abnormal, sadistic monsters. The time had clearly arrived ‘to move from abstract discourse to the careful observation of concrete instances’.
In the experiments described, the subjects, chosen at random, were invited by an experimenter to act against another person with increasing severity by administering progressively powerful electric shocks to a learner taking part in a learning experiment. In actual fact, the shocks were not real. Unknown to the subject-teacher, the pain shown by the victim-learner was faked. It is impossible in this review to describe in detail the many and varied experiments which were carried out. In all, 18 variants of the basic experiment were designed. They ranged through situations of remote feedback to close proximity of the learner-victim; from the closeness of authority to discretion about the shock level; and from the receipt of contradictory commands given by two authorities to situations in which the authority became the victim. Throughout, the authority over the subject was maintained at an impersonal level.
Before beginning the series of experiments, Prof. Milgram described the project to an audience of psychiatrists, colleg