Friday, March 20, 2009

The Man Who Shocked the World

The reading for this week is the story of a man named Stanley Milgram. Milgram is a psychologist who conducted a number of social experiments and exposed a lot of interesting tidbits about human nature. The book described a number of Milgram's experiments and their results including the Small World experiment and of course his infamous shock experiment.

I found the book to be very interesting as Milgram's methods were pretty exciting. Milgram was constantly riding the line between ethical and unethical behavior and that can lead to some interesting reading. There were parts though that I felt like were dragged out a little too much. The book could have easily lost 25 pages and still could have been entertaining and informative.

3 comments:

  1. I still don't get how people say the obedience experiments were unethical. It was all self-induced. What were they afraid of if they refused to continue? It was really just a pride thing. They didn't want to be the guy who quit. It does shine a new light on people though. If people will go that far just because of pride how much further would they go under more persuasive means?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is true. I think many people were just disgusted at how far they really let themselves go in the experiment. The natural reaction is to blame someone else. Of course, Milgram didn't physically force anyone to do anything. How threatening is a guy in a lab coat?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but ethics definitely did help to propel the book. Parts did drag out, but the experiments and their results were pretty good reading.

    ReplyDelete