Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View

The book includes tables, charts, and illustrations in PDF format that you can download from the website after purchasing the audiobook.

How far can an ordinary person go by following orders? Reflecting on thousands of people in Nazi Germany who, simply performing their duty, sent others to their death, Stanley Milgram conceived a provocative experiment.

The participants’ reactions to different experimental scenarios confirmed Milgram’s troubling hypotheses: some subjects “punished” others cruelly, without using the option to refuse.

The paradox is that qualities we value—loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice—can bind people to inhuman authoritarian systems. Even though years have passed since the Nazi death camps, human nature hasn’t changed. So while the significance of the experiment’s concept can be debated, underestimating its danger is risky.

Originally criticized and doubted, the Milgram experiment was later recognized as one of the most ethically significant works in the field of psychology.