Reference:
Obedience to Authority
Stanley Milgram
1974 Harper Perennial
Summary:
Ch. 1 - Milgram states his intention of studying the effect that authority has on obedience.
Ch. 2 - The obedience experiment is described. It hindges on a subject administering a series of electrical shocks that become more powerful with each application. These are administered when an incorrect answer is given.
Ch. 3 - Groups of phychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults are surveyed to determine where they think the breakoff would occur in the experiment. In other words, they estimated at what point a subject would disobey the experimentor.
Ch. 4 - While experimenting, Milgram discovers that the closer in proximity the subject is with the "victim," the easier it is to defy the experimentor.
Ch. 5 - A series of descriptions about several test subjects, as well as quotes and results from their particular experiments.
Ch. 6 - A number of variations of the experiment are run, including changing actors, having the subject choose the shock level, changing locations, and testing female subjects instead of male ones.
Ch. 7 - More subject analysis, basically an extension of ch. 5 with the new experiment parameters.
Ch. 8 - More variations of the experiments are tested, all geared toward trying out the possible combinations of instructor and victim.
Discussion:
Though I know about Milgram's experiment through Opening Skinner's Box, I did enjoy reading it in further detail. It's one thing to read a statistic, but another entirely to actually read about individual subjects and see the raw data. I wonder to what extent the tendency to obey authority can be used (or misused) in CHI. Will the cars of tomorrow say to us "You have no option but to turn right." Certainly interesting to think about, but potentially disturbing.
P.S. That was not 80 pages.
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