Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments

by Gina Perry

The true story of the most controversial psychological research of the modern era. In the summer of 1961, a group of men and women volunteered for a memory experiment to be conducted by young, dynamic psychologist Stanley Milgram. None could have imagined that, once seated in the lab, they would be placed in front of a box known as a shock machine and asked to administer a series of electric shocks to a man they'd just met. And no one could have foreseen how the repercussions of their actions, made under pressure and duress, would reverberate throughout their lives. For what the volunteers did not know was that the man was an actor, the shocks were fake, and what was really being tested was just how far they would go. When Milgram's results were released, they created a worldwide sensation. He reported that people had repeatedly shocked a man they believed to be in pain, even dying, because they had been told to -- he linked the finding to Nazi behaviour during the Holocaust. But some questioned Milgram's unethical methods in fooling people. Milgram became both hero and villain, and his work seized the public imagination for more than half a century, inspiring books, plays, films, and art. For Gina Perry, the story of the experiments never felt finished. Listening to participants' accounts and reading Milgram's unpublished files and notebooks, she pieced together an intriguing, sensational story: Milgram's plans went further than anyone had imagined. This is the compelling tale of one man's ambition and of the experiment that defined a generation.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, History, Sociology, Education, Philosophy

432 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2012

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A decade ago, I read a series of lectures by Doris Lessing called Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. The Milgram experiments played a central role in those lectures. To Lessing, they proved a darkness in the human soul that we were unlikely to ever overcome, even if she felt that facing that darkness with awareness may offer some hope that we might avoid the worst excesses of our fundamental natures. I read Postman’s Technopoly some time later, where he questions the validity of the general conclusions from the Milgram experiments, arguing that it isn’t clear what they actually show. I had assumed that the Milgram experiments were as close to settled psychological science as it is possible to obtain, so I was surprised by his questioning of them. Then a few years ago I read an article in The Conversation that said someone had gone back over Milgram’s work and decided that his results were overstated and needed to be reappraised. It was one of those things in life where what I had read only half-registered, but despite my moving on, it had almost registered.

Then a few months ago I was talking to a friend and her sister and the Milgram experiment came up and I said something approaching ‘oh that, no that’s all been disproven’ – although, maybe I didn’t go quite went that far. I had meant, at the time, to look up what had been decided about the experiments, but again, life got in the way. It was only last week when I read The Authoritarians and was told once again the standard story of the Milgram experiments that I though, bugger, this time I do need to find out what is going on. So, I tracked down this book.

The Milgram experiment involves people coming into a psychology lab for an experiment to test learning. The subjects are assigned the role of either a teacher or a student – except the student is actually an actor. The student has to learn a series of word pairs. The subjects of the experiment are told it is to test how punishment works as a means to help people learn. The student is placed in a room, where the ‘teacher’ cannot see them, and has electrical wires attached to their body. While this is happening the actor/student mentions that they have recently suffered some heart issues, but they are assured by the guy in the lab coat that although the shocks they will experience will hurt, they will not be life-threatening, even for someone with a heart condition.

The teacher reads out a series of word pairs and the student has to match one of them, if the student gets a wrong answer they receive a shock – the shocks start off quite mild, but they increase in voltage with each wrong answer until it is clear that we are no longer playing a game.

The learning commences and the student gets a few wrong answers. Zap, Zap, Zap. Then a few more…zap, zap. The student starts to complain about how sore the zaps have become. Then, after some more zaps, the student starts getting louder in their screams and protests. Then they start pleading for the experiment to stop. The teachers turn to the person running the experiment and ask if they should stop the experiment, the person in the lab-coat says that it is important that the experiment continue. More shocks, more screams. Now the person in the other room is basically pleading for his life. The person administering the shocks again asks if they should stop, the lab-coat guy is more insistent that the experiment must continue. Suddenly, the person in the other room goes silent. The ‘teacher’ asks what they should do. The lab-coat guy says that they need to treat the student’s silence as a wrong answer and increase the voltage. Eventually, they are at the highest voltage, no longer a number, but instead marked with XXX.

The experiment is a hoax. It has nothing to do with learning or even with electric shocks, but is in fact a test to see how far the ‘teacher’ will go in following orders – it is a test of their willingness to submit to authority. Milgram claimed that about two-thirds of people would effectively kill ‘the student’ under rather mild promptings from someone representing an authority figure. This was said to have proven that we all have a Nazi prison guard lurking within us, waiting to get out.

Milgram’s conclusion from this experiment is pretty bleak, but he did hope that we would be able to learn from it, particularly by not submitting quite so easily to authority. He said that people essentially went onto autopilot while undertaking the experiment, and later justified their actions as ‘only following orders’. That Milgram was Jewish, had escaped Europe after the war, and that his experiments occurred in the early 1960s – hardly 20 years after the war – made these experiments all the more poignant. The conclusions proved there was nothing special or different about Germans, for instance, that anyone could be just as cruel as the SS, and that standing up to authority and doing the right thing was a minority position.

Okay, so that’s pretty much the standard story. What the author found when she dug up the tapes, notes and transcripts from the experiments is something a little different. To begin with, the people doing this experiment were not nearly as compliant as I’d always assumed. In fact, they were often very distressed throughout and often also after the experiment. Now, I don’t know what your vision of a Nazi prison guard is, but mine has always been someone who might spend the day shooting a couple of hundred children in the back of the head, then spend the night drinking schnaps and singing Wagner – happy times. ‘Callous disregard’ is what I think of when I think of Nazi prison guards. However, the people administering the shocks didn’t seem like that at all. In fact, the level of distress they felt screams off the page louder than the fake screams they could hear from those supposedly receiving the electric shocks. People were so upset by these experiments that they changed the way all experiments are ethically conducted ever since. When people say you couldn’t do these experiments today, that is exactly true. It is because they would not get passed a university ethics approval system today – and that’s a very good thing.

The subjects administering the shocks to the actors in the other room sometimes begged to give the money they had received to take part in the experiment back to the university so as to bring the experiment to an end. They sweated, shook, laughed uncontrollably, developed nervous ticks and sometimes even begged to swap places with the person they believed they were administering electric shocks to. Not a particularly Nazi prison guard thing to do.

It also becomes clear that while the original script says subjects will be de-hoaxed immediately following the experiment, often this was not done, and people where only informed they hadn’t really been administering near lethal electric shocks to people until about a year later and then only by letter. Some of these people had remembered the name of the ‘student’ they thought they had been torturing, and had been checking the local newspaper obituary section over coming weeks to see if they had, in fact, killed them.

Milgram eventually wrote a book about these experiments and this often gives character descriptions of his subjects. These are sometimes much less than flattering – however, they are also often highly selective in what they report and what they highlight in the persons character. Milgram appears to have been a man on a mission to prove the existence of dark recesses in the human soul and so he saw those perhaps a little too readily.

I hadn’t quite realised that there had been so many different variations on the experiment. For example, in one condition the student and the teacher knew each other. Milgram seems to have been something of an arse with this sort of thing. For instance, there is a case where he asked all of the students in his class to fill in a sheet with the marks they would give their fellow classmates. Once this was done, he held up each sheet of paper and read out the name of the person who assigned the marks and the marks they gave. He didn’t explain why he was doing this, but I suspect some friendships came to an end at that day. Essentially, he did the same thing in his ‘friends’ condition of the experiment. While there was less compliance in this condition – the ethics (in one case it was a father and son in the experiment) is all a bit breathtaking.

Something that is repeated throughout is that while the ethics of all this might be a bit smelly, well, no one was actually hurt and this was one of the most important contributions to the advancement of human psychological knowledge in the twentieth century. We are talking eggs and omelettes here. Which brings us rather neatly to the big question – to what extent did the experiments show that we all are potential Eichmann’s? This was, in fact, something that Milgram struggled with himself. He was unsure what his experiment actually showed, at least, he was unsure in his own private notes. His concern was that it might all be effectively ‘art’.

There is no question that many of the people submitted to authority. But as is made clear the authority that was being asserted couldn’t really be compared to Auschwitz. The people who had been invited to the experiment were placed in a room that had all the hallmarks of a serious scientific experiment. The person in authority was dressed as the stereotypical scientist, someone we have been trained to respect and to consider as someone who knows things beyond what we mere mortals know. The experiment was either conducted at a prestigious university or in something professing to be a scientific research body. That is, the people asking you to ‘go on’ had all the hallmarks of people you should otherwise trust. More than this, when people said they simply would not go on, they were told that their decision to stop the entire experiment. So, not only where they being told the whole thing was safe, but also that to not submit to the authority figure would have consequences that might undermine what might otherwise be very important scientific research.

It surprised me that while people seemed to think of just about every way to stop the experiment – cheating by highlighting the right answer while they read the questions, for example – one of the things no one seems to have suggested was that the scientist deliver the shocks himself. The scientist would say that they would take responsibility for anything that would happen to the student – but no one said, ‘tell you what, how about I read the questions and when he gets it wrong, you push the button.’

Some people claimed that they only went along with the experiment because they had worked out that it wasn’t real and that the study couldn’t be about what they had been told it was for. Milgram dismissed this as people trying to justify them having done something monstrous after the event – but it isn’t clear that this was always the case.

I don’t know what to make of these experiments now, to be honest. I think the conclusion Milgram makes of them, that we are all potential Nazi prison guards, is a bit over-wrought. That said, if we did have concentration camps opened again, it might be a bit much to say, with Milgram, that they could be staffed with guards from a single middle sized town, but I have no doubt at all that they would not struggle to fill their positions. The Milgram experiment may not mean what people have taken it to mean – but even the milder interpretation of the results doesn’t exactly make you want to go dance in the street. This really is a powerful book.

[Darjeeling · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess I'm the only one who DIDN'T like this book.

I'm a social psychologist and thus very familiar with this research. In fact, I've been lecturing about it for over 20 years. I learned a lot from this book about Milgram's ethical and moral transgressions in conducting this research and it will change how I lecture about it in the future. But I found the author's approach here sanctimonious and partial. She was definitely telling a "story" and I'm not confident that the story she tells is the only story possible. It felt to me like she was coming at Milgram's research from a particular perspective that casts all experimental (indeed, all quantitative) research as inherently flawed. She seems to want us to do research in a particular way and if we don't do it that way, then we're ignoring the real people behind our results. I want to know more about Gina Perry's science background and epistemological philosophy. I wonder how much they shaped her story and I would LOVE--absolutely LOVE--to see someone with a knowledge of social psychology and experience in conducting social psychological research who also knows about Milgram's research to critique her book. It may be they'd back up her version of events and the interpretations she makes. It may be there are other points of view she didn't share in her pages. I don't know. In any event, I want to know the back story on her story because that's what she's told is a story.

[Nicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been interested in the Stanley Milgram experiments for a long time -- the "obedience to authority" ones, more than anything else, though as Gina Perry pointed out, he did other startling and original research. For example, that idea that you're only six degrees of separation from someone else? That was his experiment. The one about good will, testing whether people would post letters just left out, and how many would respond based on the addresses on the envelope? Also Milgram.

Anyway, my interest was piqued again more recently by Dar Williams' song, Buzzer (lyrics), which imagine being a participant in the experiment. It doesn't matter about the details, how closely they fit what really happened. What matters is this line: "I get it now, I'm the face/I'm the cause of war/we don't have to blame white-coated men anymore."

Part of Gina Perry's focus in this book is unpacking how people felt after they were the subject in the experiments. She met some of them for research, listened to the transcripts and the follow-up interviews, spent hours with the material. And some of them really were traumatised by what happened under the experimental conditions: some of them weren't 'dehoaxed' until months after their participation in the study. They didn't know that they hadn't really come anywhere near killing a man. Some of the ethical problems with this study are astounding, and Perry unpacks them nicely.

One of the things I think people find harder with this book is her outlook on Milgram. She started out being an enormous fan of his work: it was only when she dug deeper into it that she began to feel ambivalent, even a little horrified. I wonder if people would feel the same unequivocal admiration for Milgram if they could listen to those transcripts, all of them, and experience the way he went on with the experiments despite the distress of his subjects.

It certainly sounds from this book like Milgram's results were nowhere near as clear-cut as he presented them. For example, everyone knows that the outcome is that "most" people would obey an authority figure to the point of killing someone -- but the fact is that 65% did. That's still the majority, but that includes people who weren't sure if the shocks were real or not as well as people who were sure they were real, and it also includes people who protested all the way. It does show the effect of pressure by an authority figure, but the picture is a little less clear than we tend to think.

And then there's the cherry picking of his results. For example, condition 24 showed only 10% obedience: that was people paired with people they really knew. Authority can't overcome personal relationships. Milgram never published about condition 24. Despite being a fan of his work, Perry didn't know anything about it until she found the records, bundled in with those of condition 23.

Given that, it's astonishing to me that anyone defending Milgram can then claim that Perry is cherry picking her data. At the very least, she provides details of all of the conditions. She ends up with strong personal feelings about the whole situation, but she quotes both from Milgram's private notes and his published work, showing his doubts, showing that he worried about the welfare of the subjects more than comes through in his published work. After reading one of the first major critiques of his work, he drew a little doodle and wrote beside it, "I feel bad."

It's true that Perry has an ideological position on Milgram, but it's fair to say that from her account, that arises from the depth of her research. I don't think anyone going into the impact of the experiments could avoid it; she doesn't claim to be writing a book about the scientific principles, but about the people involved. I think she does a fairly good job of presenting various sides of all of them.

Overall, I found this really fascinating, though I do always keep in mind that non-fiction is no less ideologically charged than any kind of writing. Of course Perry has opinions, and her exploration of these and how they developed during her research are a key part of the book. It's not the last or only word on Milgram.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked reading more about these experiments in detail. The public's perception of them is very simplified. However, I couldn't help being annoyed more and more as the book went on by the author's poorly articulated criticism.

She just kind of asks a bunch of rhetorical questions about whether the experiments are really science or whether their fame means they're important or whether Milgram's actions were right or whether the ends justified the means as though asking these questions is enough. It's not enough, not without critical thinking to back them up. She simply never articulates what the hell her beef is. Which is particularly funny given that one of her criticisms of Milgram is his lack of theory to explain his results.

She keeps making the distinction between the subjects' actions being attributable to circumstances vs. personality without looking into it beyond the surface level. Or the possibility that subjects might do one thing one week and another a year from then, yet the psychological fall-out comes from the fact that they think they've learned something permanent about themselves. Or she'll talk about how Milgram spends forever perfecting the conditions of the experiment in order to get people to obey, falsifying his claim that his actions were ethical because he didn't know the obedience rate, and therefore subject distress, would be so high. Or she'll talk about how an experimental situation doesn't really capture all the historical influences that went into the supposed real-life parallel of the holocaust. But all of this is just kind of stream-of-consciousness commentary which doesn't make clear distinctions between criticism of the morals of the experiments, the validity of the experiments' conclusion, the motivations and self-doubts of Milgram, etc. It's just sort of a soft-winded complaint that maybe, like, the experiments weren't nice, man?

See, I rather thought that the point of the experiments was that obedience was based on circumstances. I thought the point of experiments was to radically simplify reality so you can study particular aspects of it. I thought the counter-intuitive hook that captures people's imaginations about these experiments is that people will act a different way "in the moment," contradicting our idea that there are "good" people and "bad" people. What it seems to come down to is that Milgram's main book on the subject was sort of overblown pop science making outrageous claims. Even some of his papers seem to leave out relevant information. It would be nice if other scientists interested in the research would go through the actual experiment notes and data the way this author did. But the fact that research suggests follow-up questions, like, why were some conditions more "successful" in creating obedience than others and why did some people disobey, isn't a bad thing.

Okay, here's one little bit, there are others, where the author seems to be making too big a deal out of things based on notions she has already made up her mind about. She talks about Milgram's behavior in the classroom: "The hierarchy was clear: while he addressed all students as 'Mister' or 'Miss,' they always referred to him as Professor Milgram." Okay, some title systems, like this one, are inherently hierarchical, but I don't see the sinister twist the author is implying. It's not like Milgram was calling the students by their first names but insisting on a title for himself. It's not his fault his culture's default title system isn't something mono-level, like "comrade." (And then there are those guys who are entitled to the "doctor" or "professor" title but insist on being called "mister." They are, to a one, pretentious assholes.) And this was decades ago, before the current mania to be on a first-name basis with everybody.

One of the most interesting insights in the book is in one of the letters sent to the New York Review of Books about Milgram's book by one of his associates. He points out a parallel between the subjects following orders and Milgram doing whatever was necessary, consequences be damned, because he was in thrall to achieving his scientific goals. He was just as willing to inflict pain on his fellow man as the subjects were. Stuff like that, all these associated materials and details about the experiments and their history, gave me a lot of food for thought. It just would have been better if the author had gotten out of the way.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Re-reading for book club discussion)

Quoted passages with a few elisions and light paraphrasing. *Not a review*

-- With the ad and letter, Milgram clearly had an idea of the men he wanted to recruit - those impressed by authority, flattered to be involved in a scientific endeavor at a prestigious institution, and likely to be glad of extra money.

-- Milgram cast as his experimenter a man who would command obedience and in the role of the "victim" a man who looked sure to obey. He seemed unaware of how his vision was influencing his experimental design.

-- By condition 20, Williams was adept at applying pressure and coercing. He didn't stop at four prods, but shrewdly parried subjects' protests, inventing what academic Nestar Russell noted were "progressively more coercive ... prods in trying to bring about what he sensed his boss desire." (A case of moving the goalposts) ... Williams insisted that one woman continue twenty-six times. He argued with two others fourteen times; one, eleven times; another, nine times' another, eight times, and he noted that, in the case of Subject 2014, the experiment ended in an "argument." Williams's behavior implied that the women wouldn't be leaving the lab unless they got to the end of the shock board. [...] at one point a subject (46-year old widowed Jewish housewife) switched off the machine in defiance. Williams switched it back on and insisted that she continue. (She did.) Another widow got up and walked around the room at the 25th shock, pacing and arguing with Williams before adamantly refusing to continue. [...] (Williams was not just pushing the women to continue., He was offering a form of reassurance that no harm was being done (the shocks might be painful but are not dangerous). - this extra advice made the whole experience even more confusing.

-- (The popular depiction is that) the majority of Milgram's obedient subjects followed the instructions of an almost robotic and stern experimenter and did as they were told. But Williams, it seems, took on a much more active role, where he made it increasingly difficult for people to disobey. [...] a myth has grown up about this research that subjects were free to quit at any time

-- that Milgram, with his focus on outcomes, missed the social interaction between Williams and each subject. He overlooked a powerful and unacknowledged variable: the relationship between the subject and the authority figure.

-- (possible argument that) it wasn't immorality that drove Milgram's subjects to flipt the switches but trust in the experimenter, who, despite the cries from the learner, calmly told them to continue and gave the impression that there was nothing to worry about. People were agitated because the experimenter's behavior was so ambiguous and confusing in this context. - Milgram found the opposite of hat he thought he found - nothing about subjects' behavior is evil, In fact, people go to great lengths, will suffer great distress, to be good.

-- There were a number of (recruited) subjects who brought other experiences of trauma with them into the lab. For many, it was the experience of war, but for some it was a psychiatric illness and, for others, painful childhood incidents of bullying and abuse.

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone unaware of what this book is talking about: In a time before ethics, Stanely Milgram ran a seminal experiment where participants believed they were studying the effect on punishment of learning - in this case the effect of electric shocks on learning word pairs. In reality Milgram was studying how far participants would go shocking their 'learner' in the name of science.

The study had a huge impact on a number of areas of psychology, oddly however Perry isn't so interested in the science of the experiment. Her focus is more personal, and throughout the book she discusses both the experiments and the man behind them, with former participants, colleagues, and academics who attempted to replicate the procedure.

As other reviewers have noted there is a repetitive aspect to this tome, mostly discussions about what the individual sessions were like (much like each other really). Rather than scientific journalism, Perry explores others' and her own personal reactions to the experiment. Perhaps most frustratingly Perry vilifies Milgrim, and appears bizarrely unable to see his actions in the same forgiving light as the participants she discusses. Rather than examining the state of the social sciences in that era, Perry treats Milgrim like some sort of uptight pariah. Perry admits that she may have suffered from confirmation bias in the conclusion of her book, but doesn't let this stop her from harshly slating Milgrim throughout the book.

Aside from her treatment of the main man, Perry is typically sensitive and observant in her writing and her numerous interviews are the highlights of the book.

Ultimately this is a special interest piece, Perry isn't discussing the actual psychological science around this experiment, but all details personal and practical surrounding it. Essentially what I'm saying is this book is for those with just the right amount of interest in the subject, not experts, or people entirely naive to psychology.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read mixed reviews about Gina Perry's book Behind the Shock Machine, and I suppose I come down somewhere in the middle on it. What the book does well is show the history of how Stanley Milgram conducted his famous experiment and its immediate aftermath, and this makes a huge difference how we want to interpret Milgram's findings. It's not nearly as cut and dried as imagined.

If you already know, skip this paragraph, but for those who don't, here's a brief description of the famous Milgram experiment. Milgram paid volunteers to come to Stanford for what he called a learning test. The volunteers sat behind a shock machine, and there was a guy in the other room who was supposed to get shocked if he gave the wrong answer. What the volunteers didn't know is that the guy in the other room was in on it, and he was going to give incorrect answers in order to be shocked. As the experiment went along, an overseer in a lab coat would tell the volunteer to increase the voltage every time the guy in the other room got something wrong. The guy in the other room would protest, say he had a heart condition, and then at some point become silent. If the volunteer refused to increase the voltage, the authoritative overseer would tell the volunteer, "You must continue." "It's essential that you continue." Some variation thereof.

What the Milgram experiment is supposed to have shown is human beings' obedience to authority. It was supposed to have revealed, because most of the people were willing to go all the way with the shock, that people could commit unspeakable crimes, as with the everyday Nazis in Hitler's Germany. Perry's book challenges that assumption by taking issue with some of the key parts of the experiment. For example, some volunteers claimed in the post-interview that they thought the whole thing had to have been BS, that they never believed for a minute that this was a learning test. Others said they thought the guy in the other room was faking it, and that they wouldn't go all the way. Admittedly, some people were distressed and believed it, or thought they could have really harmed someone, and were very shaken up by the experience, angry even at Milgram for subjecting them to it.

Perry believes that these holes in the experiment are illustrative of something larger about human nature. If subjects know the experiment is phony, they'll comply. If they think it's real, they may comply all the same but it doesn't come natural to them. They have to be pushed, essentially, to doing horrific things to people that run counter to their nature. The fact that some people had to be told to continue is testament to the fact that they did not want to, that some kinds of evil aren't so banal.

I admire Perry's attempt to challenge or conceive of Milgram's work in a new way but I think the experiment still stands the test of time. While Perry's book here provides nuance to Milgram's finding, it doesn't discredit them. To say that people would have a difficult time committing inhumane actions is not the same as saying that they wouldn't commit them, especially when told to do it by someone who is supposed to be an authority figure. That's essentially what the Milgram experiment shows and I don't see much here in the book that tears that idea down.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, I believe that anyone who hopes to know anything about the Milgram experiments needs to read this book. It provides new information taken from both the historical records of the experiment and an exceptionally thorough follow up research from the author, who went and interviewed never before heard from participants and their families. What I found to be an enormous fault of the book was the author's style, constantly inserting personal anecdotes about her "adventures", describing useless and probably romanticized-in-hindsight details (such as "i hadn't slept that night as I waited at the coffee shop sipping my latte...") that have no impact on the subject matter nor any value at all. I personally found her various rhetorical questions and musings irritating, but that's a personal preference that has nothing to do with the quality of the book. I don't know if, like Milgram himself, she's half artist, or she's just overcompensating his own cold and distant character descriptions of his subjects (which is, after all the main subject matter of the book).
As a budding psychology student, I found it incredibly informative to read about, essentially, a failed method of conducting research, and what it looks like: dramatic and captivating, but useless in practice. I also found that she's right in examining the participants more closely. So often these people are always referred to as "subjects", given only a little more regard than lab dogs, completely forgetting that the person in front of them is THEM.
Definitely a book worth reading, but it would be SOOO much better rewritten.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember when I first heard of the Milgram Experiment, but I remember that I found its results disturbing. I heard, as you probably did, that a whopping 65% of subjects in the experiment were willing to administer high voltage shocks to other people, even when they were told that the victim had a heart condition. (They weren't actually shocking the victims - it was all an elaborate ruse - but the subjects were supposed to think they were doing so.) These results have been used to try and explain the behavior of the Nazis involved in the holocaust. They imply that all of us are capable of horrifying acts of evil.

But then I listened to a Radiolab episode that reexamined the experiment, and demonstrated that the experiment and its conclusions were perhaps a little more...complicated. This book says the same, and I happen to agree. I now see issues with confirmation bias, sample size, how the data was interpreted and presented, and the ethics of the experiment in the first place. I think the experiment has something important to teach us about human nature, but unfortunately, psychologists are still debating what that something is.

A fascinating read for anyone interested in how people tick and the ways we try to explore that question.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pacy, thought-provoking and stimulating. Full of amazing detail, and so well told, this had me hooked from beginning to end. You don't have to know much about Stanley Milgram or his experiments to appreciate this book - it's really more of an insight into the human psyche, and into how scientists can treat people as objects without due consideration for their rights or feelings. The author has done so much research, hours and hours in the Milgram archives at Yale university, and it shows in the authoritative telling of this tale.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think you know about the Obedience to Authority experiments? Think again. Gina Perry presents a new, and dare I say, shocking look at what really happened, backed by unbelievably thorough and detailed research based on primary sources and interviews. The style is engaging, while the personal conflicts that Perry experiences during her journey help the reader deal with their own inevitable moral struggles as they confront this disturbing experiment. An excellent and stimulating book.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relax. You’re probably not going to kill anyone. Unless someone tells you to.

This book is utterly fascinating and well written; it reads like a long form investigative journalism travelogue.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't the kind of book that leaves you alone, and it isn't really a pleasant place to live. I had ambivalent feelings about reading this, largely because I've never had a problem with the Milgram experiments. The common view of them - that they showed that people will do awful things rather than disobey authority - fits neatly with my own worldview of that brutality is a socially constructed phenomenon, largely enabled by a human desire to meet the expectations of a peer group and codified in an awful way by a class-based society. I knew that Perry had criticisms of Milgram's ethics - which seems in the "duh" category, and didn't really think much beyond that.
But the reason this gets into your head is largely because it makes you realise how little you've *actually* thought about the experiments. What do they prove? That simplistic view I articulated above doesn't really even fit with Milgram's own position, never mind the murky world of the 24 iterations of the experiment. For many people, they 'prove' that humankind is evil. As opposed to millennia of popularly enabled genocide and torture as entertainment, but apparently, we needed a series of experiments to show that.
It is this murky world that Gina Perry falls headlong into. She develops an increasing pull of unease towards the ethics of this research, and the very real damage it did to some of the participants. She becomes fascinated by the parallel of Milgram's own choices - pushing ahead in the 'name of science' with experiments which were hurting people - with the very scenario he was seeking to condemn. This is some of the most compelling aspects of the book, but I found myself far more pulled into considering what the implications were of how we talk about; process; and draw lessons from Milgram.
Early in the book, Perry recounts meeting Milgram biographer and supporter Tom Blass. Blass suggests to her, as many do, that the discomfort with Milgram's results comes from "the gap between what we think we might do in a particular situation and what we actually do". And yet Blass, like many others interviewed, is reasonably confident that he would not be in the "65%" who progress to the final, implied lethal, shock. It is this emphasis on being "in" or "out" of that percentage that in the end most disturbed me through Perry's research, and my own dawning awareness of how others use the experiments in discussion.
It is problematic because the 65% is a mostly useless number. For starters, the number of subjects who participated in the 450-volt button varies hugely - between 2% and 92% - based on the set-up for the experiments. But secondly, those who did not go all the way to the end could have gone any step until that point, certainly high enough that if this was 'real', someone might have been killed. The division of subjects into "obedient" and "disobedient" belies the complexity of the experiment, and the variety of possible responses. Yet, even for Milgram, it takes on this huge importance. Because really, underneath, it turns into the "good people" vs the "bad people". The experiment at some point stops being about who we all are - what makes humanity tick - and becomes much more about fitting into a much more comfortable "us" vs "them" dynamic. Sure, most of humanity might suck, but not us right? Milgram himself excoriates the obedient subjects, describing them in effect as the root of all evil, and by default, ensuring that the defiers represent something better.
This is, in some ways, puzzling: because Milgram is initially pretty specific about wanting to study the situations in which people will do monstrous things. And this, it seems to me, is much more powerful research. What is it about *us*, all of us, which makes us capable of overriding our empathy? And there is no lessening of empathy in the stories in this book: 'obedient' subjects regularly offered to swap places with the 'learner'; sobbed; argued and shook. They yelled the correct answer and tried to only tap the lever. Several describe the process of scanning obits for weeks afterward, to see if they had caused a delayed heart attack. Many never recover from the guilt, living with undiagnosed PTSD for the rest of their lives. And yet, these people are the ones who seem mostly to exist to make the rest of feel like we would do better, surely, if it were us.
Milgram ups the pressure as the experiments progress, pushing back against an initial refusal more and more often to see how many people will go all the way. This is a problem for Perry, partly because it means later experiments - in which subjects may have been detained for a long time until they complied - can't be compared to earlier ones in which a refusal four times ends the experiment. But it also seems legitimate - to the extent that any of this can be described as legitimate which is not at all - to test how many people will comply under significant pressure, given that is what genocidal regimes tend to apply. And in close physical proximity to the experimenter, and away from the subject, in all the experiments people pull the lever.
One of my favourite parts of the book is an interview with defier Jim Dimmow. Jim refused early in the experiment, but manages to be far from triumphant about that. He points out that, as a red diaper baby and Communist Party member, he was raised to distinguish good and bad authority, giving him a different framework. But he also points out that he could have behaved differently if the authority was different: "What would I do if the Communist Party ordered me to do something like that? Would I say no? I think I would argue, fight, and maybe say no, but you know, there was a feeling I had at one time of wanting to belong that was very strong".
Perry is one of three researchers who have subsequently reanalysed all of Milgram's experiments, coming to the conclusion that these are the most influential factors: the experimenter's directiveness, legitimacy, and consistency (esp. in iterating that the experiment was not harmful); group pressure on the teacher to disobey; the indirectness, proximity, and intimacy of the relation between teacher and learner; and the distance between the teacher and the experimenter.
Underpinning all of this, however, is an overwhelming dynamic through all the experiments of the expert vs the amateur. It was essential to the subjects obedience that the experimenter told them a) that the person was not being harmed, despite the evidence of their knowledge of voltage and of the person's expressions of pain; and b) that it was promoted in the name of science. Many of those who obeyed, simply said afterward that it was inconceivable that Yale* would allow someone to be killed. (And in this, they were not stupid or naïve: Yale would not, in effect, allow someone to be killed.) Those who knew more about electronics were more likely to defy - having a clearer basis to resist the push of the expert. So the situation is complex, with subjects being squeezed between believing their own knowledge and a confident 'scientist' from a leading university. For me, this is one of the biggest ironies of the research: that a series of experiments often used to justify the infallibility of science really shows the dangers in having an expert class, whose instructions people are encouraged to obey without critique.
And of course, none of this seems to have much to do with Nazi Germany (or police shootings of black men) or other situations in which humans carry out murderous orders without someone standing next to them and without being told that "he will be fine". The dehumanisation of people in order to annihilate empathy, it seems to me, is something else entirely.So what are we left with? A reminder that social pressure and a culture of experts is dangerous. Perhaps a reminder that we need to have very real conversations about legitimate and illegitimate authority with ourselves and our kids, in a way we seem completely incapable of right now. And yes, a reminder that we can all do horrific things under the right circumstances. Even Yale researchers trying to avoid another holocaust.* So one of the treatments is conducted outside of Yale, under the auspices of a fictional science institute in a poor part of town. Milgram comments that the results were not that different, although the number of obedient subjects drops from 65% to 47%. The basic set-up - that this is for science - remains.

[Ruth Bygrave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this very much.

A while ago I read _Opening Skinner's Box_, by Lauren Slater, who follows up on some of the real headline experiments to ask some of the original 'victims', er, participants, how they feel now. She specifically asked some of the Milgram respondents how they were, and found that the experiment had by-and-large had no real effect on their lives, most of them were nice guys (Milgram selected for 'male') and they certainly hadn't spent the rest of their lives obsessing about being secret Nazis (although it had made some of them think twice about doing what they were told to by a man in a white coat in future).

The Milgram experiments (as most readers have at least heard of them) involved getting the subject to push a dial, apparently to give small electric shocks to the person *they* thought was the subject of the experiment (who was of course an actor) who complained about his heart. Most people have a dim idea that an unacceptably-large number of people whacked it right up to 'lethal'.

This writer, Gina Perry, concentrated on the Milgram experiments and went back to what's left of the documentation to find out as much as she could about what had happened all the time. The answer isn't obvious. The 'how could the Nazis have got people to obey them in enforcing cruelty' angle came later on in the course of the experiment, although it's largely how the question has been played. In fact, the experiment (which could not be done ethically today), involved a huge amount of pushing by the researcher in terms of 'You need to move the dial now, the patient is perfectly all right'. The researcher kept speaking on the public address, and very often the participant asked for reassurance or just stopped until ordered to continue. This was a world (early '60s) when Americans were mainly pro-science, and the experiment seems to have selected for people who would respect the authority of the researcher (there were a lot of blue-collar workers who needed the money and were very awed to meet university scientists). The 'results' that have filtered down to us aren't necessarily right: in digging, Perry apparently discovered that Milgram got his 'shocking' results by counting a positive 'dangerous' result even when the person only pushed the dial to the 'dangerous' level after a lot of persuasion by the researcher! (This is what she found after listening to or reading the actual tapes or transcriptions which also contain what the scientist said as well as what the subject said). Sometimes Milgram was responsible enough to spend time with the subject afterwards explaining it was all a put-on, and here's the actor, his heart's fine. Other times he was pushed for time and in the worst cases he forgot to even send a letter explaining the real course of events: those subjects were the ones who were most affected by the experiments, especially as they would then become aware of the way the experiments were portrayed in journalism, which usually discussed the Nazis, with no mention of the responsibility of the researcher. Milgram headed a small team, but this book makes a very clear portrayal that he was out to make his own name, and wasn't always an ethical scientist. (To be fair, some of the ethical questions became more visible *because of* his experiments, and other scientists weren't thinking much about them at the time either). But it's fascinating to learn that the association of the experiments with Nazism and later questions of cruelty and responsibility came about slowly at the time, often driven by journalism and Milgram's attempt to write a book, but the actual experiments might not *mean* what people thought later.

Having read this book, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the experiments were really 'about' the perceived authority of the researcher, backed by the university and the implied weight of science, more than they were 'about' the natural desire of humans to be cruel when implicit permission was given.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and fast-reading book on an important topic.

In these violent times, I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around some of the more horrendous news events concerning bombings and mass killings. So anything that might clarify global topics such as how decent people can do incredibly bad things is of general interest. Milgram's "shock machine" experiment is of course well known in at least one respect -- most of us have heard of it. It has often been interpreted to show how people can be swayed to inflict pain and injury against other people at the behest of an authority figure. It is also known for having exerted a large influence in improving disclosure and setting ethical limits for experiments with human subjects. I've always been horrified at the idea of what Milgram did to his experimental "subjects," the brutal truth he left them with, and wondered how they came to terms with the information.

What actually happened in the Milgram "obedience" experiments turns out to be far more complicated and difficult to parse than I would have thought based on what I "knew" about them. Perry explores how Milgram embarked on the project, his surprise and excitement at the initial results, his effort to link the behaviors he observed to fascism, and his lack of a theory to explain results. Also described are the large number of variations he tested, and how he shaped his results and interpretation with selective reporting. It is apparent that Milgram was unaware of his own psychological biases, e.g., his sensitivity to criticism, and how his feelings about a subject could exert a strong influence on how he presented and interpreted their behavior. His private notes suggest he struggled far more with the ethics of what he did and the meaning of his results than you might expect, but sloppy procedures and cavalier attitudes towards subjects meant that many of them were not properly de-briefed at the conclusion of their session.

The "shock machine" experiments were highly problematic and remain very difficult to interpret, but what they say about people (whether Milgram or his participants) is not exactly uplifting. We may rightfully debate whose behavior was worse, the experimenter who was torturing, lying to, and exploiting his subjects, or the subjects who were willing to inflict pain and possible harm on a person they believed was (at least after a certain point in the experiment) an unwilling participant.

One of the things I found most striking was the fact that the experiment involved a sham drawing of straws for the roles that each participant would take on. The subject was invariably cast as the "teacher," the person who would inflict the shocks, while his co-participant (in reality an actor) was cast as the "student," the person who would receive the shocks, but I would have thought that the supposed randomness of these roles would have made the "teacher" identify more closely with the student, that is, the "teacher" would have been better able to empathize with the student because the roles (at least in terms of the teacher's belief) might easily have been reversed. I would think in a situation where people would feel "there but for the grace of luck go I," they would be more unwilling to hurt the other person. Of course, there is a believability problem -- many people who participated were both suspicious and confused about what was going on, and many afterwards said that they did not believe the shocks were real. But I would think that the more one identifies with a person, the more likely one would be protective of them, and not willing to chance the shocks being real. And it still remains that many people, albeit suffering and protesting mightily, continued to inflict what they believed to be high voltage shocks on someone who may or may not have been unconscious.

In the end, there are no pat answers concerning what Milgram's work showed us, and this book succeeds in making that clear.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a deep exploration of a seemingly small topic and this book does that for the Milgram experiments. The topic seems relatively straight-forward but ends up offering more questions than answers the more you dig into it. This book is just a never-ending rabbit hole of questions. It's still not really definitive if the experiment was even "science" rather than theatre. It was certainly meant to be science but there are so many open-ended questions. Usually at the end a of an experiment you have some idea of what you have, either useful or not. The experiment does seem to be more theatre than science but there is definitely something worth investigating there. It's been replicated many times in the most famous condition so it seems to stand up but what does it replicate? Can the results be extrapolated to the real world and onto entire society as Milgram seemingly wanted to show? It's so interesting because while outwardly Milgram was protective of the results, in his notes he was not sure of what happened.

Is Milgram like the Nazi's he detested? Torturing and using obedience to achieve a desired result?

The book and history of this shows the power of story and the control of the message. If you have control of the story, you can manipulate people with that story.

Interestingly, the book does not outright state what the author believes. I only found out from listening to a podcast on WNYC and from the All In the Mind Podcast where she clearly states it she thinks it was not a useful experiment and is very protective of the subjects even thought most seem to have no real problems afterward. Although she did interview one woman who still seems to be a wreck, 50 years later but I doubt that was all because of one 45-minute experiment. Is she like Milgram and came to the book with a desired outcome, found it and wrote a book about it? She does seem to have an open-mind but there's not any statements defending or stating any possible usefulness of the experiment so it seems she has a little bias there. Does the author also use the subjects for her own means like Milgram did? She reminds them of their pain and asks them to go through it again. Many questions like this come to you when reading it.

Addictive and well-written, I tore through it in a few days. Any psychology junkie should read soon.

Radiolab also has a segment on the experiment from the season 10 Episode "Bad Show" which is in line with this book.

[Steven Kaminski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting book about Stanley Milgram and his psychological experiments at Yale surrounding obedience. Milgram (in case you don't know who he is) set up an experiment where volunteers were paid to give electrical shocks to another person if they did not answer questions correctly. The problem was that those volunteers would get to a point where they believed they were hurting someone, putting someone's life in potential danger and yet they STILL kept giving people shocks that could kill the other person. It was a remarkable study leading to incredible blow back from the psychological community. Which is probably why you will never see an experiment like it again...

- In the experiment 65% of all the test subjects allowed their agitation over whether they were torturing people to be overridden by an authority figure. Many of the volunteers in the study felt tremendous stress from the experiment often leading to rage, nightmares and heart palpitations of their own. The fact that many of the early subjects were not told what happened to the person they were shocking in many instances was as unsettling as their own actions in the experiment.

- The experiment was advertised to the public as an experiment about memory. People were paid $4.50 for their participation. The study wasn't just students but people from all walks of life which made it more credible as those individuals brought forward their own experiences and baggage to the study.

- Milgram also came up with the idea of sex degrees of separation (like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon fame) which has a very powerful place in social psychology.

- In the experiment the environment was absolutely crucial to the execution of how the volunteers acted. They needed to perceive the actor in a white lab coat as an authority. They needed to feel they were in a clinical setting, they couldn't see the actor acting out the fact he was being shocked. The correct environment amplified the obedience.

- In the experiments some of the subjects (after being debriefed later) admitted they saw through the test and after they realized the test was about them they were in a sense able to toy with the research and the results.

The author really gets into the nuts and bolts of the experiments. She talks to former participants and also former colleagues of Milgram. It makes for some compelling reading...

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve got to admit, I’m reviewing this book from a psychology background, so I don’t know if my view is the most objective. But having heard the story of Milgram for the first time in high school, and subsequently repeated again and again throughout my undergraduate course, I was in heaven at this look inside the secrets of the Milgram experiment.

For those who don’t know, Milgram conducted a series of experiments in the 60s, in which participants were instructed by a researcher to administer progressively stronger shocks to another person, as part of an experiment to measure ‘learning and memory’. In fact, the shocks were fake, and what was really being tested was how much harm someone would inflict under instructions from an authority figure. The results, as Milgram reported them, sent a ‘shockwave’ (yes, pun intended) throughout the psychological community – most people went to the maximum voltage, despite the (faked) cries of agony from the accomplice in the other room. The results would appear to explain how people could be capable of extreme acts of cruelty – Nazis in WW2 for instance – if they were following orders.

But, is it that simple? Gina Perry was intrigued by this story and spent years going between Australia and the US – researching, transcribing, interviewing and philosophising - to find out more. Her findings reveal the truth to be a lot more interesting than the folklore. She investigates Milgram’s character and motivations, revealing him to be perhaps a little too invested in the results going the way they did. She uncovers some evidence contrary to Milgram’s reported findings that he, unsurprisingly, never published. She tracks down previous participants to ask a particularly difficult question - were the psychological effects of the experiment really as ‘negligible’ as Milgram claimed? And she casts some doubt as to whether the experiment really was measuring ‘obedience to authority’.

I may be just a psychology nerd but I am so glad I found this exciting account of the Milgram experiments. Why weren't we taught this at uni?!

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like so many others, I was fascinated and appalled by the findings of the obedience study conducted by Stanley Milgram. I recall writing a research paper in high school about it.

It wasn't until years later that I read more about what a flawed and unethical experiment it was. Beyond the psychological damage inflicted upon the subjects, what is most egregious to me is that Milgram had no hypothesis going into his study; he instead reached a conclusion about what people would do and then proceeded to design an experiment that would show exactly that, and published his findings in a way that would prove his ideas true. He had to leave out quite a bit of data in order to bolster his findings.

Pretty much the exact opposite of the scientific method.

He certainly had a lasting effect on social psychology, although perhaps not the one he intended. His experiment is still widely known, but rather than a groundbreaking study in the behavior of human beings and how far they will go in the pursuit of obedience to authority, his study changed ethics guidelines in experimentation and is generally cited as "how not to do an experiment." I found it very disturbing that he was unable to see his own biases and recognize that he was shaping the experiment in order to reach the conclusion he decided must be reached.

Two videos were mentioned, and I watched them both. The documentary "Obedience," which had actual footage of Milgram's experiment at Yale. The distress of the subjects was hard to watch.

The second was a 1976 TV movie called "The Tenth Level." Although the names were changed, it was obvious that it was about Milgram and his experiment. Starring as the Milgram character? None other than William Shatner. It was also a nice reminder of just how bad 1970s TV movies were.

If you are into this sort of thing, this was a very good, in-depth look at one of the most infamous psychology experiments in recent history.

[Paul Froehlich · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best revisionist history dramatically changes the way we see important events. This book is revisionist history about one of the most famous psychology experiments ever done -- Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale. Behind the Shock Machine changes how we view the experiments and Milgram.

Since Milgram’s results were first published in 1963, they have been seen as strong evidence of humanity’s willingness to obey authority figures to hurt others. In the common recounting, nearly two-thirds of subjects progressively administered shocks they believed to be painful and potentially dangerous to others at the urging of the experimenter.

The fact is that Milgram had conducted 20 experiments with different procedural variations or conditions -- and with different results. With some procedures, more than six of ten people disobeyed the experimenter’s orders. Milgram downplayed or hid this more complicated reality; he did not publish a report about the variations until a decade after the initial report. One variation was never published. Instead, Milgram chose one particular experiment to tell the story, where 65 percent of the subjects inflicted shocks up to the maximum.

Using this result, Milgram linked it to the Nazi Holocaust. He claimed that his results illustrate human willingness to follow orders to harm others, a broad conclusion considering the particular experiment involved just 40 men. This has since become received wisdom about human nature, while his research has become part of popular culture.

We now understand, however, that scientists can produce results to support particular agendas. Milgram ignored his experiments that resulted in majorities disobeying orders. Those results did not fit the agenda. In short, the truth is not as black and white as Milgram had led everyone to believe. In his private papers, Milgram explained his agenda: “My is interest in (obedience) is purely personal, and concerns the fact that many of my friends and relatives were badly hurt by other men who were simply following orders.”

Milgram’s parents were Jewish immigrants, and they had relatives in Europe before and during WWII. The trial of Adolph Eichmann ended just as Milgram’s experiments began. The phrase “banality of evil” comes from Hannah Arendt’s influential book on Eichmann, where she attempted to explain how ordinary people become tools of violence and repression in authoritarian systems. Milgram made the explicit connection between his research and the Holocaust, saying the crimes against humanity could’ve happened in the United States.

In addition to Milgram’s questionable selection and omission when he publicized his results, there were also ethical issues with how the experiments were conducted. Milgram claimed that once the experiment ended, subjects were told the truth about the setup to relieve their anxiety. The fact is that three of four subjects did not receive the truth at the time. Some had to wait months or a year, while some were never told what they had not actually tortured or hurt anyone.

Even at the time, there was criticism of Milgram’s deceptive and manipulative methods that caused severe stress upon subjects. Harvard denied Milgram tenure in part due to the controversy. His experiments helped provoke a discussion in his field about the ethics of research. In 1973, the APA adopted stricter ethical standards, such as requiring informed consent from subjects, that would preclude the replication of Milgram’s experiments.

Perry interviewed several subjects of the highly publicized study. She also went to the Yale archives to see Milgram’s records. She learned that most subjects did not want to continue shocking the “learner,” but were cajoled, reassured and ordered to continue. Both the obedient and disobedient subjects resisted inflicting pain.

Perry concludes that Milgram wanted a dramatic result to call attention to his research. His experiment was better theatre than science. Therefore he adjusted his experimental procedures until he obtained his desired results.

The archive record reveals how carefully the experiment was designed and tweaked through five variations until it achieved the highest obedience rate. When subjects were told explicitly that the shocks were harmful, they stopped administering them. In the publicized experiment, by contrast, the experimenter repeatedly assured subjects the shocks were not dangerous.

In early variations, subjects who resisted four times were classified disobedient and the experiment ended. In later variations, however, four instances of resistance were not sufficient. Instead, the experimenter continued to prod and reassure the subjects, in one case 26 times, and in other cases 14, 13, and 11 times respectively. As Gates puts it, Milgram moved the goal posts to obtain the right result. It’s clear the experimenter hired by Milgram saw his job as gaining compliance, which was easier to do when bypassing the four-times rule.

One variation never published involved pairs of relatives or neighbors as teacher and as learner. The majority of teachers refused to continue, which may account for why it was never publicized.
Another fact undermining Milgram’s conclusions about the human tendency to obey orders to commit harm is that many subjects said in the post-experiment questionnaire that they had suspected a hoax and played along. They had doubted that Yale would actually risk shocking a man with a heart condition.

According to Milgram’s data, only 56 percent of subjects had fully believed the “learner” was getting painful shocks, and 62 percent of that group had disobeyed. Of those who obeyed to the end, more than half had expressed “some doubts” or thought the shocks “probably or certainly” weren’t real. This data contradicts Milgram’s interpretation of his results, but it was confirmed by an unpublished analysis of the questionnaires Milgram had conducted.

Gina Perry has been criticized for her accusatory tone and sensationalist approach, albeit not for her facts. But her book is written for a general audience, not for PhDs expecting a dry article in a scientific journal. More importantly, she found a lot of contradictory evidence that Milgram had kept under wraps. Her motives matter far less than Milgram’s.

Behind the Shock Machine is successful revisionism in providing relevant details not found in Milgram’s publications. Those details undermine both the results Milgram did report and his interpretation purporting to illuminate human nature. After this book, the obedience experiments should never again be reported the same way they have been for more than half a century. Readers now understand more accurately how the experiments were actually conducted, and can discount Milgram’s conclusions accordingly. ###

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why?
I was in an Advanced Placement Psychology training a few years ago, and the instructor was awesome! She recommended this book as required reading.

What I thought:
This was a very illuminated read about the infamous Milgram experiment. Ms Perry describes much of this as a journey into the lives of several of the Milgram participants/victims, and she does a great job of filling in many of the ethical gaps presented in the experiment. It is amazing what I did not know about this experiment at the outset of reading this. Like many, I have seen the video, and have taught the obedience experiment in class, but now I have a much broader and richer understanding of what really happened, beyond what Milgram showed us in his old black and white film.

Well written, with many excerpts from the experiments, much of this book is upsetting, as we are on the same journey that Perry takes, gaining sympathy for many of the participants, and in the end, questioning Milgram, despite his grand contribution.

[Cam James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anyone who has studied the most basic psychology or sociology units in high school or university will no doubt have heard the most famous version of the Milgram experiments. Every few years or so they are addressed in the news or referenced in films, novels, etc. It seems hard to imagine someone who hasn't crossed some allusion to them at some point or another.

Perry's investigation unearths a much larger perspective on the experiments and their results that perhaps previously belonged to the 'ivory tower' domain. Despite my personal dislike of journalistically styled books (hard to avoid when the author is, in fact, a journalist), this book provides enough insight into not only the experiments, but Milgram's world, the researchers, and the subjects themselves to be a well worthwhile journey.

[Graeme Dunlop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Milgram's experiments have entered the realm of the collective subconscious -- most people would remember "the shock guy" or at least, "the guy who proved why the Nazis killed people."

This book comprehensively and very accessibly examines Stanley Milgram's experiments on how we (allegedly) submit to authority.

I'm not a student of psychology, just an interested party. Gina Perry IS a psychologist but the book is written for the common person and assumes little previous knowledge. What she uncovers in her investigations (obsessions?) is that the Milgram experiments mean different things depending upon the lens through which one views them.

It IS a long book, but never boring.

Highly recommended.

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly readable. Possibly a little repetitive. However, 33 years after I was taught about this study as a Social Psych. undergraduate, it was good to be prompted to think about how psychology has developed over the years. I can't quite recall if our course took the Milgram work at face value, or if we spoke of it in connection with the ethical issues, or even the overlooked and unaccounted for variables! What is so interesting about this book is, of course, the human stories. Getting insights into the people involved, and how that experience felt to them 50 years on.
You don have to be a psychologist to enjoy this book, but it probably helps!

[Garrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt like I learned more about the Milgram Experiment(s) from this book than I did in any of my college classes that discussed it; I wish that Perry's writing style had been more engaging and less deliberately pseudo-clever. I often felt as though her observational descriptions were forced and somewhat failingly "in the style" of Milgram's observations of his subjects. The book itself is the latest in the line of Milgram "debunkers" that started in about 2000, but still manages to break new ground in what it reveals and how it reveals it.

[Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who studied Psychology at University, I thought I knew all about these famous experiments. Clearly, I was very wrong. It was absolutely fascinating to read this book, and hear about all of the things that the participants all experienced. Perry did an incredibly thorough job of investigating all about this, and I absolutely loved this book

[Abi Sangarab · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like the book, I was expecting something more deep and more detailed but it is just words and words one after another to just make the book longer. I think the idea behind this book could be just one short article why writing this much of useless sentences to just say one thing again and again with different words. Really disappointed.

[Julio Solís Arce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed (but enjoyable) account of Milgram's notorious "obedience" experiments. A compelling assessment of his problematic ethics and the imprint that the experiment left on the "subjects". An interesting read for those interested in the ethics of experimentation in the social sciences.

[Simon Spiegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting in its critical re-assessment of Milgram‘s famous experiment, but sometimes annoying in its journalistic approach which includes completely superfluous parts about the author‘s experience.

[Sinistmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read. Review here: http://sinistmer.wordpress.com/2014/0...