Reddit reviews Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (Perennial Classics)

If you're interested, there are two books that answer your question:

• Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram (More info...), and
  
• The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo (More info...)
  
  TL;DR
  
  
• the further you are removed from your victims, the more likely you'll obey unchallenged authority figures to do anything
  
• you play the roles you're given, breaking previous social contracts
  
  You don't have to go far to see modern-day examples. While we can blame ISIS as some far-away, backwards group of people, we have no such excuse for what happened in Abu Ghraib.

If you've never read Obedience to Authority, you really should make time for it. The book details the years of research that unpacked the many nuances of the power of authority, things like its power relative to proximity, gender differences, obedience and empathy, the influence of cooperative or non-cooperative peers, any so much more. One of the most important psychology books I read in graduate school.

Human action and behavior (aka human nature) CHANGES based on the form of socially authoritative system they find themselves bound to. To learn about the varying features of human nature, I highly recommend reading Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View by Stanley Milgram.

I think there is a divide that is more general, and deeper, than the specific issue of banning.

I elaborated on this a few times before, so I will just quote and link a post describing what I think is the fundamental disagreement here (and advocating for "my side"):

> > That fucker you were pleased with in this very post said that "refusal to debate" is reactionary and/or authoritarian.
>
> Yes... and I don't care much for the exact phrasing (and in fact, I went on about the phrasing here).
>
> But it really is a simple fact that the refusal to debate, the use of pat answers and cliches with the air of finality, the shutting down of disagreement through mockery/abuse, etc., are characteristic of both the authoritarian personality, and of authoritarian societies.
>
> C.f.:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
>
> > Cis people are that fucking entitled.
>
> Do you really think it has anything to do with "cis people" feeling entitled? Actually I think most people in most circumstances feel entitled to receive justification for assertions given to them. Not to demand justification is actually an authoritarian trait, in a way -- the kind of thing that begins with a childhood of being told "because I said so" and ends with the "agent state" capacity described in Obedience to Authority.
>
> Personally I am trying to raise my daughter in such a way that she feels entitled to explanation in exactly this way. I do not want her to accept anything on a "because I said so" basis. So, I am always giving her the reasons for things (when I don't let her do things, for example), even if she won't understand, so that she will expect reasons. And when she is older I will tell her not to listen to anyone who can't explain why, and I will warn her about the many people who believe things without knowing why.
>
> That was a bit of a tangent, but the point is, I don't think this feeling of being entitled to explanation, debate, rationale, etc., has anything to do with "cis people," and I don't think it is a bad thing. I think it is a very good thing. I think it is the foundation of skepticism. I wish to see more of it, not less.
>
> Incidentally, I'm reminded of a relevant quote. I am sorry that it is so long, in addition to my already-long post with many links. But it is quite good, and there is no way to shorten it.
>
> > Paul Rabinow: Why is it that you don't engage in polemics ?
>
> > Michel Foucault: I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It's true that I don't like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.
>
> > In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.
>
> > The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

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Finally, for a bit of balance, I will quote /u/Voltairinede's defense of the opposite position, with emphasis added:

> >Is it acceptable to mock people for their assumed physical appearance/grooming?
>
> depends on whether their oppressed or not.
>
> >Is it acceptable to imply that other people have never experienced marginalization, while knowing nothing about them?
>
> its an odds game, but I get it right nearly all the time.
>
> >Does making light of "marginalization" in this way (bragging about the power to marginalize others) create the kind of atmosphere in which the marginalized become safer, or does it normalize marginalization itself?
>
> marginalising the non-marginalised makes safe spaces for the marginalised.
>
> >What kind of response is this type of behavior likely to provoke?
>
> Fear, confusion, anger, frustration.
>
> >What kind of social atmosphere follows from it?
>
> A hostile one for reactionaries, one where the war between oppressed and oppressor is in the open.
>
> > Does it produce the kind of social atmosphere that you would like to see characterize society as a whole?
>
> Yeah

(This may not be the strongest defense of that position, but I quote it as a clear statement of what that position is.)

What people should keep in mind about the milgram experiment is that he did a lot of variables, and there were an specific set of variables that brought out the worst in people. Just FYI. His book Obedience to Authority covers every single variable and what it means.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely look into them. These books have been really helpful:

>"when prophecy fails" - its by the sociologists who came up with the concept of "cognitive dissonance", they followed a group that believed they were getting messages from outer space from "Sandana", and a flood was coming and flying saucers would pick them up [spoiler: no flood, but some still believed]

>"Obedience to Authority" - this is the famous Stanley Milgram experiment, and they found that religious people were the most likely to "obey authority" even when it was for things against their conscience, e.g. shocking people to death (actor played the part of the "student").

I would recommend reading [Ordinary Men] (http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068) a book that uses the narrative about a group of ordinary Germans from all walks of life committed some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust: many Jews were not killed in chambers (the final solution) where their screams could be ignored. These "ordinary men" were forced to take jews out of villages and shoot them in cold blood, even infants.

The author uses it as a cautionary tale of the horrors of brainwashing propaganda and war; how average joes can be convinced that what they're doing is ok because it is sanctioned by a higher authority and therefor rationalize it to themselves. For more on that you can read about Milgram's psychological experiments, described in [Obedience to Authority] (http://www.amazon.com/Obedience-Authority-Experimental-Perennial-Classics/dp/006176521X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342748841&sr=1-1&keywords=obedience+to+authority). In the 1950s people were insisting that the Holocaust was a strictly German thing, that it happened once and never again. Milgram proved that most Americans would be willing to inflict pain on others to the point of death (they truly thought the actor was being killed by shocks) as long as some authority sanctioned it. He showed that even in our "good country" if an authority figure tells you to do something, you place all responsibility on him and become willing to kill. Afterwards participants would say things like "I felt bad for hurting the guy so bad, but I wanted to do my job well" and things like that.


People have always been quick to deny involvement, or claim to be just doing their small part. It's complacency towards hate that leads to these atrocities, not millions of hateful people.

I may be in the minority but I don't think that Mills's Sociological Imagination is a good starting point for an introduction to sociology. While the first chapter (The Promise) may be worth a read, the rest of the book is very much an insider's critique of the subject and requires the reader to have a general understanding of sociology as it is being practiced post-WWII. I think that you will get the most out of Mills after familiarizing yourself with sociology more broadly.


As others have mentioned, Ritzer & Stepnisky's Sociological Theory is a very comprehensive overview of sociological thinking but it may be a bit overwhelming. While it isn't as encyclopedic as Ritzer & Stepnisky, I like Seidman's Contested Knowledge because it provides the reader with both a historical overview of sociological thinking and provides easy to read summaries of important thinkers.


I am not sure if you will find these too difficult but here are some other books that may expand your understanding of sociology:

• Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance by Howard Becker
  
• Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View by Stanley Milgram

He wrote a great book on his studies called Obedience to Authority. He goes deep into detail on his experiments and the data he got and how people reacted. His writing style is easy and conversational so that you don't need a PHD to understand him, though he doesn't dumb anything down.

Honestly one of the only books I've read that made me a better human being.

Probably this study. I knew somebody who said electricians refused to provide the shocks, but I have never confirmed that.

Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy Wilson is personally one of my favorites
Anything by Malcolm Gladwell (I really enjoyed Blink)
Anything by Robert Cialdini (He was my social psychology professor and one of my favorite authors / public speakers)
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time) by Claude M. Steele (Who basically uncovered stereotype threat research)
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Phillip Zimbaro (famous for the Stanford prison experiment)


Older books:
Mindfulness by Ellen Langer (about automatic processes and how mindless we can be)
When Prophecy Fails by Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter (To understand how cults work, a group of researchers infiltrate a join a cult. Mainly about cognitive dissonance but details what happens to a cult when the world doesn't end like predicted)
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View by Stanley Milgram if you want to know all about the Milgram experiments

Sorry that is all that comes to mind now. . . (edited for formatting)

This book would be a good place to start: https://smile.amazon.com/Obedience-Authority-Experimental-Perennial-Classics/dp/006176521X/ref=smi_www_rco2_go_smi_g2563698942?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0&ie=UTF8

For some really interesting studies about the nature of authority, I recommend:

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo (the one responsible for the Stanford prison experiment)

Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram (of the Milgram experiment)

The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. The book is freely available at his site.

Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram describes a classic experiment and is very readable.

I think you might enjoy some books that often serve as a learning tool for many sociology students.

A Shopkeeper's Millennium by Paul E. Johnson.

Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

War and Empire by Paul Atwood.

Each book is either a study to prove or present a hypothesis, so naturally tries to present evidence in a simple and clear way. No extended parts on boring sociological theory. The books are all easy to read and understand, and most importantly they are all a pretty good read.
One thing they all have in common is that their value or methodology is often controversial and highly debated in many crowds.

For instance, the Milgram book is the foundation for the famous Milgram Yale Shock Experiments in the 60's, so naturally there is the issue with ethics and methodology. If I remember correctly, this study is the reason any scientist today has to have his/her work approved by an Ethics Committee every time human subjects are involved.

War and Empire is a bit far-fetched at times, but is still very engaging, and at times hard to put away. Some might argue that it falls under 'History' more than 'Sociology', but because of how recent a lot of the topics are, I think there is real value there within sociology.

Guns, Germs and Steel is basically an overly simplified answer to a very complex and multidimensional question, but it's still a very fun idea to explore when you read it. Most people in the social sciences have heard of this book, and with it most people have also heard a lot of criticism.

The Shopkeeper's Millennium is probably the "best" of the four, as it often used as a "benchmark" for many sociology students on how historical research is conducted and used to present a study. The book is old, but it's still taught at many colleges to this day.

Based on your request, I think the Milgram book would be the most interesting for you to start with. Simply put the purpose of the study was to see if there is a correlation between obedience and the presence of authority.

I've also read a few books on poverty and unemployment in the Black and Latino communities. If that sounds interesting, let me know and I'll see if I can dig up some titles and names for you.

EDIT: Fixed some words.