ABSTRACT
Despite the intellectual appeal of physical reductionism and the practical influence of genetic science, the contemporary age is primarily the age of the social sciences. In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram, then of Yale University, conducted a series of experiments on the behavior of human beings, the purpose of which was to examine the phenomenon of obedience to authority. Milgram's famous experiments yield results typical of much research in the social sciences—theories of a high level of generality that are mechanical and unconvincing; middle-level theories, such as the agentic shift, which are partially successful; and low-level theories or "laws," which are simply inductions from the experimental evidence. Milgram never explicitly defines his concept of authority, presuming instead that an experimental view will be morally neutral and present the issue in contemporary and relevant terms.
