ABSTRACT
Stanley Milgram believed that obedient subjects see themselves not as people acting in a morally accountable way, but as the agents of external authority. The book is written in a clear, down-to-earth way, and provides ample quotes from interviews with participants in his experiments, giving the reader a better sense of how they felt and why they remained obedient even when it meant hurting another person. Milgram's 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View aimed, above all, to identify those factors that make obedience to authority most likely to occur, even when it results in behavior that the individual finds morally wrong. Striving to understand how people can engage in behavior that they feel is immoral simply they are obeying orders; Milgram was also interested in the factors that make disobedience more likely. Milgram argues that the participants experience an agentic shift: in the context of his experiments, they attributed responsibility for their actions to the experimenter-the authority figure.
