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Site Map OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY |
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Acknowledgments The experiments described here emerge from a seventy-five-year tradition of experimentation in social psychology. Boris Sidis carried out an experiment on obedience in 1898, and the studies of Asch, Lewin, Sherif, Frank, Block, Cartwright, French, Raven, Luchins, Lippitt, and White, among many others, have informed my work even when they are not specifically discussed. The contributions of Adorno and associates and of Arendt, Fromm, and Weber are part of the zeitgeist in which social scientists grow up. Three works have especially interested me. The first is the insightful Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State, by Alex Comfort; a lucid conceptual analysis of authority was written by Robert Bierstedt; and Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine developed the idea of social hierarchy in greater depth than the present book. The experimental research was carried out and completed while I was in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, 1962-63. And I am grateful to the department for helping me with research facilities and good advice. In particular I would like to thank Professor Irving L. Janis. The late James McDonough of West Haven, Connecticut, played the part of the learner, and the study benefited from his unerring natural talents. John Williams of Southbury, Connecticut, served as experimenter and performed an exacting role with precision. My thanks also to Alan Elms, Jon Wayland, Taketo Muata, Emil Elges, James Miller, and J. Michael Boss for work done in connection with the research. I owe a profound debt to the many people in New Haven and Bridgeport who served as subjects. Thinking and writing about the experiments went on long after they had been conducted, and many individuals provided needed stimulation and support. Among them were Drs. Andre Modigliani, Aaron Hershkowitz, Rhea Mendoza Diamond, and the late Gordon W. Allport. Also, Drs. Roger Brown, Harry Kaufmann, Howard Leventhal, Nijole Kudirka, David Rosenhan, Leon Mann, Paul Hollander, Jerome Bruner, and Mr. Maury Silver. Eloise Segal helped me get several chapters under way, and Virginia Hilu, my editor at Harper & Row, displayed remarkable faith in the book and in the end lent me her office and rescued the book from a reluctant author. At the City University of New York, thanks are due to Mary Englander and Eileen Lydall, who served as secretaries, and to Wendy Sternberg and Katheryn Krogh, research assistants. Judith Waters, a graduate student and skilled artist, executed the line drawings in Chapters 8 and 9. I wish to thank the Institute of Jewish Affairs, London, for permission to quote at length from my article "Obedience to Criminal Orders: The Compulsion to Do Evil," which first appeared in its magazine, Patterns of Prejudice. Thanks also to the American Psychological Association for permission to quote at length several of my articles which first appeared in its publications, namely, "Behavioral Study of Obedience," "Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind," "Group Pressure and Action Against a Person," and "Liberating Effects of Group Pressure." The research was supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation. Exploratory studies carried out in 1960 were aided by a small grant from the Higgins Fund of Yale University. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972-73 gave me a year in Paris, away from academic duties, that allowed me to complete the book. My wife, Sasha, has been with these experiments from the start. Her abiding insight and understanding counted a great deal. In the final months it came down to just the two of us, working in our apartment on the Rue de Remusat -- jointly dedicated to a task that is now, with Sasha’s sympathetic help, complete. Stanley Milgram
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