Stanley Milgram: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas and Legacy

Told by a calm man in a grey coat to keep pressing the switch, most ordinary people went all the way to a lever marked 450 volts - Danger: Severe Shock. They were not monsters. That is exactly what makes the finding so hard to forget.Stanley Milgram set out to answer the question the war-crimes trials had left hanging: how could so many ordinary people take part in atrocity? In a plain laboratory at Yale in the early 1960s, he built an experiment that gave the question a number. Sixty-five per cent of his volunteers obeyed to the end - far beyond the fraction of one per cent that experts had predicted - and psychology has been arguing about what it means ever since.Stanley Milgram: A Gateway to His Life, Ideas, and Legacy is a clear, human introduction to the restless mind behind the most famous - and most contested - experiment in social psychology. It follows Milgram from a Bronx childhood to Harvard and Yale, and it takes his ethics as seriously as his findings.Inside, you'll discover: - How the obedience experiment actually worked - the shock generator, the scripted learner, the four calm prods - and why the situation, not the person, did the work- Why "people do not need to be monsters in order to do monstrous things" became his most enduring and uncomfortable lesson, and the idea of the "agentic state" behind it- The small-world study that gave us "six degrees of separation" - what Milgram really found, and what the slogan leaves out- His lesser-known work - the lost letter, the familiar stranger, the cyranoid - and the single curiosity that unites it: the hidden architecture of social life- The fair, unflinching reckoning his research demands - the deception, the distress, the ethics storm he provoked, and the safeguards that now protect research participants because of itPart of the Pioneers of Human Behaviour series: premium, accessible, carefully researched gateways into the people who changed how we understand the mind. Quotations and key facts are checked against primary texts and trusted scholarship.Whether you are a student, a professional, or simply someone unsettled by what the experiments reveal, this is the honest, gripping introduction to the man who showed how easily good people follow orders.