In this episode we unpack American Social Psychologist Stanley Milgram's 1974 book "Obedience to Authority."
This book explores...
-Why we lose our sense of moral responsibility when taking orders
-Why we are so bad at predicting our capacity to be obedient
-Why the desire to be polite can lead us to do evil
Links to Reading and Other Books/Movies Mentioned
Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram
CRT: An Introduction by Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic
Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian (short story)
Experimenter (movie about Stanley Milgram)
A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick (film)
**note** reading is not required to enjoy the episode!
Host: Zach Stehura UnpackingIdeas.com
Guest: Claire Bevan ClairehBevan@gmail.com
Theme Music: Polyenso listen here
Timestamps
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:52 Historical context of the Milgram Experiment
00:05:00 Asch’s Conformity Experiment
00:06:57 Milgram’s Existential Questions for the Experiment
00:09:25 Milgram’s Personal Motivation for the Experiments
00:09:53 Summary of the Experiment
00:15:012 Milgram’s Hypothesis for the Experiment
00:17:25 Results of the Experiment
00:18:39 the Disconnect between our predictions and reality
00:19:50 The Attribution Error
00:21:07 The Agentic State/Loss of Moral Responsibility
00:25:47 The Horrific Consequences of the Division of Labor in Society
00:28:12 Doing What We’re Told as a Way of Preserving Cognitive Energy
00:32:35 Victim Blaming
00:33:10 Dehumanization feedback loop
00:38:26 Variations of the Experiment
00:39:20 Proximity of Experimenter to Subject
00:43:35 Proximity of Subject to Victim
00:47:47 Power in Numbers in Dissent
00:51:30 Not Seeing Disobedience as an Option
00:54:08 Counteranthropromorphism
00:56:36 More Variations
00:58:52 Motivations for Dissent
01:01:30 The Sequential Nature of Action
01:03:43 The Unknown of Dissent
01:04:22 The Moment of Bravery to Say No
01:05:08 Obeying out of a sense of Politeness
01:09:49 Feeling Bad After Doing the Right Thing
01:12:28 Profiles of Subjects
01:13:22 Obedience to God as an Antidote to Obedience to Corruption
01:18:14 Feeling Bad vs. Doing Good
01:20:18 The Effects of the Experiment on the Subjects
01:23:08 The Ethics of the Experiment
01:24:40 Lessons Learned for the Experiment
01:29:16 Variations we would have liked to see
01:32:22 Wrapping Up/Outro
