Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 1: Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust - Paperback

by Nestar Russell (Author)

1. Introduction.- 2. The Origins and Evolution of Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiments.- 3. How Milgram Ensured Most Participants Completed the First Official Experiment.- 4. The Obedience to Authority Variations and Milgram's Agentic State Theory.- 5. Academia's Response to Milgram's Findings and Explanation.- 6. A New Theoretical Path-The Emergence of Milgram's Bureaucratic Machine.- 7. Explaining the Baseline Condition's High Completion Rate.- 8. The Shock Generator: the Most Powerful Single Factor in the Obedience Studies.- 9. Conclusion.

Back Jacket

Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram's personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introduces readers to a behind the scenes account showing how during Milgram's unpublished pilot studies he step-by-step invented his official experimental procedure--how he gradually learnt to transform most ordinary people into willing inflictors of harm. Volume two then illustrates how certain innovators within the Nazi regime used the very same Milgram-like learning techniques that with increasing effectiveness gradually enabled them to also transform most ordinary people into increasingly capable executioners of other men, women, and children. Volume two effectively attempts to capture how step-by-step these Nazi innovators attempted to transform the Führer's wish of a Jewish-free Europe into a frightening reality. By the books' end the reader will gain an insight into how the seemingly undoable can become increasingly doable.

Author Biography

Nestar Russell, Ph.D., is Sessional Instructor and Independent Researcher at the University of Calgary, Canada.