Quotes from Stanley Milgram

The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (1974)

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action.

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior.

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience.

Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs.

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority

Authority systems must be based on people arranged in a hierarchy. Thus the critical question in determining control is, Who is over whom? How much over is far less important than the visible presence of a ranked ordering.

is not what subjects do but for whom they are doing it that counts.

There is a certain discomfort in not knowing who the boss is, and subjects sometimes frantically sought to determine this.

Freud (1921), without referring to the general systems implications of his assertion, spelled out this mechanism clearly: ". . . the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal embodied in the leader" (page 78, Group Psychology).

we sometimes have a choice among authorities, and we ought to look at this phenomenon within the experiment. It is possible that when different authorities simultaneously call for opposing lines of action, a person's own values will prevail and determine which authority he follows. Or

It is clear that the disagreement between the authorities completely paralyzed action. Not

Subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action.