Quotes by Stanley Milgram

About Stanley Milgram:

Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiment on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale. Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, specifically the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing this experiment.
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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 ...

Stanley Milgram

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.

Stanley Milgram

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.

Stanley Milgram

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.

Stanley Milgram

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 m...

Stanley Milgram

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

Stanley Milgram

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

Stanley Milgram

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...

Stanley Milgram

Author Bio

  • NameStanley Milgram
  • DescriptionSocial psychologist
  • BornAugust 15, 1933
  • DiedDecember 20, 1984
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPsychologist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; AAAS Prize For Behavioral Science Research