biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1933–84)
|
| biography:
| Psychologist, born in New York City, USA. He studied at Harvard, then taught at Yale (1960–3) and the City University of New York (1967–84). He became concerned to understand how apparently ordinary people in Nazi Germany had committed the atrocities of the Holocaust, so he examined what factors would influence the tendency of people to obey orders in an artificial situation where they were given to believe (wrongly) that they were administering electric shocks to other experimental subjects. The most striking result of this study was that the vast majority of people were prepared to do so in the cause of ‘science’ when requested by an authoritarian figure. The results are published in his most famous research programme, Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View (1974). |
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