Book Reading #35 - Obedience to Authority

Ch 1-8

The first chapter discusses obedience and its importance in the fabric of social life. Here he gives an introduction of his experiments on the topic. In the second chapter he goes further in to the details and description of the different parts of the experiments. He explained them from the ground up from how the test subjects were obtained to the mechanisms used in the experiments. He set the stage for the experiments. The third chapter deals with the expected behavior of the subjects in the shock experiment. The expected behavior of the subjects are hypothesized and discussed explaining why a subject would stop once the actor begged to stop. The next chapter, Chapter ,4 deal with the reaction of the subject in correlation to vicinity. The close a subject was to the actor, the more prone they were to stop. Chapter 5 deals with those subjects that confront authority and the factors that go into this such as background and interaction. Variations and control is the subject of chapter 6. It deals with the different changes to the experiment such as proximity, women in experiment, personalities. Different controls were modified to see the outcome and the effect of these. Chapter 7 is a lot like chapter 5 in discussing those subjects and their reactions to authority and why these actions are triggered. The last chapter, chapter 8, dealt with the importance of the hierarchy of authority that affected subjects.