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Behind The Shock Machine
Gina Perry
The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments
The New Press
September 2013
On Sale: September 3, 2013
354 pages ISBN: 159558921X EAN: 9781595589217 Kindle: B00C4GTCNE Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers
to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961,
none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide
sensation that the published results would cause. Milgram
reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had
repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing
strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even
suffering a life-threatening heart condition, simply because
an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior
was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under
the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public
imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy
and fascination more than fifty years later.
In
Behind the Shock Machine, psychologist and author
Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of
this controversial experiment and its startling
repercussions. Interviewing the original participants—many
of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did—and
delving deep into Milgram’s personal archive, she pieces
together a more complex picture and much more troubling
picture of these experiments than was originally presented
by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads
her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic
and the claims that it revealed something essential about
human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the
tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the
unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock
machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one
man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.
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