{"product_id":"obedience-why-ordinary-people-do-terrible-things-9798195715052","title":"Obedience: Why Ordinary People Do Terrible Things","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Victor Lane\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Movements - Behaviorism\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1961, a social psychologist at Yale asked ordinary volunteers to administer electric shocks to a stranger - increasing the voltage with each wrong answer, up to a level labelled Danger: Severe Shock. Sixty-five percent continued to the maximum. They were not sadists. They were not ideologically motivated. They were ordinary people who had been given an authority figure, a plausible reason to continue, and a sequence of small escalations that made each step feel like a continuation of the last. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eStanley Milgram's obedience experiments remain the most disturbing findings in the history of social psychology. Not because they revealed human evil - but because they revealed human ordinariness. The capacity for harmful compliance is not a property of damaged personalities. It is a feature of normal human social psychology, activated by conditions that are common in every institution human beings have ever built. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eOBEDIENCE\u003c\/b\u003e examines those conditions in full - what they are, how they operate, and what the decades of research that followed Milgram's original experiment have confirmed, challenged, and refined. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eInside this book: \u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Milgram experiments - what they actually proved, and what they did not\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe agentic state - how authority transfers moral responsibility away from the individual\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe foot in the door - why gradual escalation makes each small step feel manageable\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eConformity and Asch - how social pressure overrides the evidence of our own senses\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDehumanisation - how language prepares ordinary people to harm\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Holocaust, My Lai, Rwanda, Enron - how the mechanisms operate at historical scale\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe rescuers and the whistleblowers - who refused, and what made refusal possible\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWhat the science says about building institutions and individuals that resist\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis is not a comfortable book. The science it describes is not comfortable. But it is the most important science there is - because the conditions it identifies are not historical relics. They are present in every organisation, institution, and authority structure that exists today.","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47882729521303,"sku":"9798195715052","price":1420.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798195715052.webp?v=1781096611","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/obedience-why-ordinary-people-do-terrible-things-9798195715052","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}