bOING bOING: Stanley Milgram's shocking new biography

The Man Who Shocked The World is a new biography about Stanley Milgram, the provocative social psychologist whose mind-blowing experiments three decades ago are still highly relevant in today's world of Abu Ghraib and Friendster. From the Milgram Web site, hosted by the book's author, Dr. Thomas Blass:

"Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants.

Link

[Boing Boing]

Hm... 60 Minutes or a similar program did a piece maybe a year back on some psychology experiments done at a Big Name College Whose Name Escapes Me At The Moment. In those one group was placed in the role of jailer and another group was the detainees. The jailers rapidly descended to a pretty vicious level of tyranny. None of the participants were actors and both groups ended up pretty psychologically scarred.

I'll have to dig for more concrete info on that. Not sure if this was one of Milgram's or not.