PERSON
Stanley Milgram
The social psychologist who proved, in a Yale basement, that ordinary decent people will administer what they believe are lethal electric shocks to a stranger if the situation is correctly arranged—and whose experimental catalog of how compliance is manufactured has become, without attribution, the operating manual for the digital systems that now govern human attention.
Milgram asked a question the twentieth century had made unavoidable: under what conditions will an ordinary person, who thinks of himself as decent, do something he believes to be wrong because an authority told him to? He did not ask it from the armchair but in a laboratory, with a shock generator, a confederate pretending to suffer, and a man in a gray coat saying flatly that the experiment required the subject to continue. Roughly two-thirds of subjects continued to the switch marked 450 volts—marked XXX—past the moment the learner fell silent. The gap between what people predicted they would do and what they actually did is the first and most important datum, because it establishes the theme of his entire career: human beings systematically misjudge how compliant they will be, and the misjudgment is itself a vulnerability. His follow-up experiments
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