A thrilling new account of psychology's most notorious and least understood experiment
In 1961, months after the Eichmann trial opened, Stanley Milgram tackled the question haunting the postwar world: how could ordinary people have taken part in atrocity? In a Yale basement, men and women recruited for a memory test were ordered to punish a stranger's mistakes with ever-stronger electric shocks. The shocks were fake and the victim an actor—but they didn't know that. As the screams grew, a man in a grey lab coat said only: ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’ Most went all the way to a lethal 450 volts.
The results seemed to expose something monstrous in human nature—the Holocaust was in all of us. Yet Milgram could never explain it, and nor, despite many attempts, could anyone else. Returning to the recordings, David Kaposi overturns the story we thought we knew. What made Milgram’s subjects continue with the experiment?
Gripping and profoundly original, this book finally reveals what happened in that laboratory—and how ordinary people are drawn into cruelty.