Obedience to Authority

What Hacker News says

1. sneakJun 2025
   This might apply here:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obedience_to_Authority:_An_Exp...

   I recommend reading the book, it has a ton of useful stuff in it beyond what everyone knows about the Milgram experiment.

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2. sneakSep 2023
   I recommend that everyone read Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority about his fake shock experiments.

   Some people simply suspend moral judgement entirely in circumstances where someone else is calling the shots. They no more regard themselves as culpable for the bad outcomes as they do an automobile operated by a drunk driver. At a certain point, many people just switch off the moralizing, automatically assigning all of the responsibility to the order-giver.

   It's an interesting phenomenon. A side effect, I find, is that people get very very upset when you name and shame individual employees doing unethical things at work that are legal and fall under the umbrella of "corporate initiatives" such as implementing antipatterns. The guilt for such seems to be perceived to fall with management or "product people", not developers, even though the developers are the ones who wrote the code.

   Same for, say, warfighters. People don't regard the conscripted infantrymen at fault for the deaths, even though it is often literally their hand on the trigger.

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3. statquontrarianOct 2020
   I've never created a reading list, so this was a fun exercise.

   Programming:

   * Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ - Gunther

   * The Mythical Man Month - Brooks

   Philosophy:

   * A Journey Around my Room - de Maistre

   * Anger, Mercy, and Revenge - Seneca

   * Schrödinger - What is Life?

   * Man's Search for Meaning - Frankl

   * Essays - Montaigne

   * Ethical Intuitionism - Huemer

   * The Consolations of Philosophy - de Botton

   * A Manual for Living - Epictetus

   * Meditations - Aurelius

   Psychology / Meaning / Purpose / Science:

   * Purpose and Meaning in the Workplace - Dik, Byrne & Steger

   * The Case Against Education - Caplan

   * Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Caplan

   * Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

   * A Confession - Tolstoy

   * Enlightenment Now - Pinker

   * The Better Angels of our Nature - Pinker

   * The Improving State of the World - Goklany

   * The Skeptical Environmentalist - Lomborg

   * Religion for Atheists - de Botton

   * Ending Aging - de Grey

   * Gut Feelings - Gigirenzer

   Fiction:

   * Heart of Darkness - Conrad

   * Candide - Voltaire

   * Brave New World - Huxley

   * Selected Works - Goethe

   * 1984 & Animal Farm - Orwell

   Politics:

   * Obedience to Authority - Milgram

   * The Problem of Political Authority - Huemer

   * The Communist Manifesto - Marx

   * Socialism - von Mises

   * Just One Child - Greenhalgh

   * The God That Failed - Crossman

   * Death by Government - Rummel

   Thought-provoking:

   * Free to Learn - Gray

   * The Beautiful Tree - Tooley

   * Education and the State - West

   * The Machinery of Freedom - Friedman

   * Against Intellectual Monopoly - Boldrine & Levine

   * From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State - Beito

   * The Not So Wild, Wild West - Hill

   * More Guns, Less Crime - Lott

   * Race & Economics - Williams

   * Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men - Hummel

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4. gruseomFeb 2014
   That study is a classic that belongs alongside Milgram (obedience to authority) and Zimbardo (Stanford prison experiment). I'm not sure why it isn't better known. The three go together perfectly.
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5. danthemanNov 2010
   The book Obedience to Authority: http://www.amazon.com/Obedience-Authority-Stanley-Milgram/dp...

   Is an excellent piece of work, and shows how much work really needs to be done to try and do social science.

   Here's the actual table of results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Summary_of_v...

   As you can see, by varying the way responsibility was assigned and the role the subject had they could get to the point where only 8% refused to got the 450V.

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6. dgordonSep 2010
   What the banality of evil suggests is that "evil" or in this case "thuggish" behavior is much more a function of social role, and less a function of character, than people thought. (Yes, it really was a radical idea -- recall that two-thirds of the people in Milgram's famous experiment went to shocking an unresponsive subject with 450 volts, when almost everyone had assumed, prior to the experiment actually being run, that only a one-in-a-thousand psychopath would get there. Check out Milgram's book Obedience To Authority for more details.)
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