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Palgrave Macmillan

Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 1

Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Nestar Russell

    1. University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

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  • Offers an explanation as to how ordinary people may perform unthinkable acts

  • Utilizes never-before-seen documents from Milgram's personal collection

  • Will appeal to scholars across multiple disciplines

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
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  2. Introduction

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 1-16

  3. Germany’s “Ordinary Monsters” and the Holocaust

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 17-36

  4. The Origins and Evolution of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 37-54

  5. How Milgram Ensured Most Participants Completed the First Official Experiment

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 55-78

  6. The Obedience to Authority Variations and Milgram’s Agentic State Theory

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 79-110

  7. Academia’s Response to Milgram’s Findings and Explanation

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 111-153

  8. A New Theoretical Path: The Emergence of Milgram’s Bureaucratic Machine

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 155-198

  9. Explaining the New Baseline Condition’s High Completion Rate

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 199-238

  10. The Shock Generator: The Most Powerful Single Factor in the Obedience Studies

    • Nestar Russell
    Pages 239-267

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 269-294
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Keywords

About this book

Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram’s personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introduces readers to a behind the scenes account showing how during Milgram’s unpublished pilot studies he step-by-step invented his official experimental procedure—how he gradually learnt to transform most ordinary people into willing inflictors of harm. Volume two then illustrates how certain innovators within the Nazi regime used the very same Milgram-like learning techniques that with increasing effectiveness gradually enabled them to also transform most ordinary people into increasingly capable executioners of other men, women, and children. Volume two effectively attempts to capture how step-by-step these Nazi innovators attempted to transform the Führer’s wish of a Jewish-free Europe into a frightening reality. By the books’ end the reader will gain an insight into how the seemingly undoable can become increasingly doable. 

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

    Nestar Russell

About the author

Nestar Russell, Ph.D., is Sessional Instructor and Independent Researcher at the University of Calgary, Canada.


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