Fifth Reading Assignment

Comments:
Comment #1
Comment #2
Comment #3

The Man Who Shocked the World
Thomas Blass

Summary:
This book discusses the life of Stanley Milgram and his studies in the field of social psychology.

• Obedience to authority: In this study, subjects were instructed by someone of scientific authority to deliver different levels of electrical shocks to other protesting "participants." He found that 65% of these subjects were willing to deliver the highest voltage shock (450V).
• Small-world method: This experiment attempted to prove that any two random individuals could be linked through a series of acquaintances. He determined that an average of six people were required to connect two people. This phenomena is sometimes referred to as the "six degrees of separation."
  
• Lost-letter technique: Milgram created an experiment to investigate how helpful people would be in a given situation. He did this by writing letters and addressing them to both favorable and unfavorable organizations. Then, the letters were distributed ("lost") around the city. He found that people were more likely to mail letters that were addressed to favorable organizations, rather than mailing those addressed to unfavorable organizations.
• Familiar stranger: This study investigated the social interactions between people that saw each other on a regular basis. They found that though people might share daily experiences, they are unlikely to interact or speak with others. They attributed this to the stimulus overload that occurs from living in an urban environment.

Discussion:
Overall, I thought this book was interesting. In particular, I thought his "familiar stranger" study was very applicable. In my case, I see most of the same people everyday at the rec center. Have I ever spoken with any of them? No. The same could be said for any large class on campus. My management class has over 300 people in it, but there are hardly many people interacting with each other.

Some people think his obedience experiment was borderline unethical. Certainly, discovering that you are capable of doing such things could be traumatizing. As with anything, there are ethical lines that shouldn't be crossed, but I'm unsure how the experiment could be changed.

The "six degrees of separation" idea can also be applied to Wikipedia. In particular, I remember a thread about this on texags.com. The idea was that any Wikipedia page/topic could be accessed from the front page in under six links. The forum thread was several pages long, and links were found for every case presented... a lot of them were pretty random, too.

In my opinion, this was a decent book. I've never read anything about social psychology before, so I thought the experiments were pretty interesting. It seemed to ramble along in some places, but I suppose that is to be expected.



Ranking:
#1- The Design of Future Things
#2- The Mole People
#3- The Man Who Shocked the World
#4- The Design of Everyday Things
#5- The Media Equation
#6- Doing Ethnographies