Stanley Milgram: The Man Who Shocked the World

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Brad Twitty: The Man Who Shocked Some People
George L: Shocking
Tony G: The Man who Shocked the World

The Man Who Shocked the World, by Thomas Blass was a very interesting book to read. Although I have heard of Stanley Milgram before and his most famous shock experiments, I never knew anything about him and his other experiments. For being a biography, the book has a lot of depth about Stanley's life. Blass goes into detail about his early years and everything that he does up through the day he dies, and beyond. Since this book is a biography, of course Blass would have to talk about his life in detail, but I found the discussion on the experiments to be more interesting. 

In particular, I though that the lost letter experiment was very clever. By dropping letters all throughout town addressed to different opposing parties, Stanley was able to find out people's opinion of the different parties without actually asking them. By counting the number of letters actually mailed to each party, he was able to predict the popularity of each one. 

Another experiment I enjoyed was his six degrees of separation experiment. I have heard of it before, as well as most people, but I did not know that Stanley was the person that came up with the idea. Basically, the idea was to give someone a letter, then tell them about another person that was far away. The goal was to get the letter to the other person only by giving it to someone they think is closest to that person. After mailing lots of letters, he concluded that the average separation between two people was six. The actual values varied though. There was at minimum of 3 or 4 degrees or at most 10 or 12 degrees between two people. I think that by having the Internet and social networking sites, the average separation today would be significantly smaller.

Overall, I thought that it was a very good good and definitely worth reading. The experiments that he conducted were very interesting and really makes you think about the morals of experimentation on people. This is especially so on his shock experiments. How far can someone go in the name of science? How much is too much? If you have any interest in psychology or experimentation on social phenomenon, then this book is a must read.