I’m just back from Canada where I co-convened the first ever Obedience to Authority conference with my colleague and fellow antipodean scholar, New Zealander Nestar Russell.
Organising a conference is a huge amount of work. So I was glad that we’d made the decision early on to make a ‘wish list’ of people we’d most like to invite. Happily for us, just about everyone who’s anyone in the world of obedience scholarship accepted our invite and showed up in beautiful Bracebridge, two hours outside of Toronto. The agenda : to discuss Stanley Milgram’s obedience research 50 years on.
Opinions today are as divided as they were when Milgram first published news of his research in October 1963. There were those at the conference convinced of the importance and value of Milgram’s work. There were others like me who are more critical not just of the way the experiments were conducted but about the conclusions that have been drawn from Milgram’s studies. It was sometimes fiery, always fascinating and way, way, too brief.
Pictured above : Taketo Murata, Milgram’s research assistant with Professor Thomas Blass, Milgram’s biographer.
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