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The experiment was first described in 1963 by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, and later discussed in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Graphically, the experimenter (E) orders the subject (S) to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to another subject (A), who is actually an actor. Many participants continued to give shocks despite pleas for mercy from the actor, as long as the experimenter kept on ordering them to do so.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

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Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. His therapeutic technique frequently involved talking with his patients while they reclined on his famous couch.

Quotes

• "Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares." — Daniel Dennett

• "The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man." — B. F. Skinner

• "Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin." — Ivan Pavlov

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He is famous for work done in collaboration with Amos Tversky and others in establishing a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and in developing prospect theory.

Did you know...

• ...that Walter Bowart was a proponent of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the writer of a seminal book on mind control, as well as a prolific publisher and editor of both newspapers and magazines?
• ...that Richard C. McCarty helped launch the "Decade of Behavior" campaign to bring attention to the importance of behavioral and social research?
• ...that social loafing is the phenomenon in which people make less effort when they work as part of a group than when working alone?
• ...that one of the most important advances in medieval Muslim psychology was the establishment of the first psychiatric hospitals?
• ...that race car journalist and former race car driver Dr. Dick Berggren decided to stop teaching college psychology after he was called into the college president's office because he parked his racecar in the faculty parking lot?

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