11 quotes
Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others.
Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)
Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.
Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)
When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group.
Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)
If you think it is easy to violate social constraints, get onto a bus and sing out loud.
Psychology in Today's World (1975)
The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.
Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)
Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.
Psychology in Today's World (1975)
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974)
The variety of political forms we have seen in history are only several of many possible political arrangements. Perhaps the next step is to invent and to explore political forms that will give conscience a better chance to resist errant authority.
The Social Dimensions Of Law And Justice In Contemporary India (1979)
It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.
The Social Dimensions Of Law And Justice In Contemporary India (1979)
I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.