Gina Perry is the eminent psychologist who blew apart Stanley Milgram’s shocking revelations from his 1961 research. Milgram had caused a sensation by alleging that 65 per cent of volunteers had been willing to inflict painful, dangerous electric shocks on others. He drew direct analogies between this ostensible blind obedience to commands to inflict pain/harm on others and that of Nazi functionaries.
Perry found that Milgram had misrepresented his results: in fact, 60 per cent of his subjects had disobeyed instructions and refused to continue; while those who had, were pressed into doing so despite protests, sometimes being ordered 25 times to keep going, or told lies, such as that the recipient of the shocks was fine. Others had suspected throughout that the experiment was a hoax. It was: no one was hurt.
In her mesmerising new book, Perry investigates another psychological experiment that turns out to have been less than honest in its published findings, and unethical in its treatment of subjects.
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