It's about time someone wrote this book.
The famed Stanley Milgram psychology experiments shocked the world by suggesting that a majority of humans are capable of cruelty when under the orders of an authority figure. In this book, a secret history of the experiments is revealed, debunking Milgram's most sensational claims.
The experiments, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, have long been a staple of psychology textbooks. The setup is dramatic but simple: Subject A sits in a room with a "shock machine" and is instructed to shock an unseen Subject B if he fails a simple memory test. The study was advertised as collecting data on how punishment affects learning and memory, but in reality, Milgram was not shocking Subject B, instead carefully monitoring the behavior of Subject A. The experiment's surprising results indicated that 65 percent of the subjects administered shocks even after the actor playing Subject B screamed in pain or even complained of a heart condition. In a postwar environment still reeling from the horror of the Holocaust, the connection between the Milgram experiments and the behavior of the Nazis brought questions of human behavior and obedience into the national spotlight. However, much like the experiments themselves, Milgram's published results were replete with omissions and inconsistencies, casting doubt on his methodology and ethics. Perry, a psychologist who first presented her research in an award-winning Australian documentary, spent several years interviewing original participants, combing through archived transcripts of the experiments, analyzing unpublished data and meeting with psychologists who worked with Milgram at that time. The result is a passionate text that humanizes the subjects and provides nuanced, provocative context to the experiments. The author asks profound questions about what truths, if any, can be elicited from analysis of human nature in a constructed environment.
It's about time someone wrote this book.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59558-921-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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