Stanley Milgram Quotes

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

The environment shapes people's actions.

If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

I am affected by what is around. I don't think many people would admit that.

That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

Nobody starts out evil - we know that. It's life circumstances that lead them to that.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

Everyone is a product of their own environment, and that, I think, has actually been the key lesson for me.

Always blame conditions, not men

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

If you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation.

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

Your environment influences your mindset.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

As a rule it is circumstances that make men.

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

The first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology's failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.

I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Environment is stronger than will.

A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.

Whoever would change men must change the conditions of their lives.