Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.[2]
Stanley Milgram
August 15, 1933
December 20, 1984 (aged 51)
Queens College, New York (B.A., Political Science, 1954)
Harvard University (Ph.D., Social Psychology, 1960)
Professor[1]
2[1]
Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, until his death in 1984.
Milgram gained notoriety for his obedience experiment conducted in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University in 1961,[3] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[4] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[5]
His other small-world experiment, while at Harvard, led researchers to analyze the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept. Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.
He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.[6]
Early and personal life[edit]
Milgram was born in 1933 in New York City (the Bronx)[7] to Jewish parents.[8] His parents were Adele (née Israel) and Samuel Milgram (1898–1953), who had immigrated to the United States from Romania and Hungary respectively during World War I.[9][10][11][12][13] He was the second of three children.[14][9] Milgram's immediate and extended family were both affected by the Holocaust. After the war, relatives of his who had survived Nazi concentration camps and bore concentration camp tattoos stayed with the Milgram family in New York for a time.[15]
His Bar Mitzvah speech in 1946 was on the subject of the plight of the European Jews and the impact that the events of World War II would have on Jewish people around the world.[9][16][17] He said, upon becoming a man under Jewish law: "As I ... find happiness in joining the ranks of Israel, the knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews ... makes this ... an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people—which now becomes mine. ... I shall try to understand my people and do my best to share the responsibilities which history has placed upon all of us."[17] He later wrote to a friend from childhood: "I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some 20 years later. How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital, I'll never quite understand."[18]
Milgram's interest in the Holocaust had its basis in what his biographer, Professor Thomas Blass, referred to as Milgram's "lifelong identification with the Jewish people".[19] Author Kirsten Fermaglich wrote that Milgram as an adult had "a personal conflict as a Jewish man who perceived himself both as an outsider, a victim of the Nazi destruction, and as an insider, as scientist."[20] Alexandra stated that Milgram's Jewish identity led to his focus on the Holocaust and his obedience-to-authority research.[20] He shared this as well with Herbert Winer, one of his obedience study subjects, who noted after speaking to Milgram about the experiment that "Milgram was very Jewish. I was Jewish. We talked about this. There was obviously a motive behind neutral research."[20]
Milgram married his wife, Alexandra, in a ceremony at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Greenwich Village in Manhattan on December 10, 1961, and they had two children, Michele and Marc.[21] At the time of his death, Milgram lived in New Rochelle, New York.[22]
Milgram's father worked as a baker, providing a modest income for his family until his death in 1953 (upon which Stanley's mother took over the bakery). Milgram attended public elementary school and James Monroe High School in the Bronx (which he graduated from in three years),[12][13] and excelled academically and was a great leader among his peers. One of Milgram's classmates at James Monroe High School was Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the Stanford prison experiment. Milgram and Zimbardo also shared an affinity for the popular television program Candid Camera and an admiration for its creator, Allen Funt.[23][24]
By the time he was college age, his family had moved to nearby Queens.[16] In 1954, Milgram received his bachelor's degree in political science from Queens College in New York, which he attended tuition-free.[2] He also studied at Brooklyn College, where he received A-grades in "Psychology of Personality" and "An Eclectic Approach to Social Psychology".[8] He applied to a PhD program in social psychology at Harvard University, and was initially rejected due to an insufficient background in psychology (he had not taken any undergraduate courses in psychology at Queens College). He was eventually accepted to Harvard in 1954 after first enrolling as a student in Harvard's Office of Special Students.[2]
Professional life[edit]
In 1961, Milgram received a PhD in social psychology from Harvard. He became an assistant professor at Yale in the fall of 1960. He served as an assistant professor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard from 1963 to 1966 on a three-year contract. The contract was then extended for one additional year, but with the lower rank of a lecturer.[25]
In 1967 he accepted an offer to become a tenured full professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and he taught at City University until he died in 1984.[2][26] Milgram had a number of significant influences, including psychologists Solomon Asch and Gordon Allport.[27]
Death[edit]
Milgram died on December 20, 1984, aged 51, of a heart attack in New York City. It was his fifth heart attack.[26][22] He left behind a widow, Alexandra "Sasha" Milgram, a daughter, Michele Sara, and a son, Marc Daniel.[22]
Lost letter experiment[edit]
Milgram developed a technique, called the "lost letter" experiment, for measuring how helpful people are to strangers who are not present, and their attitudes toward various groups. Several sealed and stamped letters were planted in public places, addressed to various entities, such as individuals, favorable organizations like medical research institutes, and stigmatized organizations such as "Friends of the Nazi Party". Milgram found most of the letters addressed to individuals and favorable organizations were mailed, while most of those addressed to stigmatized organizations were not.[37][38]
Anti-social behavior experiment[edit]
In 1970–71, Milgram conducted experiments which attempted to find a correlation between media consumption (in this case, watching television) and anti-social behavior. The experiment presented the opportunity to steal money, donate to charity, or neither, and tested whether the rate of each choice was influenced by watching similar actions in the ending of a specially crafted episode of the popular series Medical Center.[38]
References in media[edit]
In 1975, CBS presented a made-for-television movie about obedience experiments, The Tenth Level, with William Shatner as Stephen Hunter, a Milgram-like scientist. Milgram was a consultant for the film, though the accuracy of the film has been contested by Milgram himself.
In 1980, musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song called "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)", referring to the number of subjects who administered the maximum shock in another one of the experiments - 37 out of 40.[46] While it was played live on his 1980 tour, Gabriel did not release a studio version of the song until 1986, on his 5th album "So".
Milgram 18 was reproduced to test the participants in a 2008 television special The Heist.[47] Created by Derren Brown and Andy Nyman for British station Channel 4, the Milgram experiment helped determine which would be given the opportunity to rob a (fake) armoured bank van.
In March 2010, French television channel France 2 broadcast Jusqu'où va la télé, describing the results of a fake game show that they had run 80 times (each time independently, and with a new contestant and audience). The contestants received instructions to administer what they thought would be near fatal electric shocks to another "contestant" (really an actor) when they erred on memorized word-associations. The vast majority followed instructions even as the "victim" screamed.[48]
In 2015, an experimental biopic about Milgram called Experimenter was released, directed by Michael Almereyda. Peter Sarsgaard stars as Stanley Milgram.
In 2020, an online project known as the MILGRAM project portrays how a human would act if faced with the decision of being a prison guard to 10 different murderers. The project is still ongoing and has yet to be confirmed on its roots.