Stanley Milgram

• Born: August 15, 1933
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 20, 1984
• Place of death: New York, New York

American social psychologist

Cause of notoriety: Motivated by the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940’s and by Adolf Eichmann’s defense at his 1961 war crimes trial that he was merely “following orders” during the Holocaust, Milgram initiated a series of experiments on obedience to authority that involved people being asked to deliver painful electric shocks to innocent victims.

Active: 1961-1962

Locale: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Early Life

The parents of Stanley Milgram (MIHL-grahm), Samuel and Adele, were European Jews who settled in New York City, where they operated a bakery. Stanley was born in New York in 1933, the second of three children. He excelled in high school, thereafter majoring in political science at Queens College. After additional coursework in psychology, Milgram was admitted to the doctoral program in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in the fall of 1954.

At Harvard, Milgram worked with noted social psychologist Solomon Asch, who had developed a novel technique for investigating social conformity in the face of group pressure. Milgram adapted this technique for his dissertation research. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 and obtained an assistant professorship at Yale that fall.

Scientific Career

At Yale, Milgram recruited subjects for obedience experiments from among the male citizens of New Haven, Connecticut, by advertising in the local newspaper. For their participation, volunteers were paid four dollars plus carfare. They arrived at Milgram’s lab in pairs for what was advertised as an experiment on learning and memory. One volunteer was assigned the role of teacher, the other of learner. The learner was strapped into a chair, and the teacher was shown to another room and instructed on how to use a “shock generator.” On the shock generator, switches were labeled in 15-volt increments, ranging from “15 volts, slight shock” to “420 volts, danger: severe shock.” Two additional switches were labeled “435 volts, XXX” and “450 volts, XXX.” The teacher was then told to administer the learning test. If the learner responded correctly to an item, the teacher moved on to the next item, and if not, the teacher was to apply a “shock.” Each successive error by the learner resulted in a more severe shock.

In fact, no one was shocked. The learner was an actor whose part had been carefully scripted. When 75 volts was supposedly being administered, he began to protest by grunting. At 120 volts he called out, and at 150 volts he demanded to be released from the experiment. As the “shocks” increased in intensity, his protests increased in their apparent agony, until at 270 volts he screamed in mock pain. At 300 volts the learner refused to answer the question but continued protesting until 330 volts, after which nothing further was heard from him.

If the teacher balked, the experimenter prodded him with statements like, “The experiment requires that you continue,” and “You have no other choice, you must go on.” In some experiments, the learner was in sight of the teacher, and in some the teacher actually had to press the learner’s hand onto the shock plate. All teachers, however, complied with the instructions, and many continued the shocks up to the maximum 450-volt level. After the experiment, the teacher-subjects were interviewed and debriefed, and the true nature of the experiment was explained to them.

Milgram’s reputation as a psychologist does not derive solely from the obedience experiments. In 1963 he left Yale for Harvard but was denied tenure there due in part to the controversial nature of his research. Thereafter, he took a position as professor at City University of New York, where he headed the graduate program in social psychology. He remained there until his death in 1984. During this time he conducted research on the “small world” effect (popularly known as “six degrees of separation”), the effects of violence in broadcast media, and the psychological experience of urban life.

Impact

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments are probably the most famous experiments in social psychology, perhaps in all of psychology. Many still consider them to offer a compelling explanation of perpetrator behavior in atrocities such as the Holocaust.

Shortly after their publication in 1963, critics began raising ethical questions about the experiments. Although no one was actually shocked, ethicists raised concerns about deceiving subjects into believing they were administering painful electric shocks to innocent victims. This ultimately led to reconsideration of the ethics involved in the use of human subjects in psychology experiments, including use of deception.

The obedience experiments resonated even outside academic psychology. Articles quickly appeared in the popular press about them, most notably in The New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the latter especially being harshly critical of Milgram’s treatment of naïve subjects. For most people, however, it was the shocking results of the experiments that disturbed them. Numerous magazine articles described these results, several playwrights were inspired to incorporate them in one form or another into plays, and a made-for-television film, The Tenth Level, in which William Shatner played a Milgram-like scientist, appeared on CBS in 1976. Rock-and-roll lyrics were influenced when Peter Gabriel recorded “We Do What We’re Told” in 1986. The experiments have influenced teaching methods in law schools and have been studied by the military.

Bibliography

Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books, 2004. A biography written by a psychologist who has continued the research on obedience begun by Milgram.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. 1974. Reprint. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Milgram’s detailed description of the obedience experiments, their justification, and some of their repercussions.

Miller, Arthur G. “What Can the Milgram Obedience Experiments Tell Us About the Holocaust? Generalizing from the Social Psychology Laboratory.” In The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, edited by Arthur G. Miller. New York: Guilford Press, 2004. Milgram argued that his experiments were relevant to explaining the failure of moral judgment that led to the Holocaust. This chapter reviews his arguments and also the opposing arguments of Milgram’s critics.

Sabini, John. “Stanley Milgram (1933-1984).” American Psychologist 41 (1986): 1378-1379. Milgram’s obituary published in a leading psychology periodical shortly after his death.