Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933, in the Bronx, New York, the second of three children in a Jewish family. His mother Adele had immigrated to the United States from Romania, and his father Samuel from Hungary, both arriving during World War I. Samuel worked as a baker, supporting the family until his death in 1953, after which Milgram's mother took over the bakery.

The Holocaust was not an abstract historical event for Milgram but a deeply personal reality. Relatives who had survived Nazi concentration camps, still bearing tattoo marks, came to stay with the Milgram family in New York after the war. At his Bar Mitzvah in 1946, the thirteen-year-old Milgram chose as his subject the suffering of European Jews and the long shadow World War II would cast over Jewish life worldwide. This early moral seriousness about the fate of his people would eventually drive some of the most consequential research in the history of psychology.

Milgram attended public school and James Monroe High School in the Bronx, where one of his classmates was Philip Zimbardo, who later designed the Stanford prison experiment. In 1954 Milgram earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Queens College in New York. Despite having taken no undergraduate psychology courses, he applied to Harvard's PhD program in social psychology, was initially rejected on those grounds, and was eventually accepted.

In 1960 Milgram received his PhD in social psychology from Harvard and joined Yale as an assistant professor. The following year, just three months after the opening of the Jerusalem trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, he began running the experiments that would make his name. The setting was the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale. The connection to Eichmann was deliberate: Milgram wanted to understand scientifically how ordinary people could participate in systematic atrocity.

Participants arrived believing they were taking part in a study of memory and learning. Each was assigned the role of 'teacher' and told to administer electric shocks of increasing intensity to a 'learner' whenever the learner gave a wrong answer. The learner was in reality a collaborator of Milgram's, and no shocks were actually delivered, but the teachers did not know this. When participants hesitated, the experimenter firmly instructed them to continue. Roughly 65 percent of all subjects administered shocks all the way to the highest level on the dial.

Milgram published his initial findings in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and expanded on them in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. He won the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1964 for his work on the social dimensions of obedience. His explanation for the results centered on what he called the 'agentic state': the psychological shift that occurs when a person begins to see themselves as merely an instrument of another's will and stops feeling personally responsible for their own actions.

The obedience experiments generated immediate and sustained controversy. The American Psychological Association held up Milgram's membership application for a year over ethical concerns about his methods before eventually granting him full membership. Critics questioned whether participants had been subjected to genuine psychological distress, whether the laboratory setting bore any meaningful relationship to real-world obedience, and whether some subjects may have sensed that the scenario was not entirely real.

Milgram responded to his critics by arguing that the discomfort directed at his work reflected an unwillingness to accept what the data showed. He wrote that underlying much of the criticism was an alternative model of human nature, one that assumed normal people would reliably refuse harmful orders when faced with a clear choice. His experiments suggested otherwise, and that finding proved difficult for many to accept. The results were later applied to explain events ranging from police interrogations that produce false confessions to the conduct of soldiers during the 1968 My Lai massacre.

In 1967 Milgram published research on what he called the small-world phenomenon, an investigation into how closely connected strangers actually are. He sent packages to 160 randomly selected people in Omaha, Nebraska, asking each of them to forward the package toward a specific stockbroker in Boston, Massachusetts, but only by passing it to someone they knew personally on a first-name basis. Each recipient was given the same instructions, creating a chain of acquaintances meant to close the gap between a random midwesterner and a specific Boston professional.

Milgram tracked each package's progress using returnable postcards. The first folder reached the Boston stockbroker in just four days and passed through only two intermediate people. Across all the chains that completed the journey, the number of intermediate links ranged from two to ten, with a median of five, giving rise to the phrase 'six degrees of separation' to describe the maximum typical distance between any two people. The concept captured wide public imagination, though the experiment drew scientific criticism: Milgram did not follow up on many of the packages that went missing, leaving open serious questions about whether the completed chains were representative.

After leaving Harvard in the mid-1960s, Milgram accepted a tenured full professorship at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1967 and remained there until his death. In the final phase of his career he pursued several smaller but imaginative research programs. One involved dropping stamped, sealed envelopes in public places addressed to a variety of organisations, some respectable and some stigmatised, to measure how likely passersby were to pick them up and mail them. Letters addressed to individuals and medical research institutions were mailed at much higher rates than those addressed to groups like Friends of the Nazi Party.

From 1977 onward, Milgram developed an experimental technique he called the cyranoid, borrowing the concept from the Edmond Rostand play Cyrano de Bergerac. A 'cyranoid' was a person who, during a face-to-face conversation, silently repeated in real time words fed to them by a hidden third party via radio earpiece. Milgram found that the people conversing with cyranoids consistently failed to detect that their interlocutor was relaying someone else's words, a result he called the 'cyranic illusion.' He extended the method to situations with stark contrasts between the speaker and the source, including having children shadow his own words while being evaluated by panels of teachers. He never published a formal account of these experiments before his death.

Milgram died on December 20, 1984, in New York City, aged 51, from his fifth heart attack. A 2002 survey published in Review of General Psychology ranked him as the 46th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century. His obedience research, conducted over a few years in a Yale basement, had by that point spent decades reshaping how psychologists, historians, and the general public think about moral responsibility, institutional authority, and the conditions under which ordinary people do terrible things.