Stanley Milgram
Jessica McCloskey '01

   Stanley Milgram was born in New York in 1933 and grew up during the Second World War. In 1950 he graduated from James Monroe High School, along with his classmate Phil Zimbardo. He stayed in New York to begin his college undergraduate work at Queen College. Interestingly, he took no psychology courses while he was an undergraduate. Instead, he majored in and earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science. During his senior year, he became interested in psychology and applied to Harvard’s Ph.D. program. Due to his lack of experience in psychology, he was at first rejected. After taking several psychology courses during the summer, he gained provisional admittance.

    Milgram’s dissertation examined cross-cultural differences in conformity, which he conducted in Norway and Paris. When he returned from Paris, he worked for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with Solomon Asch. Asch was also concerned with conformity and conducted his famous studies using line length. Milgram stepped away from line length and into shock and began his most controversial and compelling work.

Obedience Study

    Milgram’s best known work was his experiments with obedience to authority. He recruited from men from the New Haven area from all professions. When each participant came into to the experiment, they were immediately paid the participation fee and assured that they would not lose that money no matter what happened during the experiment. In this way, Milgram assured that participants were not staying in the experiment alone out of a desire for the money.

    The participants were then introduced to a confederate posing as another participant. They were told that the experiment was to find out how various punishments affect learning. As was prearranged, the confederate was always chosen as the learner and the participant as the teacher. Both participant and confederate were led into a room and shown the "shock" apparatus. The participant was given a sample shock to verify for him that the punishment was real and the confederate was then strapped into the apparatus.

    The participant was told that he was to help the learner to memorize word pairs. Every time that the learner missed a word pair, the teacher was to administer a shock. Each missed pair meant an increased voltage until all the words were correctly memorized. The voltages were marked according to how painful the shocks were and at the end of the spectrum were shocks marked as causing death. Milgram was looking to see how far the participant would go to follow his instructions. It was what he found that revolutionized how the world looked at obedience.

    Milgram’s results showed that for the most part, everyone will administer shocks to someone they do not know. But most compelling were his findings that 65% of the population would actually shock all the way up to the lethal levels. The experimenter in the room had no way of enforcing his commands. He was allowed only to read from a script certain phrases, such as "It is imperative to the experiment that you continue". And yet, even without any real prod to obey, the majority of people do. This was important to argue the logic that such events as Nazi Germany can occur only when people are afraid of what will happen when they do not obey. Milgram’s participants had already been paid and were under no obligation to stay and continue the experiment. It was only their instinct to obey the experimenter that would lead them to ‘shock’ the learner, often all the way to the end of the spectrum.

    Milgram’s research is a particularly good body of work because not only was his initial design so elegant, but he continued his work by methodically changing variables. Milgram changed the proximity of the experimenter to the teacher (the closer the experimenter, the higher the levels of obedience), the nearness of the learner (the closer the learner to the teacher, which would let them either just hear his cries or also see him, the lower the levels of obedience), the personality of the experimenter (the colder and more austere the experimenter, the higher the levels of obedience) and the location of the experiment (the more professional and ‘official-looking’ the building, the higher the obedience).

    It is important to note that even in the most adverse of conditions (in one experiment, Milgram actually had the teacher force the learner’s hand onto the electrode) a large pool of people still obey to the furthest levels of shocking and the majority will still obey for a very long time before pulling out of the study.

    Milgram’s obedience work is not just valuable for what it showed us about obedience, though that is of course a huge consideration. His work has also been a boon to the field of psychology for the questions that it has raised. When Milgram first presented this work to the American Psychological Association, they held his application until they decided if his work was ethical. The controversy surrounding his work has made the leaders in the field question and debate where ethical lines really are. His work has also gone far to answer questions about the importance of social psychology research. There is no denying that his obedience studies have had an incredible influence on Psychology.

   While his obedience studies are undoubtedly what Milgram is best known for, they are by no means the only important work that he has conducted. Milgram is also known for developing the ‘small-world’ theory in which he found that everyone in the world can be connected by 5.2 degrees of association. From this came the movie 6 Degrees of Seperation and countless games of "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon". Due to the nature of the topic, there are some questions about the applicability of his findings, as there was no way to account for overlap of social groups or to test whether the lines of connections were in fact the shortest possible line. Even with more questions to be answer, however, this work has been an interesting piece that has led to more good research.

    It was also Milgram who conducted his ‘lost-letter’ experiments in which he examined the likelihood of helping behavior by dropping a stamped, addressed letter and seeing if people would pick it up, post it, or throw it out. From the basic experiment, he manipulated how likely people were to want to help by changing where the letter was sent. Overall, people were likely to post the letter, but by changing the address to be something questionable, such as the Ku Klux Klan or a communist support group, he was able to affect how often people helped. Again, this work led to even more really great studies.

    Whichever study one examines from Milgram’s work, it is clear that it will be an elegantly designed, well-thought out experiment. His work was very clear in what it was looking at, making his results very compelling and it was well-designed making it highly replicable. Milgram’s work provided compelling results on their own, but it is perhaps Milgram’s greatest contribution that his work also became a springboard for other researchers to take his work to the next level.

Blass, T. (2000) http://www.stanleymilgram.com/

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An experimental view. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.

Travers, J. & Milgram, S. (1969). "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem," Sociometry, 32, 425-432.

http://www.oocities.org/Athens/Acropolis/1976/milgram.htm  biographical information