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Stanley Milgram

American social psychologist (1933-1984)

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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's obedience experiment was conducted in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University in 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The experiment unexpectedly found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey instructions to harm others, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Milgram's small-world experiment, while at the University of Iowa, 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.

Milgram 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.

Biography

Early life, family and education

Milgram was the second of three children born to Jewish parents in the Bronx (New York City), in 1933. His parents were Adele (born Israel) and Samuel Milgram (1898–1953), who had immigrated to the United States from Romania and Hungary respectively during World War I. Milgram's immediate and extended family were both affected by the Holocaust. After the war, relatives who had survived Nazi concentration camps and bore concentration camp tattoos stayed with the Milgram family in New York for a time.

Milgram's bar mitzvah speech, when he turned 13 in 1946, focused on the plight of European Jews and the impact that the events of World War II would have on Jewish people around the world. 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." 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."

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". 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." His wife, Alexandra, later said that Milgram's Jewish identity led to his focus on the Holocaust and his obedience-to-authority research. 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."

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. One of his classmates at James Monroe High School was Philip Zimbardo, later to be known as the architect of the Stanford prison experiment. (Milgram and Zimbardo also shared an affinity for the television program Candid Camera and an admiration for its creator, Allen Funt.)

By the time he was college age, Milgram's family had moved to nearby Queens. In 1954, he received a bachelor's degree in political science from Queens College in New York. He also took two courses at Brooklyn College, "Psychology of Personality" and "An Eclectic Approach to Social Psychology".

Milgram then applied to a PhD program in social psychology at Harvard University, but was initially rejected due to an insufficient background in psychology, as he had not taken any undergraduate courses in psychology at Queens College. Milgram was eventually accepted to Harvard, where he was influenced by the work of Gordon Allport; he received his PhD in social psychology in 1960. While he was completing his PhD, Milgram worked as an assistant to psychologist Solomon Asch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Academic career

In the fall of 1960, Milgram became an assistant professor at Yale, where he undertook his famous obedience-to-authority experiment. He then 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. In 1967, Milgram accepted an offer to become a tenured full professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he taught until he died in 1984.

Personal life and death

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. At the time of his death, Milgram lived in New Rochelle, New York.

Milgram died on December 20, 1984, aged 51, of a heart attack in New York City. It was his fifth heart attack. He left behind a widow, Alexandra "Sasha" Milgram, a daughter, Michele Sara, and a son, Marc Daniel.

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