Stanley Milgram

Brief Biography

Stanley Milgram was born in 1933 in the Bronx in New York City. His family later moved to Queens.

Milgram’s father was born in Hungary and his mother in Romania. Both of his parents were Jewish. In America, the senior Milgram worked as a baker to support the family.Milh

Milgram lost several members of his extended family in the Holocaust. After the war, relatives who had survived Hitler’s extermination camps and bore tattoos on their arms lived with the boy’s family in the Bronx from time to time.

The young Milgram meditated on his people’s history in his bar mitzvah speech (see below, under “Milgram on Milgram”).

It seems fair to say that these formative experiences had a profound impact on the course of Milgram’s life and work.

Milgram graduated from high school in Bronx a year early, in 1950. He went on to take his bachelor’s degree in political science from Queens College in 1954.

After doing well in classes in personality and social psychology that he took as an undergraduate, Milgram decided to switch subjects, applying to the doctoral program in social psychology at Harvard University. He obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1961.

After teaching on short contracts at Yale University and then back at Harvard, in 1967 Milgram accepted the offer of a tenure-track position at City University of New York Graduate Center, where he spent the rest of his career.

Milgram did the work for which he is famous—the experiments on obedience to authority—early in his career, while he was teaching at Yale. Altogether, he published three well-regarded books and authored or co-authored about 180 peer-reviewed journal articles. 

According to prominent citation indices, Milgram was among the top-50 most-cited psychologists of the twentieth century.

Milgram died in Manhattan in 1984 at the age of 51.

Milgram’s best-known work by far is the series of experiments he conducted at Yale University in 1961. Inspired, in part, by the trial of former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, which was occurring in Jerusalem at that time, the experiments involved subjects’ being given orders by an authority figure to deliver a graded series of what they thought were electrical shocks to another subject visible to them. The second subject was in fact a confederate of the experimenter, who feigned reactions to the graded putative shocks.

Milgram found a general willingness of subjects to obey the authority figure’s orders to administer increasingly severe shocks to the confederate. In fact, over 60% of subjects were willing to increase the shocks to the maximum level of severity, even though they could see the confederate feigning the experience of severe pain.

Milgram’s experiment was replicated in certain respects by a high school classmate of his, Philip Zimbardo, carry out a similar experiment at Stanford University in 1971. In Zimbardo’s variant, a group of students was divided into “prisoners” and “guards” and the latter were instructed to keep the former “under control.” Under Zimbardo’s supervision (and thus his tacit consent), the guards exerted their authority in an increasingly severe manner, which eventually amounted to abuse and near-torture.

Both Milgram and Zimbardo were heavily criticized for behaving unethically in setting up these experiments. 

In 1974, Milgram summarized his experimental findings along with his ruminations on the best way to interpret them. He concluded that the shock experiments revealed the innate propensity in all human beings to willingly surrender their individual moral responsibility to what they perceive to be a proper socially constituted authority.

Gradually, Milgram’s work became famous and the psychologist found himself something of a celebrity, albeit a controversial one.

Aside from the ethical issues raised by the shock experiments, Milgram’s findings were attacked from a wide variety of sources. Milgram always insisted it was the disturbing truth about human nature that his experiments revealed that his many critics really objected to, rather than any fault in his experimental design or mistake in the interpretation of his results.

More-recent efforts to replicate Milgram’s experiment that have been conducted since his early death in 1984 have mostly corroborated his original findings, according him a measure of posthumous vindication.

As far as interpretation goes, one significant study has suggested that the problem is not so much a moral one as it is a cognitive one, namely, the difficulty that the individual has in recognizing the bad intentions of the authority figure.[1] This interpretation throws much light upon the ease with which totalitarian states manipulate their populations through the total control of information.

The Milgram’s work was hugely influential, reaching beyond the boundaries of academic psychology. The shock experiments have been the subject of numerous depictions on television, in film, and even in performance art.

Other projects Milgram worked on after his work on obedience to authority include the “small-world concept” (AKA “six degrees of separation”) and the phenomenon of “cyranoids,” named for Edmond Rostand’s character, Cyrano de Bergerac, who speaks through the agency of another’s body.

Note

1. Moti Nissani, “A cognitive reinterpretation of Stanley Milgram’s observations on obedience to authority,” American Psychologist, 1990, 45: 1384–1385.

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Stanley Milgram are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Milgram’s many academic and popular writings.

Challenges to Authority

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

We sometimes have a choice among authorities, and we ought to look at this phenomenon within the experiment. It is possible that when different authorities simultaneously call for opposing lines of action, a person’s own values will prevail and determine which authority he follows.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Some people treat systems of human origin [and maintenance] as if they existed above and beyond any human agent, beyond the control of whim or human feeling. The human element behind agencies and institutions is denied. Thus, when the experimenter says, “This experiment requires that you continue,” the subject feels this to be an imperative that goes beyond any merely human command. He does not ask the seemingly obvious question, “Whose experiment? Why should the designer be served while the victim suffers?

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Behavior prior to this rupture is termed obedience. The point of rupture is the act of disobedience.

Cited in Thomas Blass, ed., Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm (1999).

When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. (Not that the group is always on the right side of the issue. Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.)

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Holocausts

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

Interview, “Sixty Minutes,” CBS News, March 31, 1979.

Homo Hierarchicus

We do not observe compliance to authority merely because it is a transient cultural or historical phenomenon, but because it flows from the logical necessities of social organization. If we are to have social life in any organized form—that is to say, if we are to have society—then we must have members of society amenable to organizational imperatives.

Letter to student, cited in Thomas Blass, “The Man Who Shocked the World,” Psychology Today, March 1, 2002.

The first twenty years of the young person’s life are spent functioning as a subordinate element in an authority system, and upon leaving school, the male usually moves into either a civilian job or military service. On the job, he learns that although some discreetly expressed dissent is allowable, an underlying posture of submission is required for harmonious functioning with superiors. However much freedom of detail is allowed the individual, the situation is defined as one in which he is to do a job prescribed by someone else. While structures of authority are of necessity present in all societies, advanced or primitive, modern society has the added characteristic of teaching individuals to respond to impersonal authorities. Whereas submission to authority is probably no less for an Ashanti than for an American factory worker, the range of persons who constitute authorities for the native are all personally known to him, while the modern industrial world forces individuals to submit to impersonal authorities, so that responses are made to abstract rank, indicated by an insignia, uniform or title.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Authority systems must be based on people arranged in a hierarchy. Thus the critical question in determining control is, Who is over whom? How much over is far less important than the visible presence of a ranked ordering.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Human Nature

It may be that we are puppets—puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

Cited in Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (2004).

The capacity to abandon one’s own autonomy, to surrender one’s will to an external authority, appears to be limitless.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

The greatest sin of our time is not the few who have destroyed but the vast majority who sat idly by.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

If you think it is easy to violate social constraints, get onto a bus and sing out loud. Full-throated song now, no humming. Many people will say it’s easy to carry out this act, but not one in a hundred will be able to do it. . . . The point is not to think about singing, but to try to do it. Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.

Psychology in Today’s World (1975).

Milgram on Milgram

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.

Bar Mitzvah speech, cited in Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (2004).

My true spiritual home is Central Europe, not France, the Mediterranean countries, England, Scandinavia or Northern Germany, but that area which is bounded by the cities of Munich, Vienna and Prague. . . . 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.

Letter to a friend, cited in Thoams Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (2004).

Obedience to Authority

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

“The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, 247(1483): 62–77 (1973).

If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be deluged with eloquent protests. But in a psychological laboratory, with the scientific experimenter urging on the subject, one finds that decent, ordinary men and women will commit horrendous acts.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.

“The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, 247(1483): 62–77 (1973).

In times of war, the necessity to comply with authority is paramount, however irrational the demands.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

It is clear that the disagreement between the authorities completely paralyzed action.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

. . . it is not what subjects do but for whom they are doing it that counts.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

There is a certain discomfort in not knowing who the boss is, and subjects sometimes frantically sought to determine this.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Freud, without referring to the general systems implications of his assertion, spelled out this mechanism clearly: “. . . the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal embodied in the leader” (Group Psychology, 1921, page 78).

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Scientists’ Responsibility

Perhaps it is the responsibility of scientists to ensure that their findings are employed to forward human welfare, rather than erode it.

“The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, 247(1483): 62–77 (1973).

Social Psychology

The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

Tyrannies

Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs.”

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).