Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram was born on 15 August 1933 in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents — Samuel, a Romanian-born baker, and Adele, from Hungary. The household was deeply marked by the Second World War: after 1945 relatives who had survived Nazi concentration camps came to stay with the family in New York, their tattoos visible. In his 1946 Bar Mitzvah speech, the thirteen-year-old Milgram spoke about the suffering of European Jewry; he later wrote to a childhood friend that he should have been born in the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber twenty years later. The Holocaust was not background to his work — it was its motive.

He took a bachelor's degree in political science at Queens College in 1954, then applied to the social psychology PhD programme at Harvard. Initially rejected for lack of psychology coursework, he completed an intensive summer programme and was admitted that same year. He earned his PhD in 1960 under Solomon Asch, whose conformity experiments would shape his methodology. At James Monroe High School in the Bronx he had been a classmate of Philip Zimbardo, the future architect of the Stanford prison experiment. In autumn 1960 Milgram took up an assistant professorship at Yale and, three months after Adolf Eichmann's trial opened in Jerusalem, began running an experiment in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall that would define his life.

The design was elegantly cruel. A volunteer was told he was helping a study of memory and learning, assigned the role of teacher and instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a learner — actually a confederate — whenever he answered word-pair questions incorrectly. As the learner cried out, complained of a heart condition and eventually fell silent, the experimenter, in a white lab coat, calmly told the teacher to continue. In the baseline condition published in 1963 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, around sixty-five percent of subjects went all the way to the maximum 450 volts. The 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View collected and theorised the results and won the American Association for the Advancement of Science prize for social-psychological research.

The reach of the experiments far exceeded the discipline. They were invoked to interpret the My Lai massacre, the behavior of police interrogators eliciting false confessions, and the routine cruelties of bureaucratic organisations. At the same time, the work faced enduring criticism. The developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind argued in 1964 that subjects had suffered serious emotional harm and that debriefing was inadequate; the American Psychological Association held up Milgram's membership for a year on ethical grounds before granting full membership. The controversy contributed directly to the tightening of institutional review-board procedures for human-subjects research. In 2009 Jerry Burger published a partial replication using a 150-volt cut-off and richer safeguards and found obedience rates close to Milgram's, reopening the question of how to interpret the findings without resolving it.

Milgram was always more than the obedience study. From the mid-1960s he ran the small-world experiment, mailing folders to 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska, with the task of forwarding them through personal acquaintances toward a stockbroker in Boston. The completed chains averaged about five intermediaries, giving rise to the popular notion of six degrees of separation and to a research programme that would eventually merge with network science. He also designed his familiar stranger studies of urban commuters and invented the lost-letter technique for measuring attitudes by tracking which dropped, stamped letters strangers chose to mail. His 1970-71 anti-social behavior experiments tested whether television violence increased real-world transgression, with results that complicated simple imitation models. In 1977 Milgram began piloting work on cyranoids, hybrid social agents in which a speech shadower spoke in real time the words of a remote source, an experimental probe of self-perception, stereotype and social interaction that he never published in full before his death; replications of the cyranoid pilots only appeared in 2014.

Milgram died of a heart attack — his fifth — in New York City on 20 December 1984, aged 51. He left behind his wife Alexandra, two children, a long shelf of films and articles, and an unfinished cyranoid programme. A 2002 Review of General Psychology survey ranked him the forty-sixth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century, but his real legacy is measured differently. He gave social psychology its most haunting experiment, anchored what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil to a concrete laboratory paradigm, and set in motion the modern conversation about research ethics that produced today's institutional review boards. His career remains a case study in the productive tension between scientific ambition and the duty of care owed to the human beings who make our science possible, a tension every empirical psychologist still has to negotiate.