Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.Blass, T. (2004). ''The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram''.

Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann 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 gained notoriety for his obedience experiment 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. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the '' Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology''as PDF.
and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, '' Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.''

His other small-world experiment, while at Harvard, 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.

He 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.

Early and personal life

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

His Bar Mitzvah speech was on the subject of the plight of the 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." Alexandra stated 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 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'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 (which he graduated from in three years), and excelled academically and was a great leader among his peers. One of Milgram's classmates at James Monroe High School was Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the Stanford prison experiment. Milgram and Zimbardo also shared an affinity for the popular television program ''Candid Camera'' and an admiration for its creator, Allen Funt.

By the time he was college age, his family had moved to nearby Queens. In 1954, Milgram received his bachelor's degree in political science from Queens College in New York, which he attended tuition-free. He also studied at Brooklyn College, where he received A-grades in "Psychology of Personality" and "An Eclectic Approach to Social Psychology". He applied to a PhD program in social psychology at Harvard University, and was initially rejected due to an insufficient background in psychology (he had not taken any undergraduate courses in psychology at Queens College). He was eventually accepted to Harvard in 1954 after first enrolling as a student in Harvard's Office of Special Students.

Professional life

In 1961, Milgram received a PhD in social psychology from Harvard. He became an assistant professor at Yale in the fall of 1960. He 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. Most likely because of his controversial obedience experiment, Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard.

In 1967 he accepted an offer to become a tenured full professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and he taught at City University until he died in 1984. Milgram had a number of significant influences, including psychologists Solomon Asch and Gordon Allport.

Death

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.

Obedience to authority

In 1963, Milgram submitted the results of his obedience experiments in the article "Behavioral Study of Obedience". In the ensuing controversy, the American Psychological Association held up his application for membership for a year because of questions about the ethics of his work, but eventually did grant him full membership. Ten years later, in 1974, Milgram published ''Obedience to Authority''. He won the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1964, mostly for his work on the social aspects of obedience. Inspired in part by the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann

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