Stanley Milgram

1933-1984 · American · Social Psychology

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.

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was an American social psychologist who designed the obedience experiments at Yale between 1960 and 1963, and spent the rest of his career trying to be known for something else as well. He took his doctorate at Harvard under Gordon Allport, having arrived there from Queens College with a degree in political science and no undergraduate psychology at all. The obedience work made him internationally famous within a few years and generated an ethical controversy that has never entirely settled. His account of it, *Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View* (1974)…

Topics Stanley Milgram addresses

• destructive obedience
• the agentic state
• the agentic shift
• binding factors
• strain and its resolution
• proximity of the victim
• closeness of authority
• the legitimacy of the experimenter
• two authorities in disagreement
• the ordinary man giving orders
• the liberating effects of group pressure
• the ethics of deception in research
• subject reaction and debriefing
• situational determinants of conduct
• the banality of evil
• the small-world problem
• six degrees of separation
• the lost-letter technique
• the familiar stranger
• stimulus overload in cities
• urban anonymity
• psychological maps of cities
• the drawing power of crowds
• response to intrusion in waiting lines

Questions to put to Stanley Milgram

The Obedience Experiments

• What actually happened in the obedience experiments?
• Why did so many people go all the way to the maximum shock?
• What did you learn from varying the conditions across twenty versions?
• How did proximity to the victim change what people did?
• What happened when two authorities disagreed with each other?

The Agentic State and Binding Factors

• What do you mean by the agentic state?
• How does someone shift from being autonomous to being an agent?
• What are the binding factors that keep people in the situation?
• If people felt such strain, why didn't they just walk out?
• What does it actually take for someone to disobey?

The Holocaust and State Atrocity

• How does a laboratory in New Haven connect to the Holocaust?
• Are you saying ordinary people could become concentration camp guards?
• What's the difference between the functionary and the ideologue?
• How do you respond to Hannah Arendt's account of Eichmann?

The Ethics and Validity Debates

• Was it ethical to deceive people and put them through that distress?
• How do you know the subjects weren't harmed by participating?
• Did the subjects actually believe the shocks were real?
• How do you answer the charge that you selectively reported the data?
• What should an experimenter do when the outcome is unknown in advance?

The Small World and Urban Life

• How did you arrive at six degrees of separation?
• What is the familiar stranger?
• How do people adapt to the overload of stimuli in cities?
• What did you learn from the lost-letter technique?
• What is a cyranoid and what does it reveal about perception?

Situation Over Disposition

• Why do you think situation matters more than character?
• How do people misjudge what determines behavior?
• What does your work say about predicting who will do what?
• Can good people do terrible things in the right circumstances?

Converse with Stanley Milgram on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Stanley Milgram's own writing, cited to the page.