MILGRAM, STANLEY

MILGRAM, STANLEY (1933–1984), U.S. social psychologist. Born in New York City, Milgram attended public schools in the Bronx, then earned a bachelor's degree in political science at Queens College in 1954. Convinced by an advisor to change his field of study to psychology, Milgram entered Harvard University, where he studied under Solomon Asch and Gordon Allport, receiving his doctoral degree in social psychology in 1960. That year Milgram joined the faculty of Yale University as an assistant professor, and in 1961 he began his experiments on obedience to authority. He found, in studies conducted at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, that 65 percent of the subjects (ordinary citizens of New Haven) followed instructions to administer what they believed were harmful, even potentially fatal, electric shocks to an unwilling stranger – simply because they were directed to do so by an authority figure dressed in a lab coat. At the end of the experiment, the subjects were told that the victim did not actually receive shocks. Milgram's findings, released in 1963, were considered alarming; critics, including the American Psychiatric Association, initially questioned the ethics of the experiment. In time, however, Milgram's experiment was considered a milestone in the study of the social aspects of obedience and the primary documentation of what came to be called "situationism," whereby external situations override internal perceptions and moral standards. It is widely regarded as the most powerful experiment ever conducted in social psychology. Milgram, in his work Obedience to Authority (1974), used his findings to explain a range of shocking behavior, from guards in Nazi concentration camps to American soldiers at the My Lai massacre. Milgram taught at Harvard from 1963 to 1967, where he conducted other noteworthy research, including the lost-letter technique and the "small world" problem, which both concerned the degrees of separation between randomly selected people. The studies gave rise to the popular expression "six degrees of separation." In 1967 Milgram was named the head of the social psychology doctoral program at the City University of New York. In 1980 he was appointed a distinguished professor at the City University Graduate Center, where he continued to teach until his death in 1984. His research in the 1970s and early 1980s is considered to have established the subfield of urban psychology. Milgram's work continues to be widely cited in psychology textbooks, and its influence on popular culture has extended to a television movie, The Tenth Level (1976), and a Broadway play, Six Degrees of Separation, which was adapted for film in 1993. (Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)