Milgram, Stanley

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'''Stanley Milgram''' (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American [[social psychology|social psychologist]]. He served on the faculty at [[Yale University]], [[Harvard University]], and the [[City University of New York]]. While at Yale, he conducted a seminal series of experiments on [[obedience]] to [[authority]], which have come to be known simply as the infamous "[[Milgram experiment]]." Milgram conducted a number of other studies, including the [[Small world phenomenon|small-world experiment]] (the source of the [[six degrees of separation]] concept), and also introduced the concept of [[familiar stranger]]s.
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{{readout||right|250px|Stanley Milgram's experiments showed that people may act in inhumane ways when ordered to do so by an [[authority]] figure and when their peers also act in the same way}}
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Milgram's experiments shocked people with their implications about the dark aspects of human nature, especially since they showed that apparently normal people would behave in inhumane ways. For Milgram, however, they were more about the influence of the group on the individual than individual nature itself. He had begun his research asking whether it could be that those on trial as [[war criminal]]s were just following orders, and would others have done the same. When the [[My Lai Massacre]] occurred in [[Vietnam]] in 1968, his work was used to explain the behavior of those involved.
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{{Toc}}
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Milgram showed that human beings, people who one would not expect to behave inhumanely, are nonetheless capable of acting in inhumane ways when ordered to do so by an [[authority]] figure and when their peers also acted in the same way. Such [[obedience]] and [[conformity (psychology)|conformity]], Milgram noted, are essential aspects of social behavior, allowing [[society]] to function in an organized fashion. The problem, obviously, comes when authority is wrong. Milgram's solution, based on his research, was that people of [[conscience]] would find strength in numbers to resist misguided authority. Thus, although shocking, Milgram's contribution to our understanding of human nature gives much hope for a better world.
  
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==Life==
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'''Stanley Milgram''' was born in [[New York City]] on August 15, 1933, the second of three children. His parents were immigrants from [[Europe]] and ran a bakery in New York. Stanley spent his early years in the city, graduating from James Monroe High School in 1950. One of his classmates was [[Philip Zimbardo]], who also became an influential [[social psychology|social psychologist]], famous for the [[Stanford prison experiment]].
  
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'''Stanley Milgram''' (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was a [[social psychologist]] at [[Yale University]], [[Harvard University]] and the [[City University of New York]]. While at Harvard, he conducted the [[Small world phenomenon|small-world experiment]] (the source of the [[six degrees of separation]] concept), and while at Yale, he conducted the [[Milgram experiment]] on obedience to [[authority]]. He also introduced the concept of [[familiar stranger]]s.
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Although considered one of the most important [[psychologist]]s of the twentieth century, Stanley Milgram took no [[psychology]] courses as an undergraduate at [[Queens College, City University of New York|Queens College, New York]], where he earned his [[Bachelor's degree]] in [[political science]] in 1954. He applied to a [[Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D.]] program in social psychology at [[Harvard University]] and was initially rejected due to lack of psychology background. He was accepted in 1954 after taking six courses in psychology, and graduated with his Ph.D. in 1960.  
  
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Although considered one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, he never took a psychology course as an undergraduate at [[Queens College, City University of New York|Queens College, New York]], where he earned his [[Bachelor's degree]] in [[political science]] in 1954. He applied to a [[Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D.]] program in [[social psychology]] at [[Harvard University]] and was initially rejected due to lack of psychology background. He was accepted in 1954 after taking six courses in psychology, and graduated with the Ph.D. in 1960. Most likely because of his controversial [[Milgram Experiment]], Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard after becoming an assistant professor there, but instead accepted an offer to become a tenured full professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (Blass, 2004). Milgram had a number of significant influences, including psychologists [[Solomon Asch]] and [[Gordon Allport]] (Milgram, 1977). Milgram himself influenced other psychologists such as Alan C. Elms, who was his first graduate assistant on the obedience experiment.
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Milgram's dissertation, under the mentorship of [[Gordon Allport]], was a cross-cultural study of [[conformity (psychology)|conformity]] carried out in [[Norway]] and [[France]]. In 1955 [[Solomon Asch]] had been a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and Milgram was his teaching assistant. He became very familiar with Asch's conformity experiments, and modified Asch's procedure to use [[sound]] (tones) instead of [[vision|visual]] stimuli (lines) in his research. Milgram also used tape-recorded answers from other subjects to create the [[peer group]], noting that this method had the advantages that "tapes do not have to be paid by the hour and they are always available."<ref> Stanley Milgram, "Nationality and Conformity," ''Scientific American'' 205(34) (1961): 45-51.</ref>
  
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In 1984, Milgram died of a [[myocardial infarction|heart attack]] at the age of 51 in the city of his birth, [[New York City|New York]]. He left behind a widow, Alexandra "Sasha" Milgram, and two children.
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In 1959 and 1960, Milgram worked for Asch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, helping him edit his book on conformity. He regarded Asch as the most important scientific influence on his research.<ref name=Blass>Thomas Blass, [http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20020301-000037 The Man Who Shocked the World] ''Psychology Today'' (Mar/Apr 2002). Retrieved June 12, 2008.</ref> After receiving his Ph.D., in September of 1960 Milgram was appointed assistant professor of psychology at [[Yale University]]. He immediately began pilot studies on [[obedience]] and began the formal experiments in the summer of 1961. Going beyond Asch's conformity work, Milgram was curious as to whether social influence would have such power in situations of greater consequence than judgments of lines or tones. His research into obedience to authority shocked the world.
  
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==Familiar stranger==
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During his three years at Yale, Milgram met and married Alexandra "Sasha" Menkin. They had two children.
  
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In 1963, Milgram submitted the results of his research in the article "Behavioral study of Obedience." Most likely because of this controversial "[[Milgram Experiment]]," Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard after becoming an assistant professor there. He subsequently accepted an offer to become a tenured full professor at the Graduate Center of the [[City University of New York]] (CUNY).
  
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A '''familiar stranger''' is an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact. First identified by [[Stanley Milgram]] in the 1972 paper '' The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity'', it has become an increasingly popular concept in research about [[social network]]s.
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In the ensuing controversy that erupted, the [[American Psychological Association|APA]] held up his application for membership for a year because of questions about the [[ethics]] of his work, but finally granted him full membership. Ten years later, in 1974, Milgram published ''Obedience to Authority'' and was awarded the annual social psychology award by the [[American Association for the Advancement of Science|AAAS]] (mostly for his work over the social aspects of obedience).  
  
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Somebody who is seen daily on the train or at the gym, but with whom one does not otherwise communicate, is an example of a familiar stranger. Interestingly, if such individuals meet in an unfamiliar setting, for example while travelling, they are more likely to introduce themselves than would perfect strangers, since they have a background of shared experiences.
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Inspired in part by the 1961 trial of [[Adolf Eichmann]], his work was later used to explain the 1968 [[My Lai massacre]] (including authority training in the military and on depersonalizing the "enemy" through racial and cultural differences).  
  
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The 1972 paper was based on two independent research projects he conducted in 1971, one at [[City University of New York|CUNY]] and the other at a train station. Milgram published a second paper on the subject, ''Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger'', in 1974. It appeared in the magazine ''[[Psychology Today]]''.
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Stanley Milgram died of a [[myocardial infarction|heart attack]] on December 20, 1984 at the age of 51 in the city of his birth, [[New York City|New York]].
  
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[[University of California, Berkeley|UC Berkeley]] has adopted the concept as part of a research program titled ''Familiar Stranger Project'' at its Intel Research Laboratory.
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==Work==
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Milgram is most famous for his work on [[obedience]], with a particularly shocking study becoming known simply as the "Milgram experiment." In addition to his studies of obedience and [[conformity (psychology)|conformity]], Milgram investigated a number of other issues in [[social psychology]]. Of particular note are his work on the "small world phenomenon" and the "familiar stranger."
  
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Milgram also conducted a study of the effects of [[television]] on social behavior. He published an article on urban life in ''[[Science (journal)|Science]]'' in 1970. This reflected his love of city life and helped initiate the psychological study of urban life.
  
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=== Obedience to authority ===
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While at [[Yale University]], Milgram conducted what is known today as the infamous '''Milgram experiment''', a seminal series of [[social psychology]] [[experiment]]s, which measured the willingness of study participants to [[Obedience (human behavior)|obey]] an [[authority|authority figure]] who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal [[conscience]]. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,''<ref name=ObedStudy>Stanley Milgram, "Behavioral Study of Obedience" ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'' 67(4) (1963): 371-378.</ref> and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, ''Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.''<ref name=obedbook>Stanley Milgram, ''Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View'' (Harpercollins, 1974, ISBN 006131983X).</ref>
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[[Image:Milgram Experiment advertising.png|thumb|300px|left|Advertisement for the recruiting of the Milgram experiment subjects]]
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The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of [[Nazi]] [[war criminal]] [[Adolf Eichmann]] in [[Jerusalem]]. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in [[the Holocaust]] were just following orders? Could we call them all [[accomplice]]s?"<ref name=obedbook/>
  
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After the pilot study with Yale students, Milgram [[advertising|advertised]] for members of the public to participate in an experiment that was described as a study of [[learning]] and [[memory]]. As a result, "ordinary" people were tested, people drawn from every stratum of New Haven life including professionals, white collar workers, unemployed persons, and industrial workers.<ref name=harpers> Stanley Milgram, "[http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html The Perils of Obedience]" as it appeared in ''Harper's Magazine''. Abridged and adapted from Stanley Milgram ''Obedience to Authority.'' (1974). Retrieved June 12, 2008.</ref> The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a white technician's coat, and the learner (supposedly another volunteer, but in reality a confederate of the experimenter) was played by a 47 year old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. When they arrived, the participant and the confederate were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
  
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== Obedience to authority ==
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Two slips of paper were then presented to the participant and to the confederate. The participant was led to believe that one of the slips said "learner" and the other said "teacher," and that he and the confederate had been given the slips randomly. In fact, both slips said "teacher," but the confederate claimed to have the slip that read "learner," thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a [[heart]] condition.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
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[[Image:Milgram Experiment v2.png|right|thumb|300px|The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.]]
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[[Image:Milgram Experiment v2.png|right|thumb|200px|The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.<ref name=ObedStudy/>]]
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The "teacher" was given a 45-[[volt]] [[electric shock]] from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. For every incorrect response the teacher was to administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing for each wrong answer.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
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The '''Milgram experiment''' was a seminal series of [[social psychology]] [[experiment]]s conducted by [[Yale University]] [[psychology|psychologist]] [[Stanley Milgram]], which measured the willingness of study participants to [[Obedience (human behavior)|obey]] an [[authority|authority figure]] who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal [[conscience]]. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'',<ref name=ObedStudy>{{cite journal | last = Milgram | first = Stanley | year = 1963 | title = Behavioral Study of Obedience | journal = Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology | volume = 67 | pages = 371–378 | id = PMID 14049516 | url = http://content.apa.org/journals/abn/67/4/371}} [http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1981/A1981LC33300001.pdf Full-text PDF.]</ref> and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, ''Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.''<ref>Milgram, Stanley. (1974), ''Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View''. Harpercollins (ISBN 0-06-131983-X).</ref>
 
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The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of [[Nazi]] [[war criminal]] [[Adolf Eichmann]] in [[Jerusalem]]. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in [[the Holocaust]] were just following orders? Could we call them all [[accomplice]]s?"<ref>Milgram (1974). p. ?</ref>
 
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Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience," writing:
 
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<blockquote>The legal and philosophic aspects of [[obedience]] are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much [[pain]] an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. </blockquote>
 
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<blockquote>Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.<ref>Milgram, Stanley. (1974), [http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html "The Perils of Obedience".] ''Harper's Magazine.'' Abridged and adapted from ''Obedience to Authority''.</ref></blockquote>
 
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== The experiment ==
 
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The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a white technician's coat, and the victim (learner) was played by a 47 year old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the learner (supposedly another volunteer, but in reality a [[wiktionary:confederate|confederate]] of the experimenter) were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
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Two slips of paper were then presented to the participant and to the actor. The participant was led to believe that one of the slips said "learner" and the other said "teacher," and that he and the actor had been given the slips randomly. In fact, both slips said "teacher," but the actor claimed to have the slip that read "learner," thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a [[heart condition]].<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
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The "teacher" was given a 45-[[volt]] [[electric shock]] from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner.  
 
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The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
  
 
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
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At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
  
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If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:<ref name=ObedStudy/>
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If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter,<ref name=ObedStudy/> in this order:
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#Please continue.
 
#Please continue.
 
#The experiment requires that you continue.
 
#The experiment requires that you continue.
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If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.
 
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.
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This experiment could be seen to raise some [[ethical issues]] as Stanley Milgram deceived his study's subjects, and put them under more pressure than many believe was necessary.
 
  
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==Results==
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Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled 14 Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2 percent) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
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Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
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In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)<ref name=ObedStudy/> of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks ''before'' the 300-volt level.<ref name=ObedStudy/>
 
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Later, Prof. Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world, with similar results<ref> Milgram(1974)</ref> although unlike the Yale experiment, resistance to the experimenter was reported anecdotally elsewhere.<ref> Melbourne(1972) A version of the experiment was conducted in the Psychology Department of La Trobe University by Dr Robert Montgomery. One 19-year old female student subject (KG), upon having the experiment explained to her, objected to participating. When asked to reconsider she swore at the experimenter and left the laboratory, despite believing that she had "failed" the project </ref>  Moreover, Milgram later investigated the effect of the experiment's locale on obedience levels, (e.g. one experiment was held in a respectable university, the other in an unregistered, backstreet office in a bustling city; the greater the locale's respectability, the greater the obedience rate). Apart from confirming the original results, the variations have tested variables in the experimental setup.
 
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Dr. Thomas Blass of the [[University of Maryland Baltimore County]] performed a [[meta-analysis]] on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61–66 percent, regardless of time or place.<ref>Blass, Thomas. "The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority," [http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bell/jasp/ ''Journal of Applied Social Psychology''], 1999, 25, pp. 955-978.</ref><ref>Blass, Thomas. (2002), "The Man Who Shocked the World," ''Psychology Today'', '''35''':(2), Mar/Apr 2002.</ref>{{Verify source|date=June 2007}}
 
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There is a little-known [[wiktionary:coda|coda]] to the Milgram Experiment, reported by [[Philip Zimbardo]]: None of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave, per Milgram's notes and recollections, when Zimbardo asked him about that point.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}
 
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Milgram created a documentary film titled ''Obedience'' showing the experiment and its results. He also produced a series of five social psychology films, some of which dealt with his experiments.<ref>[http://www.stanleymilgram.com/films.php Milgram films.] Accessed 4 October 2006.</ref>
 
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The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the [[ethics]] of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants. In Milgram's defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated, 15 percent chose neutral responses (92% of all former participants responding).<ref>See Milgram (1974), p. 195</ref> Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants. Six years later (at the height of the [[Vietnam War]]), one of the participants in the experiment sent correspondence to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress:
 
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<blockquote>While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority . . . . To permit myself to be [[Conscription in the United States|drafted]] with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself . . . . I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted [[Conscientious Objector]] status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience . . . . </blockquote>
 
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The experiments provoked emotional criticism more about the experiment's implications than with experimental ethics. In the journal [[Jewish Currents]], Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher," suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period".<ref>Dimow, Joseph. [http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm "Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments"], ''Jewish Currents,'' January 2004.</ref> Indeed, that was one of the explicitly-stated goals of the experiments. Quoting from the preface of Milgram's book, ''Obedience to Authority'': "The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch."
 
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In 1981, [[Tom Peters]] and [[Robert H. Waterman Jr]] wrote that The Milgram Experiment and the later [[Stanford prison experiment]] led by Zimbardo at Stanford University were frightening in their implications about the danger lurking in human nature's dark side.<ref>[[Tom Peters|Peters, Thomas, J.,]], [[Robert H. Waterman Jr|Waterman, Robert. H.]], "[[In Search of Excellence]]," 1981. Cf. p.78 and onward.</ref>
 
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== Interpretations ==
 
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Professor Milgram elaborated two theories explaining his results:
 
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* The first is the ''theory of conformism'', based on [[Solomon Asch]]'s work, describing the fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person. A subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model.
 
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* The second is the ''agentic state theory'', wherein, per Milgram, ''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 sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow''. {{Fact|date=January 2008}}
 
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==Variations==
 
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===Milgram's variations===
 
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In ''Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View'', Milgram describes nineteen variations of his experiment. Generally, when the victim's physical immediacy was increased, the participant's compliance decreased;  when the authority's physical immediacy decreased, the participant's compliance decreased (Experiments 1–4). For example, in Experiment 2, where participants received telephonic instructions from the experimenter, compliance decreased to 21 percent; interestingly, some participants deceived the experimenter by ''pretending'' to continue the experiment. In the variation where the "learner's" physical immediacy was closest, wherein participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, compliance decreased. Under that condition, 30 percent of participants completed the experiment.
 
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In Experiment 8, women were the participants; previously, all participants had been men. Obedience did not significantly differ, though the women communicated experiencing higher levels of stress.
 
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Experiment 10 took place in a modest office in [[Bridgeport, Connecticut|Bridgeport]], [[Connecticut]], purporting to be the commercial entity "Research Associates of Bridgeport" without apparent connection to Yale University, to eliminate the university's prestige as a factor influencing the participants' behavior. In those conditions, obedience dropped to 47.5 percent.
 
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Milgram also combined the power of authority with that of [[conformity (psychology)|conformity]]. In those experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional "teachers" (also actors, like the "learner"). The behavior of the participants' peers strongly affected the results. In Experiment 17, when two additional teachers refused to comply, only 4 of 40 participants continued in the experiment. In Experiment 18, the participant performed a subsidiary task (reading the questions via microphone or recording the learner's answers) with another "teacher" who complied fully. In that variation, only 3 of 40 defied the experimenter.<ref name=old>[http://www.stanleymilgram.com/oldanswers.html Milgram, old answers.] Accessed 4 October 2006.</ref>
 
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===Replications===
 
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Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a puppy. They found that 20 out of the 26 participants complied to the end. The six who did not were all male; all 13 of the women obeyed to the end, although many were highly disturbed and some openly wept.<ref>Sheridan, C.L. and King, K.G. (1972) Obedience to authority with an authentic victim, Proceedings of the 80th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association 7: 165-6.</ref>
 
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Recent variations on Milgram's experiment suggest an interpretation requiring neither obedience nor authority, but suggest that participants suffer [[learned helplessness]], where they feel powerless to control the outcome, and so abdicate their personal responsibility. In a recent experiment using a computer simulation in place of the learner receiving electrical shocks, the participants administering the shocks were aware that the learner was unreal, but still showed the same results.<ref>{{cite journal |author=Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, ''et al'' |title=A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments |journal=PLoS ONE |volume=1 |issue= |pages=e39 |year=2006 |pmid=17183667 |doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0000039}}</ref>
 
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In the Primetime series ''Basic Instincts'', the Milgram Experiment was repeated in 2006, with the same results with the men; the second experiment, with women, showed they were more likely to continue the experiment. A third experiment, with an additional teacher for peer pressure, showed peer pressure is less likely to stop a participant.<ref>{{citeweb|url=http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2765416&page=1|title=The Science of Evil|accessdate=2007-01-04|format=HTML}}</ref>
 
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==Real life examples==
 
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From April 1995 until June 30 2004, there was a series of hoaxes, known as the [[strip search prank call scam]], upon fast food workers in popular fast food chains in America in which a phone caller, claiming to be a police officer, persuaded authority figures to strip and sexually abuse workers. The perpetrator achieved a high level of success in persuading workers to perform acts which they would not have done under normal circumstances.<ref>Wolfson, Andrew. [http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051009/NEWS01/510090392 A hoax most cruel.] ''The Courier-Journal.'' October 9, 2005.</ref> (The chief suspect, David R. Stewart, was found not guilty in the only case that has gone to trial so far.<ref>[http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061031/NEWS01/61031014 Jury finds Stewart not guilty in McDonald's hoax case.] ''The Courier-Journal.'' October 31, 2006. [Link dead as of January 5th, 2008]</ref>)
 
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== Media depictions ==
 
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{{copyedit|section|date=December 2007}}
 
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*''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0822813/ The Human Behavior Experiments]'' (2006) is a documentary by [[Alex Gibney]] about major experiments in social psychology, shown along with modern incidents highlighting the principles discussed. Along with [[Stanley Milgram]]'s study in obedience, the documentary shows the 'diffusion of responsibility' study of [[John_Darley | John Darley]] and [[Bibb_Latan%C3%A9 | Bibb Latané]] and the [[Stanford_prison_experiment |Stanford Prison Experiment]] of [[Phillip Zimbardo]]. <ref>[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0822813/ The Human Behavior Experiments] at IMDb.com. Accessed 4 October 2006.</ref>
 
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*Another documentary by [[Alex Gibney]], ''[[Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room]]'' (2005), refers to the Milgram Experiment as the rationale for the actions of Enron's line-level employees. The film was nominated for an [[Academy Award]] for Best Documentary.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.oscars.org/78academyawards/nomswins.html|title=78th Academy Awards - Nominees and Winners|publisher=Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences|dateaccessed=2007-09-25}}</ref>
 
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*The documentary ''[[Ghosts of Abu Ghraib]]'', directed by [[Rory Kennedy]], uses actual films clips from the Milgram Experiment.<ref>"The documentary is framed by clips from Dr. Stanley Milgram’s infamous “obedience” studies in the 1960s, which showed how easily ordinary, law-abiding citizens could be persuaded to inflict pain on strangers with what they were led to believe were high-voltage electric shocks."{{cite web|url=http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/arts/television/22stan.html|title=Abu Ghraib and Its Multiple Failures|author=Alessandra Stanley|date=2007-02-22|publisher=[[New York Times]]}}</ref> The documentary won an [[Emmy Award|Emmy]] for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special.<ref>http://www.emmys.org/awards/2007pt/crtvarts_wrap.php Retrieved 2007-09-16</ref>
 
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*''Obedience'' is a black-and-white film of the experiment, shot by Milgram himself. It is distributed by [[The Pennsylvania State University]] [http://www.mediasales.psu.edu/ Media Services].
 
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*''Atrocity'' (2005) is a film re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment.<ref>{{citeweb|url=http://www.movingimage.us/science/sloan.php?film_id=214|title=Atrocity.|accessdate=2007-03-20}}</ref>
 
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*UK conceptual artist Rod Dickinson recreated one condition of the Milgram obedience experiment as a performance art installation, [http://www.milgramreenactment.org ''The Milgram Re-enactment''] (2002).
 
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*''[[I as in Icarus|I comme Icare]]'' or ''I as in Icarus'' (1979), starring French film star [[Yves Montand]] is a French political thriller (about the Kennedy assassination) which contains a full and accurate reproduction of Milgram's experiment at a fictitious university meant to remind one of [[Yale University]].
 
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*''The Tenth Level'' (1975) was a [[CBS]] television film about the experiment, featuring [[William Shatner]], [[Ossie Davis]], and [[John Travolta]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20020301-000037&page=4|title=The Man who Shocked the World|author=Thomas Blass|publisher=''Psychology Today''|date=March/April 2002}}</ref><ref>[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075320/ The Tenth Level] at the Internet Movie Database. Accessed 4 October 2006.</ref>
 
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*The TV show [[Law & Order: Special Victims Unit]] used the [[strip search prank call scam]] as well as discussion of Milgram's work as the premise for an episode (Season 9, Episode 17).
 
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−
*[[Chip Kidd]]'s 2008 novel ''The Learners'' features Milgram and his experiment as central to the plot.
 
  
 +
In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)<ref name=ObedStudy/> of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks ''before'' the 300-volt level.<ref name=ObedStudy/> Later, Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world, with similar results.<ref name=harpers/>
  
 +
In ''Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View'' published in 1974, Milgram described nineteen variations of his experiment, testing variables that might be expected to influence the subjects' behavior. For example, if participants received telephonic instructions from the experimenter, compliance decreased to 21 percent; interestingly, some participants deceived the experimenter by ''pretending'' to continue the experiment. In the variation where the "learner's" physical immediacy was closest, wherein participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, compliance decreased. Under that condition, 30 percent of participants completed the experiment.
  
 +
Milgram also combined the power of [[authority]] with that of [[conformity (psychology)|conformity]]. In those experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional "teachers" (also actors, like the "learner"). The behavior of the participants' peers strongly affected the results. In one variation, the actual subject did not pull the shock lever; instead he only conveyed information to the peer (a confederate) who pulled the lever. Thus, according to Milgram, the subject shifts responsibility to another person and does not blame himself for what happens.
  
 +
Milgram summarized the experiments in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience," writing:
 +
<blockquote>The legal and philosophic aspects of [[obedience]] are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much [[pain]] an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. </blockquote>
  
 +
<blockquote>Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.<ref name=harpers/></blockquote>
  
 +
Milgram elaborated two theories explaining his results:
  
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+
* The first is the ''theory of conformism,'' based on [[Solomon Asch]]'s work, describing the fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person. A subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model.
  
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In 1963, Milgram submitted the results of his [[Milgram experiment]]s in the article "Behavioral study of Obedience." In the ensuing controversy that erupted, the [[American Psychological Association|APA]] held up his application for membership for a year because of questions about the ethics of his work, but then granted him full membership. Ten years later, in 1974, Milgram published ''Obedience to Authority'' and was awarded the annual social psychology award by the [[American Association for the Advancement of Science|AAAS]] (mostly for his work over the social aspects of obedience). Inspired in part by the 1961 trial of [[Adolf Eichmann]], his models were later also used to explain the 1968 [[My Lai massacre]] (including authority training in the military, depersonalizing the "enemy" through racial and cultural differences, etc.).  
+
* The second is the ''agentic state theory,'' wherein 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 sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow.  
  
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In 1976, [[CBS]] presented a made-for-television movie about obedience experiments: ''[[The Tenth Level]]'' with [[William Shatner]] as Stephen Hunter, a Milgram-like scientist. Milgram himself was a consultant for the film, though his personal life did not resemble that of the Shatner character. In this film, incidents were portrayed that never occurred in the followup to the real life experiment, including a subject's psychotic episode and the main character saying that he regretted the experiment. When asked about the film, Milgram told one of his graduate students, [[Sharon Presley]], that he was not happy with the film and told her that he did not want his name to be used in the credits.
+
Thomas Blass of the [[University of Maryland Baltimore County]] performed a [[meta-analysis]] on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61–66 percent, regardless of time or place.<ref>Thomas Blass, "The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority," ''Journal of Applied Social Psychology'' 25 (1999): 955-978.</ref><ref name=Blass/>
  
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A French political thriller, titled ''I... comme Icare'' ''("I"...as in Icarus)'', involves a key scene where Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority is explained and shown.
+
Milgram created a documentary film titled ''Obedience'' showing the experiment and its results. He also produced a series of five social psychology films, some of which dealt with his experiments.<ref>[http://www.stanleymilgram.com/films.php Milgram's films]. ''Stanleymilgram.com''. Retrieved January 21, 2011.</ref>
  
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In Alan Moore's graphic novel, ''[[V for Vendetta]]'', the character Dr. Delia Surridge discusses Milgram's experiment without directly naming Milgram, comparing it with the atrocities she herself had performed in the Larkhill Concentration camps.
+
=== Small world phenomenon ===
 +
Beginning in 1967, Milgram carried out a series of experiments, known as the "small world experiment," examining the average path length for [[social network]]s of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a [[Watts and Strogatz model|small world]] type network characterized by short path lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "[[six degrees of separation]]," although Milgram did not use this term himself.
  
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In 1986, musician [[Peter Gabriel]] wrote a song called ''We do what we're told (Milgram's 37)'', referring to the number of fully obedient participants in Milgram's Experiment 18: A Peer Administers Shocks. In this one, 37 out of 40 participants administered the full range of shocks up to 450 volts, the highest obedience rate Milgram found in his whole series. In this variation, the actual subject did not pull the shock lever; instead he only conveyed information to the peer (a confederate) who pulled the lever. Thus, according to Milgram, the subject shifts responsibility to another person and does not blame himself for what happens. This resembles real-life incidents in which people see themselves as merely cogs in a wheel, just "doing their job," allowing them to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
+
His experiment was conceived in an era when a number of independent threads were converging on the idea that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. [[Mathematics|Mathematician]] [[Manfred Kochen]] and [[political science|political scientist]] [[Ithiel de Sola Pool]] had written a mathematical manuscript, "Contacts and Influences," while working at the [[University of Paris]] in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over twenty years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of [[social network]]s, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks.  
  
−
The award-winning short film "Atrocity" (2005) re-enacts Milgram's obedience to authority experiment.
+
Milgram's work developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other.<ref name=milg>Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem." ''Sociometry'' 32(4) (1969): 425-443.</ref> This is one way of looking at the small world problem. An alternative view of the problem is to imagine the population as a social network and attempt to find the average path length between any two nodes. Milgram's experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.
  
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== Small World Phenomenon ==
+
Though the experiment went through several variations, Milgram typically chose individuals in the U.S. cities of [[Omaha, Nebraska]] and [[Wichita, Kansas]] to be the starting points and [[Boston, Massachusetts]] to be the end point of a chain of correspondence. These cities were selected because they represented a great distance in the United States, both socially and geographically.<ref name=bara>Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, ''Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means'' (New York, NY: Plume, 2003, ISBN 978-0452284395).</ref>
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The '''small world experiment''' comprised several experiments conducted by [[Stanley Milgram]] examining the [[average path length]] for [[social network]]s of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a [[Watts and Strogatz model|small world]] type network characterized by short path lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "[[six degrees of separation]]," although Milgram did not use this term himself.
 
  
 +
Information packets were initially sent to randomly selected individuals in Omaha or Wichita. They included letters, which detailed the study's purpose, and basic information about a target contact person in [[Boston]]. It additionally contained a roster on which they could write their own name, as well as business reply cards that were pre-addressed to [[Harvard University]].
  
 +
Upon receiving the invitation to participate, the recipient was asked whether he or she personally knew the contact person described in the letter. If so, the person was to forward the letter directly to that person. For the purposes of this study, knowing someone "personally" is defined as knowing them on a first-name basis.
  
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[[Guglielmo Marconi]]'s conjectures based on his radio work in the early 20th century, which were articulated in his 1909 [[Nobel Prize]] address, may have inspired{{Fact|date=April 2008}} Hungarian author [[Frigyes Karinthy]] to write (among many things) a challenge to find another person through which he could not be connected to by at most five people.<ref name=bara>[http://www.nd.edu/~alb/ Barabási, Albert-László]. 2003. "[http://www.nd.edu/%7Enetworks/Linked/index.html Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life.]" New York: Plume.</ref> This is perhaps the earliest reference to the concept of [[Six Degrees of Separation|six degrees of separation]], and the search for an answer to the small world problem.
+
In the more likely case that the person did not personally know the target, then the person was to think of a friend or relative they know personally that is more likely to know the target. They were then directed to sign their name on the roster and forward the packet to that person. A postcard was also mailed to the researchers at Harvard so that they could track the chain's progression toward the target.
  
−
Mathematician [[Manfred Kochen]] and political scientist [[Ithiel de Sola Pool]] wrote a mathematical manuscript, "Contacts and Influences," while working at the [[University of Paris]] in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of [[social network]]s, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks.
+
When and if the package eventually reached the contact person in Boston, the researchers could examine the roster to count the number of times it had been forwarded from person to person. Additionally, for packages that never reached the destination, the incoming postcards helped identify the break point in the chain.
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Milgram took up the challenge on his return from Paris, leading to the experiments reported in "The Small World Problem" in the popular science journal ''[[Psychology Today]]'', with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in ''[[Sociometry]]'' two years later. The ''Psychology Today'' article generated enormous publicity for the experiments, which are well known today, long after much of the formative work has been forgotten.
 
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Milgram's experiment was conceived in an era when a number of independent threads were converging on the idea that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Michael Gurevich had conducted seminal work in his empirical study of the structure of social networks in his [[MIT]] doctoral [[dissertation]] under de Sola Pool. Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an [[Austria]]n who had been involved in [[Statist]] [[urban design]], extrapolated these empirical results in a mathematical manuscript, Contacts and Influences, concluding that, in an American-sized population without social structure, "it is practically certain that any two individuals can contact one another by means of at least two intermediaries. In a [socially] structured population it is less likely but still seems probable. And perhaps for the whole world's population, probably only one more bridging individual should be needed." They subsequently constructed [[Monte Carlo simulation]]s based on Gurevich's data, which recognized that both weak and strong acquaintance links are needed to model social structure. The simulations, running on the primitive computers of 1973, were limited, but still were able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S. population, a value that foreshadowed the findings of Milgrim.
 
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Milgram revisited Gurevich's experiments in acquaintanceship networks when he conducted a highly publicized set of experiments beginning in 1967 at [[Harvard University]]. Milgram most famous work is a study of obedience and authority, which is widely known as the [[Milgram Experiment]]. Milgram's earlier association with de Solla Pool and Kochen was the likely source of his interest in the increasing interconnectedness among human beings. Gurevich's interviews served as a basis for his small world experiments.
 
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Milgram sought to devise an experiment that could answer the small world problem. This was the same phenomenon articulated by the writer [[Frigyes Karinthy]] in the 1920s while documenting a widely circulated belief in [[Budapest]] that individuals were separated by six degrees of social contact. This observation, in turn, was loosely based on the seminal [[demographic]] work of the [[Statist]]s who were so influential in the design of Eastern European cities during that period. Mathematician [[Benoit Mandelbrot]], born in [[Lithuania]] and having traveled extensively in Eastern Europe, was aware of the Statist rules of thumb, and was also a colleague of de Solla Pool, Kochen and Milgram at the University of Paris during the early 1950s (Kochen brought Mandelbrot to work at the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] and later [[IBM]] in the U.S.). This circle of researchers was fascinated by the interconnectedness and "social capital" of [[social network]]s.
 
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Milgram's study results showed that people in the United States seemed to be connected by approximately three friendship links, on average, without speculating on global linkages; he never actually used the phrase "six degrees of separation." Since the ''[[Psychology Today]]'' article gave the experiments wide publicity, Milgram, Kochen, and Karinthy all had been incorrectly attributed as the origin of the notion of "six degrees"; the most likely popularizer of the phrase "six degrees of separation" is [[John Guare]], who attributed the value "six" to Marconi.
 
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Milgram's experiment developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other.<ref name=milg>Travers, Jeffrey & Stanley Milgram. 1969. "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem." ''Sociometry'', Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 425-443.</ref> This is one way of looking at the small world problem. An alternative view of the problem is to imagine the population as a [[social network]] and attempt to find the [[average path length]] between any two nodes. Milgram's experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.
 
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===Basic procedure===
 
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# Though the experiment went through several variations, Milgram typically chose individuals in the U.S. cities of [[Omaha, Nebraska]] and [[Wichita, Kansas]] to be the starting points and [[Boston, Massachusetts]] to be the end point of a chain of correspondence. These cities were selected because they represented a great distance in the United States, both socially and geographically.<ref name=bara />
 
−
# Information packets were initially sent to randomly selected individuals in Omaha or Wichita. They included letters, which detailed the study's purpose, and basic information about a target contact person in Boston. It additionally contained a roster on which they could write their own name, as well as business reply cards that were pre-addressed to Harvard.
 
−
# Upon receiving the invitation to participate, the recipient was asked whether he or she personally knew the contact person described in the letter. If so, the person was to forward the letter directly to that person. For the purposes of this study, knowing someone "personally" is defined as knowing them on a first-name basis.
 
−
# In the more likely case that the person did not personally know the target, then the person was to think of a friend or relative they know personally that is more likely to know the target. They were then directed to sign their name on the roster and forward the packet to that person. A postcard was also mailed to the researchers at Harvard so that they could track the chain's progression toward the target.
 
−
# When and if the package eventually reached the contact person in Boston, the researchers could examine the roster to count the number of times it had been forwarded from person to person. Additionally, for packages that never reached the destination, the incoming postcards helped identify the break point in the chain.
 
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===Results===
 
  
 
Shortly after the experiments began, letters would begin arriving to the targets and the researchers would receive postcards from the respondents. Sometimes the packet would arrive to the target in as few as one or two hops, while some chains were composed of as many as nine or ten links. However, a significant problem was that often people refused to pass the letter forward, and thus the chain never reached its destination. In one case, 232 of the 296 letters never reached the destination.<ref name=milg />
 
Shortly after the experiments began, letters would begin arriving to the targets and the researchers would receive postcards from the respondents. Sometimes the packet would arrive to the target in as few as one or two hops, while some chains were composed of as many as nine or ten links. However, a significant problem was that often people refused to pass the letter forward, and thus the chain never reached its destination. In one case, 232 of the 296 letters never reached the destination.<ref name=milg />
  
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However, 64 of the letters eventually did reach the target contact. Among these chains, the [[average path length]] fell around 5.5 or six. Hence, the researchers concluded that people in the United States are separated by about six people on average. And, although Milgram himself never used the phrase "[[Six Degrees of Separation|six degrees of separation]]," these findings likely contributed to its widespread acceptance.<ref name=bara />
+
However, 64 of the letters eventually did reach the target contact. Among these chains, the average path length fell around 5.5 or six. Hence, the researchers concluded that people in the United States are separated by about six people on average. And, although Milgram himself never used the phrase "[[Six Degrees of Separation]]," these findings likely contributed to its widespread acceptance.<ref name=bara />
  
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In an experiment in which 160 letters were mailed out, 24 reached the target in his [[Sharon, Massachusetts]] home. Of those 24, 16 were given to the target person by the same person Milgram calls "Mr. Jacobs," a clothing merchant. Of those that reached him at his office, more than half came from two other men.<ref>{{cite book |last=Gladwell |first=Malcolm |title=The Tipping Point |publisher=Little Brown |pages= 34-38 |chapter=The Law of the Few}}</ref>
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===Familiar stranger===
  
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The researchers used the postcards to qualitatively examine the types of chains that are created. Generally, the package quickly reached a close geographic proximity, but would circle the target almost randomly until it found the target's inner circle of friends.<ref name=milg /> This suggests that participants strongly favored geographic characteristics when choosing an appropriate next person in the chain.
+
Milgram continued to conduct creative research projects. In 1971 he carried out two independent research projects, one at [[City University of New York|CUNY]] and the other at a [[train]] station, on urban life. His findings became known as the "familiar stranger," from his article "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity" published in Milgram (1977)<ref>Stanley Milgram, "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity" in ''The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments,'' Stanley Milgram and Thomas Blass, (1977, Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2010, ISBN 978-1905177127).</ref>.
  
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===Critiques===
+
A "familiar stranger" is an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact. Somebody who is seen daily on the train or at the [[gym]], but with whom one does not otherwise communicate, is an example of a familiar stranger. If such individuals meet in an unfamiliar setting, for example while traveling, they are more likely to introduce themselves than would perfect strangers, since they have a background of shared experiences.
  
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There are a number of methodological critiques of the Milgram Experiment, which suggest that the average path length might actually be smaller or larger than Milgram expected. Four such critiques are summarized here:
+
Milgram published a second paper on the subject, "Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger," in 1974. It appeared in the magazine ''[[Psychology Today]].'' The familiar stranger has since become a popular concept in research about [[social network]]s.
  
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# The [http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html "Six Degrees of Separation" Myth]  argues that Milgram's study suffers from selection and nonresponse bias due to the way participants were recruited and high non-completion rates. If one assumes a constant portion of non-response for each person in the chain, longer chains will be under-represented because it is more likely that they will encounter an unwilling participant. Hence, Milgram's experiment should under-estimate the true average path length.
+
==Legacy==
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# One of the key features of Milgram's methodology is that participants are asked to choose the person they know who is most likely to know the target individual. But in many cases, the participant may be unsure which of their friends is the most likely to know the target. Thus, since the participants of the Milgram experiment do not have a topological map of the social network, they might actually be sending the package further away from the target rather than sending it along the shortest path. This may create a slight bias and over-estimate the average number of ties needed for two random people.
+
The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the [[ethics]] of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants. In Milgram's defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated, 15 percent chose neutral responses (92 percent of all former participants responding).<ref name=obedbook/> Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants. Six years later (at the height of the [[Vietnam War]]), one of the participants in the experiment sent correspondence to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress:
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# A description of heterogeneous social networks still remains an open question. Though much research was not done for a number of years, in 1998 [[Duncan Watts]] and [[Steven Strogatz]] published a breakthrough paper in the journal ''Nature.'' Mark Buchanan said, "Their paper touched off a storm of further work across many fields of science" (''Nexus'', p60, 2002). See Watts' book on the topic: ''[[Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age]]''.
+
<blockquote>While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. … To permit myself to be [[Conscription|drafted]] with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself. … I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted [[Conscientious objector]] status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience. </blockquote>
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# It is impossible for the entire human population to be acquainted within six degrees of separation because of the existence of certain populations which have had no contact with people outside their own culture, such as the [[Sentinelese]] people of [[North Sentinel Island]]. However, according to the current estimates of Sentinelese population of 250, they represent only 0.000000038% of the population. It is still possible that more than 99% of the world's population are connected in this way; there would need to be 66,000,000 such isolated people to represent 1% of the population of the earth.
 
  
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==Influence==
+
The experiments provoked emotional criticism more about the experiment's implications than with experimental ethics. In the journal ''Jewish Currents,'' Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher," suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period".<ref>Joseph Dimow, [http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm "Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments"] ''Jewish Currents'' (2004). Retrieved June 12, 2008.</ref> Indeed, that was one of the explicitly-stated goals of the experiments. Quoting from the preface of Milgram's book, ''Obedience to Authority'': "The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch."
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===The social sciences===
 
  
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''[[The Tipping Point]]'' by [[Malcolm Gladwell]], based on articles originally published in ''[[The New Yorker]]'',<ref>[http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_01_11_a_weisberg.htm Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg]</ref> elaborates the "funneling" concept. Gladwell argues that the six-degrees phenomenon is dependent on a few extraordinary people ("[[connector (social)|connectors]]") with large networks of contacts and friends: these hubs then mediate the connections between the vast majority of otherwise weakly-connected individuals.
+
The Milgram Experiment and the later [[Stanford prison experiment]] led by [[Philip Zimbardo]] at [[Stanford University]] were frightening in their implications about the danger lurking in human nature's dark side.<ref name=Blass/> For Milgram, however, they were more about the influence of the group on the individual than individual behavior itself:
 +
<blockquote>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.<ref name=obedbook/></blockquote>  
 +
He saw his experiments as revealing the power of [[authority]] to triumph over [[conscience]]:
 +
<blockquote>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.<ref name=obedbook/></blockquote>
  
−
Recent work in the effects of the small world phenomenon on disease transmission, however, have indicated that due to the [[strongly connected component|strongly-connected]] nature of social networks as a whole, removing these hubs from a population usually has little effect on the average path length through the [[graph (mathematics)|graph]] (Barrett et al., 2005).{{Fact|date=March 2008}}
+
Milgram's obedience studies revealed that people from all walks of life have a strong predisposition to obey authority. His work, repeated under many different conditions, revealed that human beings naturally tend to [[conformity (psychology)|conformity]]:
 +
<blockquote>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.<ref name=Blass/></blockquote>
  
−
===Mathematicians and actors===
+
Equally, Milgram suggested that when men of conscience wish to stand up to authority, they will find strength in numbers. For conformity can be used to bring together a group that balances the power of authority:
−
Smaller communities, such as [[mathematician]]s and [[actor]]s, have been found to be densely connected by chains of personal or professional associations. Mathematicians have created the [[Erdős number]] to describe their distance from [[Paul Erdős]] based on shared publications. A similar exercise has been carried out for the actor [[Kevin Bacon]] for actors who appeared in movies together &mdash; the latter effort informing the game "[[Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon]]." There is also the combined [[Erdős-Bacon number]], for actor-mathematicians and mathematician-actors. Players of the popular Asian game [[Go (board game)|Go]] describe their distance from the great player [[Honinbo Shusaku]] by counting their [[Shusaku number]], which counts degrees of separation through the games the players have had.
+
<blockquote>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.<ref name=obedbook/></blockquote>
  
−
===Current research on the small world problem===
+
==Major publications==
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. "Nationality and Conformity." ''Scientific American'' 205(34) (1961): 45-51.
 +
* Milgram Stanley. "Behavioral study of obedience." ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'' 67 (1963): 371-378.
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. "The Small World Problem." ''Psychology Today'' 6 (1967): 60-67
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. "The Experience of Living in Cities." ''Science'' 167(13) (1970): 1461-1468.
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. ''Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.'' Harper Perennial, 1983 (original 1974). ISBN 006131983X
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. [http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html "The Perils of Obedience."] ''Harper's Magazine'' (1974). Retrieved June 25, 2008.
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. "Frozen world of the familiar stranger." ''Psychology Today'' 8 (1974): 70-74.
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. ''Psychology in Today's World.'' Educational Associates/ Little Brown and Company, 1975.
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. ''The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments.'' Longman Higher Education, 1977. ISBN 0201043823
 +
* Milgram, Stanley. "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity." In ''The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments'', Stanley Milgram and Thomas Blass. Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2010 (original 1977). ISBN 978-1905177127
 +
* Milgram, Stanley and R. Lance Shotland. ''Television and Anti-social Behaviour.'' Academic Press, 1974. ISBN 978-0124963504
  
−
The small world question is still a popular research topic today, with many experiments still being conducted. For instance, the [http://smallworld.columbia.edu/ Small World Project] at [[Columbia University]] is currently conducting an email-based version of the same experiment, and has actually found average path lengths of about five on a worldwide scale. However, the critiques that apply to Milgram's experiment largely apply also to this current research.
+
== Media depictions ==
  
−
===Network models===
+
*''The Human Behavior Experiments'' (2006) is a documentary by [[Alex Gibney]] about major experiments in [[social psychology]], shown along with modern incidents highlighting the principles discussed. Along with Milgram's study in obedience, the documentary shows the "diffusion of responsibility" study of [[John Darley]] and [[Bibb Latané]] and the [[Stanford Prison Experiment]] of [[Phillip Zimbardo]].<ref>[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0822813/ The Human Behavior Experiments] at ''IMDb.com''. Retrieved January 21, 2011.</ref>
−
In 1998, [[Duncan J. Watts]] and [[Steven Strogatz|Steven H. Strogatz]], both in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at [[Cornell University]], published the first network model on the small-world phenomenon. They showed that networks from both the natural and man-made world, such as the neural network of [[C. elegans]] and [[power grid]]s, exhibit the [[small-world property]]. Watts and Strogatz showed that, beginning with a regular lattice, the addition of a small number of random links reduces the diameter &mdash; the longest direct path between any two vertices in the network &mdash; from being very long to being very short. The research was originally inspired by Watts' efforts to understand the synchronization of [[Cricket (insect)|cricket]] [[stridulation|chirps]], which show a high degree of coordination over long ranges as though the insects are being guided by an invisible conductor. The mathematical model which Watts and Strogatz developed to explain this phenomenon has since been applied in a wide range of different areas. In Watts' words:<ref>[http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1511/12_19/59587202/p6/article.jhtml From Muhammad Ali to Grandma Rose | Discover | Find Articles at BNET.com<!-- Bot generated title —>]</ref>
+
*''Obedience'' is a black-and-white film of the experiment, shot by Milgram himself.<ref>[http://stanley.milgram.media.psu.edu/ Milgram Media Offered by Penn State Media Sales] Retrieved June 12, 2008.</ref>
−
 
+
*''Atrocity'' (2005) is a film re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment.<ref>[http://www.movingimage.us/science/sloan.php?film_id=214 Atrocity] ''Museum of the Moving Image''. Retrieved June 12, 2008.</ref>
−
:"I think I've been contacted by someone from just about every field outside of English literature. I've had letters from mathematicians, physicists, biochemists, neurophysiologists, epidemiologists, economists, sociologists; from people in marketing, information systems, civil engineering, and from a business enterprise that uses the concept of the small world for networking purposes on the Internet."
+
*UK conceptual artist Rod Dickinson recreated one condition of the Milgram obedience experiment as a performance art installation, ''The Milgram Re-enactment'' (2002)<ref>''milgramreenactment.org''.[http://www.milgramreenactment.org ''The Milgram Re-enactment''] (2002). Retrieved January 21, 2011.</ref>
−
 
+
*''The Tenth Level'' (1975) was a [[CBS]] television film about the experiment, featuring [[William Shatner]], [[Ossie Davis]], and [[John Travolta]].<ref>[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075320/ The Tenth Level] ''Internet Movie Database''. Retrieved January 21, 2011.</ref>
−
Generally, their model demonstrated the truth in [[Mark Granovetter]]'s observation that it is "the strength of weak ties" that holds together a [[social network]]. Although the specific model has since been generalized by [[Jon Kleinberg]], it remains a canonical case study in the field of [[complex network]]s. In [[network theory]], the idea presented in the [[small-world network]] model has been explored quite extensively. Indeed, several classic results in [[random graph]] theory show that even networks with no real topological structure exhibit the small-world phenomenon, which mathematically is expressed as the diameter of the network growing with the logarithm of the number of nodes (rather than proportional to the number of nodes, as in the case for a lattice). This result similarly maps onto networks with a power-law degree distribution, such as [[scale-free networks]].
 
−
 
 
−
In [[computer science]], the small-world phenomenon (although it is not typically called that) is used in the development of secure peer-to-peer protocols, novel routing algorithms for the Internet and ad hoc wireless networks, and search algorithms for communication networks of all kinds.
 
−
 
 
−
===Milgram's experiment in popular culture===
 
−
Social networks pervade popular culture in the United States and elsewhere. In particular, the notion of [[Six Degrees of Separation|six degrees]] has become part of the collective consciousness. [[Social networking websites]] such as [[Friendster]], [[MySpace]], [[XING]], [[Orkut]], [[Cyworld]], [[Bebo]], [[Facebook]], and others have greatly increased the connectivity of the online space through the application of [[social network]]ing concepts. The "Six Degrees" Facebook application<ref>http://apps.facebook.com/six_degrees_app</ref> calculates the number of steps between any two members.
 
−
 
 
−
"[[Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon]]" is a popular game based upon the notion of [[six degrees]] of separation. The website The Oracle of Bacon<ref>[http://oracleofbacon.org/ The Oracle of Bacon], a small world calculator on the network of film actors</ref> uses social network data available from the [[Internet Movie Database]] to determine the number of links between Kevin Bacon and any other celebrity. One academic variant of the game involves calculating an [[Erdos Number]], a measure of one's closeness to the prolific mathematician, [[Paul Erdos]].
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
The [[six degrees of separation]] concept originates from Milgram's "small world experiment" in 1967 that tracked chains of acquaintances in the United States. In the experiment, Milgram sent several packages to 160 random people living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the package to a friend or acquiantance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual, a stockbroker from Boston, Massachusetts.
 
−
 
 
−
The letter included this specific condition:
 
−
"If you do not know the target person on a personal basis, do not try to contact him directly. Instead, mail this folder to a personal acquaintance who is more likely than you to know the target person."
 
−
 
 
−
Milgram discovered that the majority of the letters made it to the broker within 5 or 6 "steps."
 
  
 
==Notes==
 
==Notes==
 
<references/>
 
<references/>
−
 
  
 
==References==
 
==References==
−
*Milgram, Stanley. "[http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/ The Small World Problem]." ''[[Psychology Today]],'' May 1967. pp 60 - 67
+
* Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. ''Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means''. New York, NY: Plume, 2003 ISBN 978-0452284395
−
* Milgram, S. (1974), ''Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View'' ISBN 0-06-131983-X
+
* Blass, Thomas. ''The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram.'' New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004. ISBN 0738203998
−
* Milgram, S. (1974), [http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html "The Perils of Obedience"], ''Harper's Magazine''
+
* Blass, Thomas. "The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority." ''Journal of Applied Social Psychology'' 25 (1999): 955-978.
−
* Milgram, S. (1977), ''The individual in a social world: Essays and experiments / Stanley Milgram''. ISBN 0-201-04382-3.
+
* Dimow, Joseph. "Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments." ''Jewish Currents'' (2004).  
−
** Abridged and adapted from ''Obedience to Authority''.
+
* Milgram, Stanley. "Behavioral Study of Obedience." ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'' 67(4) (1963): 371-378
−
* Blass, T. (2004). ''The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram''. ISBN 0-7382-0399-8
+
* Milgram, Stanley, and Thomas Blass. ''The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments''. Stanley Milgram  Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2010 (original 1977). ISBN 978-1905177127
−
 
+
* Miller, Arthur G. ''The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science.'' New York, NY: Praeger, 1986. ISBN 978-0275920128
−
 
+
* Parker, Ian. [http://www.granta.com/Magazine/71 "Obedience."] ''Granta'' 71 (2000). Retrieved June 25, 2008.
−
* Blass, Thomas. (2004), ''The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram''. [[Basic Books]] (ISBN 0-7382-0399-8).
+
* Tarnow, Eugen. [http://cogprints.org/4566/ "Towards the Zero Accident Goal: Assisting the First Officer Monitor and Challenge Captain Errors".] ''Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education and Research'' 10(1) (2000). Retrieved June 25, 2008.
−
** Levine, Robert V. [http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/34009;jsessionid=baaeuLYcqpRVHi "Milgram's Progress",] ''[[American Scientist]],'' July-August, 2004. Book review of ''The Man Who Shocked the World''
+
* Travers, Jeffrey, and Stanley Milgram. "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem." ''Sociometry'' 32(4) (1969): 425-443.  
−
* Miller, Arthur G., (1986). ''The obedience experiments: A case study of controversy in social science''. New York : [[Praeger]].
+
* Wu, William. [http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/psychology/compliance.shtml "Practical Psychology: Compliance: The Milgram Experiment."] Retrieved June 25, 2008.
−
* Parker, Ian, [http://www.granta.com/Magazine/71 "Obedience"] ''[[Granta]],'' Issue 71, Autumn 2000. Includes an interview with one of Milgram's volunteers, and discusses modern interest in, and scepticism about, the experiment.
 
−
* Tarnow, Eugen, [http://cogprints.org/4566/ "Towards the Zero Accident Goal: Assisting the First Officer Monitor and Challenge Captain Errors".] ''Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education and Research'', 10(1).
 
−
* Wu, William, [http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/psychology/compliance.shtml "Practical Psychology: Compliance: The Milgram Experiment."]
 
−
 
 
−
*{{cite web|url=http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/research/familiarstranger/|title=Familiar Stranger Project|publisher=[[University of California, Berkeley]]|accessdate=2006-07-12}}
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
  
 
==External links==
 
==External links==
 +
All links retrieved February 9, 2023.
  
−
* [http://www.stanleymilgram.com/ stanleymilgram.com] - site maintained by Dr Thomas Blass
 
 
* [http://www.milgramreenactment.org milgramreenactment.org] - site documenting Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment by UK artist Rod Dickinson
 
* [http://www.milgramreenactment.org milgramreenactment.org] - site documenting Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment by UK artist Rod Dickinson
−
* [http://www.holah.karoo.net/milgram.htm Milgram Page] - page documenting Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment
 
−
* [http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20020301-000037 'The Man Who Shocked the World' article in Psychology Today by Thomas Blass]
 
−
* [http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/331/7512/356 'The Man Who Shocked the World' article in BMJ by Raj Persaud]
 
−
* [http://www.pinterandmartin.com Pinter & Martin], Stanley Milgram's British publishers
 
−
* [http://www.movingimage.us/science/sloan.php?film_id=214] - link to the short film "Atrocity," which re-enacts the Milgram Experiment
 
−
* [http://mssa.library.yale.edu/findaids/stream.php?xmlfile=mssa.ms.1406.xml Guide to the Stanley Milgram Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library]
 
−
 
−
* [http://www.hippolytic.com/blog/2007/01/stanley_milgram_redux_1.php Stanley Milgram Redux, TBIYTB] - description of a recent iteration of Milgram's experiment at Yale University, published in "The Yale Hippolytic," Jan. 22, 2007.
 
 
* [http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1981/A1981LC33300001.pdf Behavioral Study of Obedience] - Milgram's journal article describing the experiment in, ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'', 1963, Vol. 67, No. 4, 371-378
 
* [http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1981/A1981LC33300001.pdf Behavioral Study of Obedience] - Milgram's journal article describing the experiment in, ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'', 1963, Vol. 67, No. 4, 371-378
−
* [http://perso.wanadoo.fr/qualiconsult/milgramb.html Synthesis of book] A faithful synthesis of "Obedience to Authority" – Stanley Milgram
+
* S. Milgram, [http://www.holah.karoo.net/milgramstudy.htm Summary and evaluation of the 1963 obedience experiment] (1963) "Behavioural Study of Obedience." ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'' 67: 371-378. ''holah.karoo.net''.
−
* [http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm A personal account of a participant in the Milgram obedience experiments]
+
* [http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2007_01/milgram.html When Good People Do Evil] - Article in the Yale Alumni Magazine by Philip Zimbardo on the 45th anniversary of the Milgram experiment.
−
* [http://www.holah.karoo.net/milgramstudy.htm Summary and evaluation of the 1963 obedience experiment]
 
−
* [http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2765416&page=1 The Science of Evil] from ABC News ''Primetime''
 
−
* [http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2007_01/milgram.html When Good People Do Evil] - Article in the Yale Alumni Magazine by Philip Zimbardo on the 45th anniversary of the Milgram experiment.
 
−
* [http://www.panarchy.org/milgram/obedience.html Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (1974)] Chapter 1 and Chapter 15
 
−
 
 
−
* [http://smallworld.sociology.ohio-state.edu/html/homepage.html The Electronic Small World Project] (host not found)
 
−
* [http://smallworldexperiment.com The Small World Experiment - 54 little boxes travelling the world]
 
−
* [http://www.findsatoshi.com/ Find Satoshi Experiment]
 
−
*[http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html What the Milgram Papers in the Yale Archives Reveal About the Original Small World Study]
 
−
* [http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0803/0803.0939v1.pdf Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network]
 
−
* [http://missionoftheworld.com/ Mission of the world - Stuffed animals travelling the world on different missions]
 
−
*Collective dynamics of small-world networks:
 
−
** [http://www.unc.edu/depts/cmse/math/smallworld.html Explaining the "Small World" Phenomenon]
 
−
*Theory tested for specific groups:
 
−
** [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/ The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia]
 
−
** [http://www.baseball-reference.com/oracle/ The Oracle of Baseball]
 
−
** [http://www.oakland.edu/enp/ The Erdős Number Project]
 
−
** [http://www.pumpthemusic.com/oracle/ The Oracle of Music]
 
−
** [http://covertrek.com/ CoverTrek - linking bands and musicians via cover versions.]
 
−
** [http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2003/Aug/hour1_080803.html Science Friday: Future of Hubble / Small World Networks]
 
−
** {{PDFlink|[http://www.dau.mil/pubs/dam/03_04_2005/war-ma05.pdf Knock, Knock, Knocking on Newton's Door]|223&nbsp;[[Kibibyte|KiB]]<!-- application/pdf, 228473 bytes —>}} - article published in Defense Acquisition University's journal ''Defense AT&L'', proposes "small world / large tent" social networking model.
 
−
** [http://ibeatgarry.com The Chess Oracle of Kasparov] - the theory tested for chess players.
 
  
  
  
 
{{Credits|Stanley_Milgram|208839587|Milgram_experiment|216846639|Small_world_experiment|215094051|Familiar_stranger|195909074}}
 
{{Credits|Stanley_Milgram|208839587|Milgram_experiment|216846639|Small_world_experiment|215094051|Familiar_stranger|195909074}}

Latest revision as of 15:49, 27 April 2023

Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist. He served on the faculty at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. While at Yale, he conducted a seminal series of experiments on obedience to authority, which have come to be known simply as the infamous "Milgram experiment." Milgram conducted a number of other studies, including the small-world experiment (the source of the six degrees of separation concept), and also introduced the concept of familiar strangers.

Did you know?
Stanley Milgram's experiments showed that people may act in inhumane ways when ordered to do so by an authority figure and when their peers also act in the same way

Milgram's experiments shocked people with their implications about the dark aspects of human nature, especially since they showed that apparently normal people would behave in inhumane ways. For Milgram, however, they were more about the influence of the group on the individual than individual nature itself. He had begun his research asking whether it could be that those on trial as war criminals were just following orders, and would others have done the same. When the My Lai Massacre occurred in Vietnam in 1968, his work was used to explain the behavior of those involved.

Milgram showed that human beings, people who one would not expect to behave inhumanely, are nonetheless capable of acting in inhumane ways when ordered to do so by an authority figure and when their peers also acted in the same way. Such obedience and conformity, Milgram noted, are essential aspects of social behavior, allowing society to function in an organized fashion. The problem, obviously, comes when authority is wrong. Milgram's solution, based on his research, was that people of conscience would find strength in numbers to resist misguided authority. Thus, although shocking, Milgram's contribution to our understanding of human nature gives much hope for a better world.

Life

Stanley Milgram was born in New York City on August 15, 1933, the second of three children. His parents were immigrants from Europe and ran a bakery in New York. Stanley spent his early years in the city, graduating from James Monroe High School in 1950. One of his classmates was Philip Zimbardo, who also became an influential social psychologist, famous for the Stanford prison experiment.

Although considered one of the most important psychologists of the twentieth century, Stanley Milgram took no psychology courses as an undergraduate at Queens College, New York, where he earned his Bachelor's degree in political science in 1954. He applied to a Ph.D. program in social psychology at Harvard University and was initially rejected due to lack of psychology background. He was accepted in 1954 after taking six courses in psychology, and graduated with his Ph.D. in 1960.

Milgram's dissertation, under the mentorship of Gordon Allport, was a cross-cultural study of conformity carried out in Norway and France. In 1955 Solomon Asch had been a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and Milgram was his teaching assistant. He became very familiar with Asch's conformity experiments, and modified Asch's procedure to use sound (tones) instead of visual stimuli (lines) in his research. Milgram also used tape-recorded answers from other subjects to create the peer group, noting that this method had the advantages that "tapes do not have to be paid by the hour and they are always available."[1]

In 1959 and 1960, Milgram worked for Asch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, helping him edit his book on conformity. He regarded Asch as the most important scientific influence on his research.[2] After receiving his Ph.D., in September of 1960 Milgram was appointed assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. He immediately began pilot studies on obedience and began the formal experiments in the summer of 1961. Going beyond Asch's conformity work, Milgram was curious as to whether social influence would have such power in situations of greater consequence than judgments of lines or tones. His research into obedience to authority shocked the world.

During his three years at Yale, Milgram met and married Alexandra "Sasha" Menkin. They had two children.

In 1963, Milgram submitted the results of his research in the article "Behavioral study of Obedience." Most likely because of this controversial "Milgram Experiment," Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard after becoming an assistant professor there. He subsequently accepted an offer to become a tenured full professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

In the ensuing controversy that erupted, the APA held up his application for membership for a year because of questions about the ethics of his work, but finally granted him full membership. Ten years later, in 1974, Milgram published Obedience to Authority and was awarded the annual social psychology award by the AAAS (mostly for his work over the social aspects of obedience).

Inspired in part by the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, his work was later used to explain the 1968 My Lai massacre (including authority training in the military and on depersonalizing the "enemy" through racial and cultural differences).

Stanley Milgram died of a heart attack on December 20, 1984 at the age of 51 in the city of his birth, New York.

Work

Milgram is most famous for his work on obedience, with a particularly shocking study becoming known simply as the "Milgram experiment." In addition to his studies of obedience and conformity, Milgram investigated a number of other issues in social psychology. Of particular note are his work on the "small world phenomenon" and the "familiar stranger."

Milgram also conducted a study of the effects of television on social behavior. He published an article on urban life in Science in 1970. This reflected his love of city life and helped initiate the psychological study of urban life.

Obedience to authority

While at Yale University, Milgram conducted what is known today as the infamous Milgram experiment, a seminal series of social psychology experiments, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[3] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[4]

Advertisement for the recruiting of the Milgram experiment subjects

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[4]

After the pilot study with Yale students, Milgram advertised for members of the public to participate in an experiment that was described as a study of learning and memory. As a result, "ordinary" people were tested, people drawn from every stratum of New Haven life including professionals, white collar workers, unemployed persons, and industrial workers.[5] The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a white technician's coat, and the learner (supposedly another volunteer, but in reality a confederate of the experimenter) was played by a 47 year old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. When they arrived, the participant and the confederate were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.[3]

Two slips of paper were then presented to the participant and to the confederate. The participant was led to believe that one of the slips said "learner" and the other said "teacher," and that he and the confederate had been given the slips randomly. In fact, both slips said "teacher," but the confederate claimed to have the slip that read "learner," thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.[3]

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.

The "teacher" was given a 45-volt electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. For every incorrect response the teacher was to administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing for each wrong answer.[3]

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.[3]

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.[3]

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter,[3] in this order:

  1. Please continue.
  2. The experiment requires that you continue.
  3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
  4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled 14 Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2 percent) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.[3]

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[3] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.[3] Later, Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world, with similar results.[5]

In Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View published in 1974, Milgram described nineteen variations of his experiment, testing variables that might be expected to influence the subjects' behavior. For example, if participants received telephonic instructions from the experimenter, compliance decreased to 21 percent; interestingly, some participants deceived the experimenter by pretending to continue the experiment. In the variation where the "learner's" physical immediacy was closest, wherein participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, compliance decreased. Under that condition, 30 percent of participants completed the experiment.

Milgram also combined the power of authority with that of conformity. In those experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional "teachers" (also actors, like the "learner"). The behavior of the participants' peers strongly affected the results. In one variation, the actual subject did not pull the shock lever; instead he only conveyed information to the peer (a confederate) who pulled the lever. Thus, according to Milgram, the subject shifts responsibility to another person and does not blame himself for what happens.

Milgram summarized the experiments in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience," writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.[5]

Milgram elaborated two theories explaining his results:

  • The first is the theory of conformism, based on Solomon Asch's work, describing the fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person. A subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model.
  • The second is the agentic state theory, wherein 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 sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow.

Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland Baltimore County performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, 61–66 percent, regardless of time or place.[6][2]

Milgram created a documentary film titled Obedience showing the experiment and its results. He also produced a series of five social psychology films, some of which dealt with his experiments.[7]

Small world phenomenon

Beginning in 1967, Milgram carried out a series of experiments, known as the "small world experiment," examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small world type network characterized by short path lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "six degrees of separation," although Milgram did not use this term himself.

His experiment was conceived in an era when a number of independent threads were converging on the idea that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Mathematician Manfred Kochen and political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool had written a mathematical manuscript, "Contacts and Influences," while working at the University of Paris in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over twenty years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of social networks, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks.

Milgram's work developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other.[8] This is one way of looking at the small world problem. An alternative view of the problem is to imagine the population as a social network and attempt to find the average path length between any two nodes. Milgram's experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.

Though the experiment went through several variations, Milgram typically chose individuals in the U.S. cities of Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas to be the starting points and Boston, Massachusetts to be the end point of a chain of correspondence. These cities were selected because they represented a great distance in the United States, both socially and geographically.[9]

Information packets were initially sent to randomly selected individuals in Omaha or Wichita. They included letters, which detailed the study's purpose, and basic information about a target contact person in Boston. It additionally contained a roster on which they could write their own name, as well as business reply cards that were pre-addressed to Harvard University.

Upon receiving the invitation to participate, the recipient was asked whether he or she personally knew the contact person described in the letter. If so, the person was to forward the letter directly to that person. For the purposes of this study, knowing someone "personally" is defined as knowing them on a first-name basis.

In the more likely case that the person did not personally know the target, then the person was to think of a friend or relative they know personally that is more likely to know the target. They were then directed to sign their name on the roster and forward the packet to that person. A postcard was also mailed to the researchers at Harvard so that they could track the chain's progression toward the target.

When and if the package eventually reached the contact person in Boston, the researchers could examine the roster to count the number of times it had been forwarded from person to person. Additionally, for packages that never reached the destination, the incoming postcards helped identify the break point in the chain.

Shortly after the experiments began, letters would begin arriving to the targets and the researchers would receive postcards from the respondents. Sometimes the packet would arrive to the target in as few as one or two hops, while some chains were composed of as many as nine or ten links. However, a significant problem was that often people refused to pass the letter forward, and thus the chain never reached its destination. In one case, 232 of the 296 letters never reached the destination.[8]

However, 64 of the letters eventually did reach the target contact. Among these chains, the average path length fell around 5.5 or six. Hence, the researchers concluded that people in the United States are separated by about six people on average. And, although Milgram himself never used the phrase "Six Degrees of Separation," these findings likely contributed to its widespread acceptance.[9]

Familiar stranger

Milgram continued to conduct creative research projects. In 1971 he carried out two independent research projects, one at CUNY and the other at a train station, on urban life. His findings became known as the "familiar stranger," from his article "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity" published in Milgram (1977)[10].

A "familiar stranger" is an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact. Somebody who is seen daily on the train or at the gym, but with whom one does not otherwise communicate, is an example of a familiar stranger. If such individuals meet in an unfamiliar setting, for example while traveling, they are more likely to introduce themselves than would perfect strangers, since they have a background of shared experiences.

Milgram published a second paper on the subject, "Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger," in 1974. It appeared in the magazine Psychology Today. The familiar stranger has since become a popular concept in research about social networks.

Legacy

The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants. In Milgram's defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated, 15 percent chose neutral responses (92 percent of all former participants responding).[4] Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants. Six years later (at the height of the Vietnam War), one of the participants in the experiment sent correspondence to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress:

While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. … To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself. … I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience.

The experiments provoked emotional criticism more about the experiment's implications than with experimental ethics. In the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher," suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period".[11] Indeed, that was one of the explicitly-stated goals of the experiments. Quoting from the preface of Milgram's book, Obedience to Authority: "The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch."

The Milgram Experiment and the later Stanford prison experiment led by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University were frightening in their implications about the danger lurking in human nature's dark side.[2] For Milgram, however, they were more about the influence of the group on the individual than individual behavior itself:

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.[4]

He saw his experiments as revealing the power of authority to triumph over conscience:

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.[4]

Milgram's obedience studies revealed that people from all walks of life have a strong predisposition to obey authority. His work, repeated under many different conditions, revealed that human beings naturally tend to conformity:

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.[2]

Equally, Milgram suggested that when men of conscience wish to stand up to authority, they will find strength in numbers. For conformity can be used to bring together a group that balances the power of authority:

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.[4]

Major publications

  • Milgram, Stanley. "Nationality and Conformity." Scientific American 205(34) (1961): 45-51.
  • Milgram Stanley. "Behavioral study of obedience." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371-378.
  • Milgram, Stanley. "The Small World Problem." Psychology Today 6 (1967): 60-67
  • Milgram, Stanley. "The Experience of Living in Cities." Science 167(13) (1970): 1461-1468.
  • Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper Perennial, 1983 (original 1974). ISBN 006131983X
  • Milgram, Stanley. "The Perils of Obedience." Harper's Magazine (1974). Retrieved June 25, 2008.
  • Milgram, Stanley. "Frozen world of the familiar stranger." Psychology Today 8 (1974): 70-74.
  • Milgram, Stanley. Psychology in Today's World. Educational Associates/ Little Brown and Company, 1975.
  • Milgram, Stanley. The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Longman Higher Education, 1977. ISBN 0201043823
  • Milgram, Stanley. "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity." In The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, Stanley Milgram and Thomas Blass. Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2010 (original 1977). ISBN 978-1905177127
  • Milgram, Stanley and R. Lance Shotland. Television and Anti-social Behaviour. Academic Press, 1974. ISBN 978-0124963504

Media depictions

  • The Human Behavior Experiments (2006) is a documentary by Alex Gibney about major experiments in social psychology, shown along with modern incidents highlighting the principles discussed. Along with Milgram's study in obedience, the documentary shows the "diffusion of responsibility" study of John Darley and Bibb Latané and the Stanford Prison Experiment of Phillip Zimbardo.[12]
  • Obedience is a black-and-white film of the experiment, shot by Milgram himself.[13]
  • Atrocity (2005) is a film re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment.[14]
  • UK conceptual artist Rod Dickinson recreated one condition of the Milgram obedience experiment as a performance art installation, The Milgram Re-enactment (2002)[15]
  • The Tenth Level (1975) was a CBS television film about the experiment, featuring William Shatner, Ossie Davis, and John Travolta.[16]

Notes

  1. ↑ Stanley Milgram, "Nationality and Conformity," Scientific American 205(34) (1961): 45-51.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World Psychology Today (Mar/Apr 2002). Retrieved June 12, 2008.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 Stanley Milgram, "Behavioral Study of Obedience" Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67(4) (1963): 371-378.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View (Harpercollins, 1974, ISBN 006131983X).
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Stanley Milgram, "The Perils of Obedience" as it appeared in Harper's Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority. (1974). Retrieved June 12, 2008.
  6. ↑ Thomas Blass, "The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25 (1999): 955-978.
  7. ↑ Milgram's films. Stanleymilgram.com. Retrieved January 21, 2011.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem." Sociometry 32(4) (1969): 425-443.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means (New York, NY: Plume, 2003, ISBN 978-0452284395).
  10. ↑ Stanley Milgram, "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity" in The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments, Stanley Milgram and Thomas Blass, (1977, Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2010, ISBN 978-1905177127).
  11. ↑ Joseph Dimow, "Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments" Jewish Currents (2004). Retrieved June 12, 2008.
  12. ↑ The Human Behavior Experiments at IMDb.com. Retrieved January 21, 2011.
  13. ↑ Milgram Media Offered by Penn State Media Sales Retrieved June 12, 2008.
  14. ↑ Atrocity Museum of the Moving Image. Retrieved June 12, 2008.
  15. ↑ milgramreenactment.org.The Milgram Re-enactment (2002). Retrieved January 21, 2011.
  16. ↑ The Tenth Level Internet Movie Database. Retrieved January 21, 2011.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. New York, NY: Plume, 2003 ISBN 978-0452284395
  • Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004. ISBN 0738203998
  • Blass, Thomas. "The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25 (1999): 955-978.
  • Dimow, Joseph. "Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments." Jewish Currents (2004).
  • Milgram, Stanley. "Behavioral Study of Obedience." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67(4) (1963): 371-378
  • Milgram, Stanley, and Thomas Blass. The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Stanley Milgram Pinter & Martin Ltd, 2010 (original 1977). ISBN 978-1905177127
  • Miller, Arthur G. The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. New York, NY: Praeger, 1986. ISBN 978-0275920128
  • Parker, Ian. "Obedience." Granta 71 (2000). Retrieved June 25, 2008.
  • Tarnow, Eugen. "Towards the Zero Accident Goal: Assisting the First Officer Monitor and Challenge Captain Errors". Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education and Research 10(1) (2000). Retrieved June 25, 2008.
  • Travers, Jeffrey, and Stanley Milgram. "An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem." Sociometry 32(4) (1969): 425-443.
  • Wu, William. "Practical Psychology: Compliance: The Milgram Experiment." Retrieved June 25, 2008.

External links

All links retrieved February 9, 2023.


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