page_title: Stanley Milgram
section_title: Obedience to authority
hierarchical_section_title: Stanley Milgram / Obedience to authority
context_page_description: Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.
  Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment.
  After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, until his death in 1984.
  His small-world experiment, while at Harvard, led researchers to analyze the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept.
  Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents, which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.
  He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology.
  A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.
context_section_description: In 1963, Milgram submitted the results of his obedience experiments in the article "Behavioral Study of Obedience". In the ensuing controversy, the American Psychological Association held up his application for membership for a year because of questions about the ethics of his work, but eventually did grant him full membership. Ten years later, in 1974, Milgram published Obedience to Authority.  He won the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1964, mostly for his work on the social aspects of obedience. Inspired in part by the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, 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.).  He produced a film depicting his experiments, which are considered classics of social psychology.
  
  An article in American Psychologist sums up Milgram's obedience experiments: 
  In Milgram's basic paradigm, a subject walks into a laboratory believing that s/he is about to take part in a study of memory and learning.  After being assigned the role of a teacher, the subject is asked to teach word associations to a fellow subject (who in reality is a collaborator of the experimenter). The teaching method, however, is unconventional—administering increasingly higher electric shocks to the learner. Once the presumed shock level reaches a certain point, the subject is thrown into a conflict. On the one hand, the strapped learner demands to be set free, he appears to suffer pain, and going all the way may pose a risk to his health. On the other hand, the experimenter, if asked, insists that the experiment is not as unhealthy as it appears to be, and that the teacher must go on. In sharp contrast to the expectations of professionals and laymen alike, some 65% of all subjects continue to administer shocks up to the very highest levels.
  More recent tests of the experiment have found that it only works under certain conditions; in particular, when participants believe the results are necessary for the "good of science".
  According to 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."  Thus, "the major problem for the subject is to recapture control of his own regnant processes once he has committed them to the purposes of the experimenter." Besides this hypothetical agentic state, Milgram proposed the existence of other factors accounting for the subject's obedience: politeness, awkwardness of withdrawal, absorption in the technical aspects of the task, the tendency to attribute impersonal quality to forces that are essentially human, a belief that the experiment served a desirable end, the sequential nature of the action, and anxiety.
  A competing explanation of Milgram's results invokes belief perseverance as the underlying factor.   What "people cannot be counted on is to realize that a seemingly benevolent authority is in fact malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence which suggests that this authority is indeed malevolent. Hence, the underlying cause for the subjects' striking conduct could well be conceptual, and not the alleged 'capacity of man to abandon his humanity . . . as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.'"
  Inspired by the horrific events of Nazi Germany, Milgram's obedience experiments have been used to explain a range of social influences on the individual—including how police interrogators can get innocent people to confess to crimes they did not commit. At the same time, these experiments have come under attack. Some critics questioned whether subjects sensed the unreality of the situation. Others questioned the relevance of the laboratory setting to the real world.
  The most devastating criticisms involved the ethics of the b
caption: Setup of the Milgram Experiment
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