Stanley Milgram, the psychologist whose shock machine never shocked anyone

Stanley Milgram

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 15, 1933 The Bronx
Died	December 20, 1984 (51)
Occupation	Social Psychologist
Awards	AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research · Guggenheim Fellowship

The machine never delivered a real shock. Its row of switches climbed from a label reading “Slight Shock” to one marked only “XXX”, and the man strapped to a chair next door was an actor reading a script of complaints, screams and, finally, silence. What Stanley Milgram measured in a basement at Yale was the person at the switches: how far an ordinary adult would go when a calm man in a grey technician’s coat said the experiment required them to continue. Most went much further than the psychiatrists he polled in advance thought anyone would. That gap made the American social psychologist’s result one of the most argued-over in his field, and his own archive keeps the argument alive.

He came to the question from home. His father, a baker from Hungary, and his mother, who had emigrated from Romania, raised three children in the Bronx, and after the war relatives who had survived the Nazi camps stayed with the family, the numbers still tattooed on their arms. One of his classmates at James Monroe High School was Philip Zimbardo, who would later build the Stanford prison experiment. Milgram later wrote to a childhood friend that he should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague and died in a gas chamber, and that he would never quite understand how he came to be born in the Bronx Hospital instead.

Born on 15 August 1933, he took a degree in political science at Queens College in 1954 without a single psychology course, and Harvard’s doctoral programme in social psychology at first turned him down for exactly that reason. Once admitted, he came under the influence of Gordon Allport and assisted Solomon Asch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Asch had shown that people would echo a group’s plainly wrong answer about the length of a line. After a doctorate that carried the conformity question to Norway and France, he asked what happened when the stakes were a human being rather than a line on a card.

Yale hired him as an assistant professor in the autumn of 1960, and the obedience sessions began the following summer in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, a few months after Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem. Volunteers had answered an advertisement for a study of memory. In the condition Milgram reported in 1963 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, under the title “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, 26 of 40 men kept pressing switches up to the final 450-volt level. His two dozen or so variations mattered as much as the headline figure: compliance fell when the victim sat in the same room and all but collapsed when two other “teachers” refused to go on. He filmed sessions for a documentary, Obedience, and gathered the whole programme in the book Obedience to Authority in 1974.

The result made him famous and cost him. The American Psychological Association held up his membership for a year over the ethics of the work, even as the American Association for the Advancement of Science gave him its Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1964. That same year the psychologist Diana Baumrind argued in American Psychologist that the distress inflicted on trusting volunteers was not justified by anything the study could show. He then spent 1963 to 1966 in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, stayed a further year as a lecturer and left without tenure. In 1967 the Graduate Center of the City University of New York made him a full professor, and he taught there until his death.

The obedience work has eclipsed the rest, which is a loss: Milgram was inventive well beyond the shock generator. His small-world study of 1967 asked people in Omaha, Nebraska, to pass a folder through personal acquaintances to a stockbroker in Boston. The chains that arrived needed a median of five intermediaries, later popularised as six degrees of separation, though many never arrived at all. His lost-letter technique measured attitudes by which stamped envelopes, dropped in the street, strangers bothered to post. In a 1970 paper in Science, “The Experience of Living in Cities”, he described urban brusqueness as a defence against overload. From 1977 he tested “cyranoids”, people speaking words fed to them by radio, whose listeners kept failing to notice; he never published that work.

The trouble with the obedience studies is that the archive tells a messier story than the book. The Australian psychologist Gina Perry spent years with the Yale recordings and set out her findings in Behind the Shock Machine in 2012. She argued that the experimenter often strayed from the scripted prods to keep reluctant volunteers going, that Milgram’s account of how many participants believed the shocks were real was shakier than he presented, and that he left some variations unpublished. In Jerry Burger’s partial replication, every participant who heard the bluntest prod, that they had no other choice, refused to continue, and the social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher argue that people kept going because they identified with a scientific project they thought worthwhile, rather than because they had surrendered their judgment. Milgram saw such objections coming. “Underlying the criticism of the experiment,” he wrote, “is an alternative model of human nature, one holding that when confronted with a choice between hurting others and complying with authority, normal people reject authority.”

The basic finding has proved hard to dislodge. Burger’s study in American Psychologist in 2009 stopped at 150 volts for ethical reasons and found about 70 percent willing to go past it, against 82.5 percent in Milgram’s comparable condition. In 2017 a Polish team led by Dariusz Doliński reported similar obedience in a scaled-down version. Popular culture got there first: CBS made the television film The Tenth Level in 1975, with William Shatner as a Milgram-like scientist and Milgram as consultant, Peter Gabriel recorded “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” for his album So in 1986, and Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter, released in 2015, cast Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram and Winona Ryder as his wife.

He had married Alexandra, known as Sasha, at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Greenwich Village in December 1961; they had two children, Michele and Marc, and lived in New Rochelle. His fifth heart attack killed him in New York on 20 December 1984, at 51.

His papers sit in Yale University Library, where his critics have done their most damaging work and his defenders keep going back. No ethics board would now approve the full procedure, so the question Milgram put to his volunteers can only be asked halfway. The answers given at the halfway mark still look a great deal like his.

Tags: Peter Sarsgaard, Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, Experimenter, Milgram experiment, Obedience to Authority