The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley
Milgram. Thomas Blass. xxiv + 360 pp. Basic Books, 2004. $26.
Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to
authority—sometimes referred to as the "shock"
studies—are the most influential and controversial in modern
social psychology. They have affected fields as varied as law,
business, medicine and the military. Plays, films and songs have
been based on the experiments, and well-known authors such as Doris
Lessing and Arthur Koestler have written about them at length.
Within academic social psychology, it would be difficult to
overestimate their impact. In social psychology textbooks, a
significant study is usually described in just a couple of
sentences, or at most a paragraph, but the obedience experiments
nearly always receive pages of coverage.
In The Man Who Shocked the World, Thomas Blass, a professor
of social psychology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County,
has written the first-ever biography of Milgram. It will be a hard
one to beat. Blass, a wonderful writer, is a skilled biographer and
describes his subject with the knowing eye of an insider. And
Milgram—a brilliant, inventive, slightly spooky Renaissance
man—is a mesmerizing subject.
Milgram's contributions were remarkably numerous and varied during
his abbreviated career (he died of a heart attack in 1984 at age
51). Some of the highlights: He conducted the experiments that led
to the phrase "six degrees of separation" and devised
methodological innovations such as the "lost letter"
technique (pretending to accidentally lose letters addressed to
various individuals or organizations and then seeing how many are
picked up and mailed by people passing by). He also virtually
invented the field of urban social psychology. And he conducted the
largest-scale investigation ever on whether viewing violence on
television leads to violent behavior, a study for which he persuaded
CBS to modify the ending of a popular drama for showings in
But it is the obedience experiments (which he ran in the
1961–62 academic year, just after receiving his Ph.D.) for
which Milgram will always be remembered, for better or for worse.
The studies were inspired by Milgram's interest in the pathologies
of the Holocaust. Specifically, he wondered why tens of thousands of
ordinary German citizens willingly provided the manpower to carry
out a massive killing program. He reasoned that when a type of
behavior, no matter how evil, becomes "normal," an
explanation for it can probably be found in features of the
situation. In this case, he hypothesized, the toxic trigger for the
behavior was obedience to authority.
Milgram recruited a diverse group of psychologically normal adult
men to participate in a laboratory experiment supposedly designed to
measure the effects of punishment on learning. Each subject was
given the role of teacher and instructed to ask another ostensible
subject (actually a research assistant who was a confederate of the
experimenter) a series of questions. The subject in the role of
teacher was instructed to administer an electric shock each time the
"learner" made an error, beginning with a mild 15 volts
and progressing in 15-volt intervals up to an eventual 450 volts,
which was clearly marked as extremely dangerous. Although no shocks
were actually administered, the situation was orchestrated to appear
terrifyingly realistic. Midway through the experiment, the
confederate, who was in an adjoining room where he could be heard
but not seen, screamed out that he was having a heart attack;
eventually, he ceased responding altogether. If the subject resisted
administering shocks, the experimenter urged him on with statements
like "It is absolutely essential that you continue" and
"You have no choice. You must go on."
How many psychologically normal people would administer a 450-volt
shock to someone who might be going into cardiac arrest as a result?
When Milgram posed this question to others, the average estimate was
no more than one in a hundred people. A group of psychiatrists
guessed one in a thousand. Most people estimated that they
themselves would break off at about 135 volts—at a point just
before the supposed learner demands to be released. Almost none of
those asked said that they would obey instructions to turn up the
juice all the way to 450 volts.
Astonishingly, however, Milgram found that a full 65 percent of the
men (26 out of 40) went to 450 volts. Milgram then conducted an
equally remarkable and elaborate series of follow-up studies in
which he investigated how the subject's obedience was affected by
such factors as the proximity of the experimenter, the proximity of
the victim, the subject's sex and the presence of peers. Obedience
varied from one condition to another but in almost every case was
frighteningly high. In a television interview in 1979, Milgram said
that he eventually came to the conclusion that "If a system of
death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen
in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for
those camps in any medium-sized American town."
The obedience studies indelibly changed our understanding of the
Holocaust. In early explanations of the brutalities, Nazi leaders
were demonized as pathological sadists and monsters. Hannah Arendt
challenged this in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil, which depicted Adolf Eichmann as a
conventional bureaucrat trying to further his career. Milgram,
having seen ordinary people submit to authority in his experiments,
concluded that Arendt's perspective "comes closer to the truth
than one might dare imagine." He argued that "the most
fundamental lesson" of his findings was that "ordinary
people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular
hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process."
In Blass's view, the truth about the Holocaust is more complex than
this. Milgram's approach, Blass believes, "falls short when it
comes to explaining the more zealous, hate-driven cruelties that
also defined the Holocaust."
The obedience experiments had a profound impact within academic
social psychology, altering the central message of the discipline
itself. Social psychology at the time was caught up in "the
trait/situation controversy," which questioned whether a
person's behavior is more strongly determined by personality or by
situation. Although the obedience experiments didn't directly answer
this question, they showed just how powerful subtle, even invisible
features of the situation could be. That we tend to underestimate
the "power of the situation" has become the field's
guiding thesis. Milgram wrote that "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."
The experiments also had fallout on the world of ethics. Virtually
every university in the United States now has an Institutional
Review Board that must preapprove studies using human subjects.
Although the obedience studies aren't the only reason for these
review boards, they are certainly Exhibit A. High-impact
social-science studies that resort to deception and cause stress
would not be approved today. Blass provides an excellent treatment
of the ethics wars. It is enhanced by excerpts from the long-overdue
interviews he conducted with Milgram's former subjects.
The book is a serious, scholarly biography, but Blass manages to
fill it with delightful personal tidbits. We learn, for example,
that one of Milgram's classmates at New York's Monroe High School
was Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford professor who conducted what may
be the second most famous (and most ethically criticized) study in
the history of social psychology—the Stanford Prison
Experiment, in which a group of otherwise normal college-aged men
were confined to a mock prison in the basement of the psychology
building and assigned roles as prisoners or guards. Zimbardo
describes Milgram as one of the smartest students he graduated with:
"the kind of kid who read the New York Times, while
most others would be reading the Daily News."
Anyone who has faced the small-mindedness of tenure committees may
find solace in Milgram's story. Several years after completing what
were already the most widely influential experiments ever conducted
in social psychology, Milgram was turned down for tenure at Harvard.
When he went out on the job market, the offers didn't exactly come
rolling in either. Eventually Milgram unenthusiastically accepted an
offer from the City University of New York—a "second
rung" university—where he spent the remainder of his career.
Late in life Milgram became passionate about filmmaking and produced
the first artistically recognized film about social psychology. He
saw the images of film as a means for transcending the scientific
method. Here, perhaps, is the parting lesson for today's
data-obsessed social psychologists from its most influential
experimentalist: The complexities of social behavior cannot always
be reduced to words, and certainly not to numbers.
Milgram knew all about complexity. Both personally and
professionally, he spent his adult life as an object of admiration
and awe to some and as a lightning rod for controversy and downright
contempt to others. Blass captures it all in this penetrating,