Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.

Milgram gained notoriety for his obedience experiment conducted in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University in 1961,[3] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[4] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.

[8] His parents were Adele (née Israel) and Samuel Milgram (1898–1953), who had immigrated to the United States from Romania and Hungary respectively during World War I.

[9][16][17] He said, upon becoming a man under Jewish law: "As I ... find happiness in joining the ranks of Israel, the knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews ... makes this ... an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people—which now becomes mine.

[19] Author Kirsten Fermaglich wrote that Milgram as an adult had "a personal conflict as a Jewish man who perceived himself both as an outsider, a victim of the Nazi destruction, and as an insider, as scientist.

"[20] Milgram married his wife, Alexandra, in a ceremony at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Greenwich Village in Manhattan on December 10, 1961, and they had two children, Michele and Marc.

Milgram and Zimbardo also shared an affinity for the popular television program Candid Camera and an admiration for its creator, Allen Funt.

[28] 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.).

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".

"[31] 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.

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.

[36] Milgram developed a technique, called the "lost letter" experiment, for measuring how helpful people are to strangers who are not present, and their attitudes toward various groups.

[37][38] In 1970–71, Milgram conducted experiments which attempted to find a correlation between media consumption (in this case, watching television) and anti-social behavior.

The experiment presented the opportunity to steal money, donate to charity, or neither, and tested whether the rate of each choice was influenced by watching similar actions in the ending of a specially crafted episode of the popular series Medical Center.

[38] In 1977 Milgram began piloting an experimental procedure that aimed to operationalize the mind-body fusion fantasy explored in the Edmond Rostand play Cyrano de Bergerac.

In the story, Cyrano supplies Christian with amorous prose so that they may jointly woo Roxane (each being incapable, given their respective physical and linguistic limitations, of doing so on their own).

Milgram trained speech shadowers to replicate in real-time spontaneous prose supplied by a remote "source" by-way-of discreet radio transmission during face-to-face dialogue with naïve "interactants".

In his studies, interactants repeatedly failed to detect that their interlocutors were merely speech shadowing for third parties, implicitly and explicitly attributing to them communicative autonomy.

[41][42][43] Robb Mitchell has explored cyranoids as an experiential learning tool within the classroom (having children shadow for teachers during teaching exercises).

[45] In 1975, CBS presented a made-for-television movie about obedience experiments, The Tenth Level, with William Shatner as Stephen Hunter, a Milgram-like scientist.

In 1980, musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song called "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)", referring to the number of subjects who administered the maximum shock in another one of the experiments - 37 out of 40.

[47] Created by Derren Brown and Andy Nyman for British station Channel 4, the Milgram experiment helped determine which would be given the opportunity to rob a (fake) armoured bank van.