Stanley Milgram was born on August 15th, 1933 to an immigrant Jewish Family in Bronx, New York.
Milgram's prodigious intelligence saw its first flourish in kindergarten. At five years old, he already displayed an impressive ability to absorb information.
Milgram was a hard worker from the get go. He completed his high school degree at James Madison High School in three years by taking extra classes.
Milgram attended Queens College and majored in political science. The fact the he never took any classes in psychology made it hard for him to later gain acceptance to Harvard's prestigious PhD program.
At Harvard Milgram made many friendships which shaped his intellectual life, including Solomon Asch. His doctoral thesis on conformity across cultures was at the root of his later interest in the way individuals cope with authority.
Upon graduating Milgram went straight to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to work with Solomon Asch. Asch had been studying the effects of observing the behavior of others on one's own performance on objective tests. Tests such as choosing the longest of two lines on a sheet of paper. Asch found that candidates were likely to choose the shortest line if they saw others do the same, in spite of their best judgement.
Beginning his illustrious academic career, Milgram became an assistant professor at Yale University in the department of psychology. He immediately began securing funding to carry out experiments on obedience to authority.
Milgram placed an ad in the local newspaper for a study on "learning." The advertised pay for participating was set at $4.50. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief bureaucrats who organised the mass murder of Jews during WWII, had begun just months before. Milgram was interested in how apparently ordinary Germans, when subject to the authority of the Nazi state, could commit atrocities of historical proportions. This is what Hannah Arendt described as the "banality of evil" in her reporting of the Eichman trial. Milgram associated his own work with her observations, and intended the experiments to unearth this phenomena.
Over the course of the year, Milgram conducted over 24 different variations of his infamous experiment. The basic procedure required participants to be paired up with another, where one would be assigned the role of learner whilst one would be the teacher. The experimental set up had the learner connected to a control panel via electrodes. The experiment then required the learner to answer test questions. Each time a mistake was made, the teacher would administer a shock. And each new mistake would garner an increase in the voltage of the following electrical shock. Unbeknownst to the real participants, the individual in the role of the learner was always an accomplice of the experimenter, and the shocks administered were not real. The learner had instructions to let out increasingly agonized yelps at each increase in voltage. These cries could be heard by the teachers. Furthermore a 'scientist' would be present with the teacher, urging them to proceed and assuring them that nothing was wrong. This would continue until the leaner became unresponsive or the subject refused to participate. Milgram wanted to see just how far most people would carry on with the experiment in the face of the apparent pain of the second participant.
Milgram's experiments horrified many. They seemed to show that so called decent Americans were more than willing to do unspeakable things, just so long as they could defer responsibility. As Milgram put it a decade later: "[s]tark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ 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." (Milgram, 1974)
