Stanley Milgram
American social psychologist / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.[2]
Stanley Milgram | |
---|---|
Born | (1933-08-15)August 15, 1933 The Bronx, New York City, U.S. |
Died | December 20, 1984(1984-12-20) (aged 51) Manhattan, New York City, U.S. |
Education | Queens College, New York (B.A., Political Science, 1954) Harvard University (Ph.D., Social Psychology, 1960) |
Known for | Milgram experiment Small-world experiment Familiar stranger |
Title | Professor[1] |
Spouse |
Alexandra Menkin (m. 1961) |
Children | 2[1] |
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.
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. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. 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.[5]
His other 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 (called cyranoids), 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.[6]