Comments (0)The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram
May 15, 2009John Starrels
Special to the Jewish Times
Thomas Blass, Ph.D.
Basic Books 2009, 368 pages (paperback), $16.95
The list of Jewish social scientists who have made seminal contributions to the world of applied research is an imposing one. Among those who belong in this distinguished group is the late Stanley Milgram, the Bronx, N.Y.-born son of Eastern European immigrants who was a major figure in the then-emerging field of social psychology after World War II.
Milgram’s evolution and impact are the subject of a newly released paperback version of the original biography by Thomas Blass, a professor of social psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an acknowledged expert on Milgram’s life and work.
Milgram’s chief contribution to social science research derives from his “obedience experiments,” which were performed on a group of lab subjects drawn from the New Haven, Conn., community in the early 1960s. The main finding was that presumably normal groups of residents would readily inflict potentially harmful electric shocks on innocent victims, whose only crime was to have made themselves available as guinea pigs. For every “error” in verbal learning, the recipient was subjected to ever-increasing intensities of electric shock.
Summarizing his feelings to a colleague, Milgram pronounced the results “terrifying and depressing.” For a democratic country, he somberly observed, “A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.”
For all his originality, Milgram had his detractors. Some of them, according to Mr. Blass, took aim at his alleged insensitivity to the ethical aspects of his experiments. More stinging, to Milgram, was the criticism that he was a dilettante who flitted from one newsworthy phenomenon to the next. This fast-paced, well-written book gives all sides of the picture to this brilliant and charming professor. I found it informative, but I will let the Milgram partisans fight it out.