Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Report Card 50 Years Later

Abstract

Fifty years ago StanleyMilgram published the first report of his studies of obedience to authority. His work (1963) forged the mindset of how social scientists over the next two generations came to explain the participation of hundreds of thousands of Germans in the mass murder of European Jews during the Holocaust. Milgram’s model was Adolph Eichmann who was convicted and executed for his role in the deportation of European Jews to death camps created in Poland for their eradication. Eichmann’s legal defense, that he was ‘just following orders,’ suggested that the final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Europe was engineered by desk murderers remotely positioned in hierarchies of authority across the Nazi bureaucracy. Submission was unquestioned because the decision to eradicate the Jews originated from the sovereign authority. Milgram’s murderers were loyal automatons. Milgram attracted his subjects from the wider community in New Haven and Bridgeport. He recruited an astounding 780 subjects. His work was identified by Roger Brown as ‘the most important psychological research’ done in his generation. Where Hannah Arendt speculated philosophically that the ranks of Holocaust perpetrators such as Eichmann were unremarkable non-entities, Milgram described in an experimental idiom the ease with which New Haven citizens could be transformed into brutal Nazis without much difficulty. Milgram’s work also provoked questions about the ethical treatment of human subjects in a way that helped to shape future policies for the treatment of volunteers in experimental studies. It alerted funding agencies to the necessity of risk assessment of those deliberately misled in studies premised on subject deception. Milgram also championed the proposition that grave questions of human morality could be examined following the experimental methods that proved to be so effective in the natural sciences. He also contributed to the dogma in social psychology that ‘the situation’ is one of the most, if not the most, important determinant of social behavior. His 1974 book was promoted widely in the popular press, and created a media storm. His scientific portrayal of ‘the banality of evil’ inspired an artistic outpouring of films, and plays, and remains a point of relevance in studies of holocaust history today. Stanley Milgram died in 1984 at the age of 51.