Abstract
This article revisits a forgotten, late project by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram: the ‘cyranoid’ studies he conducted from 1977 to 1984. These investigations, inspired by the play Cyrano de Bergerac, explored how individuals often fail to notice when others do not speak their own thoughts, but instead relay messages from a hidden source. We situate these experiments amidst the intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of late Cold War America, and show how Milgram’s studies pulled together a variety of ideas, anxieties, and interests that were prevalent at that time and have returned in new guises since. In discussing the cyranoid project’s background and afterlife, we argue that its strikingly equivocal quality has lent itself to multiple reinterpretations by historians, psychologists, performers, artists, and others. Our purpose is neither to champion Milgram’s work nor to amplify the critiques already made of his methods. Rather, it is to consider the uncertain, allusive, and elusive aspects of the cyranoid project, and to seek to place that project in context, whilst asking where ‘context’ might end. We show how the experiments’ range of meanings, in different temporal registers, far exceeded the explanatory rubric that Milgram and his intellectual critics provided at that time, and ponder the risk for the historian of making anachronistic or teleological assumptions. In short, we argue, cyranoids invite our open-ended exploration of ‘voices offstage’ in social and psychological relations, and offer a useful tool for thinking about historical context and the nature of historical interpretations.
Highlights
This article revisits a forgotten, late project by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram: the ‘cyranoid’ studies he conducted from 1977 to 1984
If it were not for the woman’s confiding tones, the scene might be mistaken for a television interview on a public access programme, a conversation with the creator of those chilling obedience experiments, the celebrated and controversial Professor Milgram. This is not a television programme, and the subject is not obedience, or at least not in the way Milgram had previously conceived it. This video was produced in the course of his pilot studies exploring the ‘cyranic illusion’, a psychological phenomenon that he named after the late 19th-century French play Cyrano de Bergerac and its famous balcony scene in which the homely but eloquent Cyrano, replete with an extremely large nose, whispers poetic lines to Christian, a handsome but inarticulate soldier
Ms A’s interlocutors betray no sign that they think something amiss. Even when she begins to explain to one subject that she is a cyranoid speaking the words of Dr Milgram, her vocal expression suggests that in this act of debriefing she is still listening to Milgram’s utterances and carefully repeating them
Summary
According to Milgram’s biographer, Thomas Blass, the idea for the cyranoid studies emerged in an exercise that Milgram posed to students in a course on mass media at CUNY in fall 1977 (Blass, 2004: 239). Students tested whether one person could function as a medium for the words of another by playing the roles of sources, cyranoids, and interactants in a scenario inspired, as noted, by Cyrano de Bergerac. Whatever the reference back to a celebrated fin de siecle drama, Milgram imbued cyranoids with protean meanings and applications relating to his immediate society, as well as some timeless human problems about deciphering other people’s cues, gestures, and words First in his proposals to the National Science Foundation, and in laboratory-based studies, his efforts spoke, intentionally or otherwise, to the emerging intellectual concerns and apprehensions of the 1970s, that is to say, to the disorientated and fractured mood of his time
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