3 shocking facts about Stanley Milgram.

Milgram’s famous study of obedience.

1. Early Development and Education . Milgram was born in the Bronx, New York, on 15 August 1933, to Eastern European Jewish parents, Samuel and Adele, who had emigrated separately to the United States around the time of World War I. Samuel was a baker, and Adele assisted him in the store in addition to running their household.
2. Milgram was an Evolutionary Psychologist Sort of. He was into Evolutionary Psychology before it became a buzz-phrase — indeed, before the term had been coined. In his book, Milgram notes that “the formation of hierarchically organised groupings lends enormous advantage to those so organized in coping with dangers of the physical environment, threats posed by competing species, and potential disruption from within.” In other words, an animal which has the ability to submit to authority when necessary might be more likely to survive than one which was stubbornly individualistic. He goes on to theorize that humans have evolved a psychological mechanism for obedience, which he calls the “Agentic State”, a special state of mind in which our normal moral inhibitions are bypassed and we become an agent of an authority. I’m not sure many people would buy this as a good explanation, and it isn’t clear if Milgram’s evolutionary logic relies on Group Selection theory, but it’s certainly interesting.

3. Milgram’s Experiment. Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.