The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (review)

This book offers a well-written biography of Stanley Milgram (1933–84), the social psychologist who conducted the widely known experiments on obedience. Thomas Blass, a social psychologist himself, has made Milgram and his work his career focus in recent years. Dozens of intensive interviews, including two with the reviewer, and years of studying manuscripts and letters led to this book

Blass views his subject as an eccentric visionary. He met Milgram only once, but he captures much of this difficult man as I remember him. I knew Stan well, first as fellow doctoral students then as faculty members in Harvard's old Social Relations Department.

Clearly, Milgram is the author's hero — especially for the relevance of the obedience research for the Holocaust. Nevertheless, to Blass's credit, he describes Milgram's dark side — a "complex, sometimes enigmatic, individual — . . . controlling and domineering — a prima donna who always had to have his way" (182). Blass speculates that continued drug use, especially to overcome writing blocks, offers a possible explanation for these characteristics. But I have no knowledge of this possibility. I just recall him as routinely cruel to graduate students in a seminar we co-taught. In any event, Blass feels Milgram's "genius" outweighed these personal flaws. This view mirrors Milgram's defense of the questionable ethics of his obedience studies — that the importance of the findings outweighed any potential harm to the uninformed subjects.

I have only two caveats to make of this interesting book. First, the description of Milgram's greatest setback — Harvard's denial of tenure — is flawed. The prolonged meetings over this decision were less concerned with Milgram, as Blass writes, than they were about other possibilities for the position. And Milgram knew long before the announcement that he would not receive the appointment. These errors probably derive from Blass's faithfully recording the comments of Roger Brown, Milgram's major supporter who remained bitter over the decision. He cites Brown as saying that opponents of Milgram's promotion wrongly "attributed to him some of the properties of the [obedience] experiment" (153). But this ignores the fact that Milgram's authoritarian behavior, especially toward graduate students, reinforced his critics' qualms.

Second, from the book's title to repeated claims for Milgram's ideas, there is some hype and hyperbole. Milgram's thesis on conformity was not ". . . the first time an objective technique was used to study cross-cultural differences in behavior" (54), nor was the "stimulus overload" concept original to Milgram. And putting the computer to use in replicating Asch's conformity study had been devised by Richard Crutchfield and others long before Milgram tried it. Moreover, his many interesting field studies of urban life conducted in the 1970s, while new to psychology, retraced similar studies by symbolic interactionists.

Yet Milgram possessed truly innovative research skills. He made a specialty of creating high-impact studies with behavioral dependent variables that convincingly demonstrated the power of situations to shape behavior. Milgram also employed clever follow-up studies — 19 variations in his obedience research alone — that systematically tested plausible rival explanations. My favorite involved his repeating his obedience study in a ram shackled setting in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut. When his results almost matched his Yale laboratory results, he was able to dismiss the prestige of the university as a major factor. Here Milgram was inspired by the many repetitions by Soloman Asch, his mentor, of Asch's famous conformity experiment. It is commonplace today in social psychological journals to see several cumulative experiments reported on the same hypothesis — testimony to this Asch-Milgram contribution to social psychological method.

However, Milgram did not significantly add to the theoretical development of his discipline. A great variety of studies in social psychology, from Asch's conformity work to Phillip Zimbardo's prison study, have revealed the power of the situation. Blass correctly notes, ". . . theoretical integration . . . was not his forte" (212). He was far more fascinated...