The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram, Creator of the Obedience Experiments and the Father of Six Degrees (review)

The Man Who Shocked the World is a biography of one of the best-known social psychologists of the twentieth century. Stanley Milgram was more an imaginative experimenter than a theorist, and two of his experiments have entered into popular consciousness. One experiment established the "six degrees of separation" idea, which is that a chain of only six friends, relatives, or acquaintances can connect any two people on earth. The other—and the one central to Thomas Blass's study—was his work on obedience to authority,¹ research that was inspired by the Holocaust. Blass has been writing about Milgram for many years, has had complete access to Milgram's private papers, and has interviewed many of Milgram's friends, relatives, students, and associates, making The Man Who Shocked the World in effect Milgram's "official" biography.

The first eleven chapters provide a detailed, year-by-year account of Milgram's life from childhood to death. Milgram graduated with a B.S. from Queen's College of The City University of New York, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard, which he always revered as an academic Eden. An ambitious academic, he subsequently held positions at Yale (where he conducted the obedience experiments), at Harvard (where he was denied tenure), and finally back at CUNY. The obedience experiments and their immediate impact are described in meticulous detail in chapters 5–7.

Setting aside the cultural, political, and historical questions raised by Holocaust scholarship, we must recall that the issue Milgram addressed in Obedience to Authority was originally a theoretical debate within social psychology about the causes of behavior in social situations. Psychologists of the 1930s and 1940s believed that fixed traits of character (or personality) determined how people behaved regardless of situation. Thus, highly honest people would resist cheating even in circumstances that made cheating undiscoverable. Although the notion of the primacy of personality derived from Freud, who believed character was set by age six, other psychologists proposed different theories of personality, theories that nevertheless agreed that character trumped situation.

However, after World War II, a new school of thought arose, partly inspired by the horrors of Nazism and the excuse subsequently given by so many accused war criminals that "I was only following orders." This new approach, soon called "situationism," discounted the idea of fixed character, proposing instead that human behavior was almost entirely determined by external factors. A pioneer in situationism was Solomon Asch, under whom Milgram studied and who, according to Blass, was Milgram's "most important scientific influence" (p. 26). Asch's best-known experiments (starting in 1958, and not described by Blass) involved groups of five subjects (psychologists now call them "participants") judging whether or not vertical lines were of the same or different lengths. In the classic version, two lines were presented; these differed markedly in length, yet were pronounced to be the same length by four of the "subjects," in actuality secret confederates of the experimenter. The genuine subject thus experienced social pressure: should he or she tell the truth or conform to the group consensus? Most chose the latter. Again consistent with situationism, if even a single confederate pronounced the lines to differ, then most of the actual subjects told the truth.

Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority took Asch's social influence paradigm and made it more dramatic and more directly relevant to understanding the Holocaust. Unlike typical psychological experiments using college students, Milgram recruited subjects via advertisements in New Haven newspapers. The latter were paid to participate in what they were told was an experiment on the role of punishment in learning. Two "subjects" participated (one a secret confederate of Milgram's). One subject was assigned (ostensibly by lot) to be the "learner," and the other (the real subject) to...