The Courage of Stanley Milgram

For 50 years, millions of people worldwide have come to know Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) as the larger-than-life scientist who reported the Yale obedience experiments of the 1960s. Even today, one cannot find an introductory psychology textbook that fails to include the findings first reported by this brilliant 27-year-old assistant professor at Yale.

Not many know Milgram was also a teacher during his 24-year career—from his start at Yale in 1960, until the very afternoon he died at age 51 on December 20, 1984, after mentoring Christina Taylor’s doctoral defense at CUNY. In fact, those of us who were fortunate enough to be his graduate students at Yale, Harvard, or CUNY, actually saw Milgram less as a researcher than as a truly one-of-a-kind teacher whose gifts in the classroom rivaled his brilliance in the lab. For him, research and teaching were one. Even among other gifted faculty, there was simply no one like him, as he taught us on several levels—information as well as inspiration. Like Socrates, he rarely lectured, but used his incisive intellect to raise questions or create dilemmas for students to resolve in class. As a result, his classroom typically

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scintillated with bold new ideas, strong emotions, clashing views, and unforgettable experiences, as each of us stretched beyond our own limits to impress the maestro and each other. When we entered his classroom, we never knew what to expect. I offer two crisp examples here.

One December, Professor Milgram ended the class by coyly instructing the 13 of us to take out a piece of paper and to write each others’ names down and the final grades we felt each deserved, all as a way of helping him grade. When he collected the sheets and noticed one was missing, he asked,

“Why?” One student sheepishly confessed his failure to participate, saying, “I feel uncomfortable with this.” Milgram shrugged assent, and we sat silently while he proceeded to read all 12 sheets aloud—author, names, and grades—then thanked us and dismissed us until next week. The purpose of this activity appeared to be to teach us to put aside social politeness in favor of seeking the truth.

In another instance I can recall, Stanley Milgram often exposed weaknesses in even classic laboratory research. While we were studying Bandura’s 1963 “Bobo doll” study, Professor Milgram impatiently asked, “Where is the aggression? Exactly what is the purpose of a Bobo doll if not to hit it? Should children caress it?” Similarly, in the classic 1959 Aronson experiment, on “severity of initiation” into a sorority, Milgram asked, “How severe it could be to utter swear words?” After he challenged us to identify the filthiest word in the English language, and we failed, he assigned us to canvass others and see who could return next Tuesday with the most embarrassing obscenity. He was right: no one could identify a word so filthy that its utterance was a “severe embarrassment.”

As a teacher, Milgram surely had a profound impact on those of us who were lucky enough to study with him directly. But consider how his teaching just as surely impacted

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those millions of students who were taught by him indirectly—through his classic films on obedience and on city life. Like thousands of other professors, I have repeatedly shown Milgram’s powerful obedience film in class and witnessed first-hand the immense variations in students’ reactions—from laughter to weeping—as one man is induced to kill another. There is no question that Milgram’s film has been seen and absorbed by millions of people and has changed the lives of some of these (including me!), who later found themselves in an obedience dilemma. Those who visit the Milgram archive at the Yale library may see the binder of letters Milgram received from his research participants—many of them expressing their thanks for the invaluable insights they learned about their own behavior.

After Stanley Milgram’s third heart attack in 1982 at age 48, his alumna Ronna Kabatznick made sure to get 40 of us alumni together for a big 49^th birthday bash to celebrate his appointment as CUNY Distinguished Professor, for fear he would not make 50. After we regaled him, Milgram replied with an ever-eloquent “final lesson” for us based on his own life: “To have a successful career, I would say you need three things: one is courage, two is courage, and three is courage.” The silence was deafening.

Of course, we learned from Milgram outside the class as well—such as his bold writings and presentations in defense of behavioral science against its critics and his ingenious application of research methods to all sorts of social issues. His little known collection of 25 essays on “The Individual in a Social World” shows his immense understanding beyond the obedience experiments. Thomas Blass’ penetrating biography, The Man Who Shocked the World (2004), somehow managed to convey the Renaissance man that Milgram truly was. Without question, Professor Milgram’s students feel lucky to have studied with the maestro and each of us have a quiver full of “Milgram stories” on how he influ-

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enced our academic careers during our formative years. I would like to end by saying “Thank you” to Professor Milgram.

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