Utili informazioni sulla vita e le opere di Stanley Milgram sono reperibili in lingua inglese sul sito www.stanleymilgram.com da cui riporto alcune parti.
Dalla sezione Stanley Milgram's Basics:
Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks (up to 450 volts) to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants.
Milgram's career also produced other creative, though less controversial, research; such as, the small-world method (the source of "Six Degrees of Separation"), the lost-letter technique, mental maps of cities, cyranoids, the familiar stranger, and an experiment testing the effects of televised antisocial behavior which, though conducted 30 years ago, remains unique to the present day.
Dalla sezione Little Known Facts:
Although Milgram was to become one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, he never took a single psychology course as an undergraduate at Queens College, where he obtained his BA in Political Science. He changed career goals in his senior year and applied to the PhD program in Social Psychology at Harvard's Department of Social Relations. Rejected at first because he did not have any background in psychology, he was accepted provisionally after he took six psychology courses at three different New York-area schools in the summer of 1954.
In the fall of 1962, a year before the appearance of his first journal article on his obedience research, the American Psychological Association (APA) put Milgram's membership application "on hold" because of questions raised about the ethics of that research. After an investigation by the APA produced a favorable result, they admitted him.
The first published criticism of his obedience experiments appeared in an unusual place. In the fall of 1963, right after the first appearance of his research in a journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial criticizing him and Yale for the highly stressful experience he created for his subjects. Milgram found out about the editorial from a St. Louis social psychologist, Robert Buckhout. As a result, Milgram was able to write a rebuttal that the newspaper subsequently published on its editorial page.
In August, 1976, CBS presented a prime-time dramatization of the obedience experiments and the events surrounding them, titled "The Tenth Level". William Shatner had the starring role as Stephen Hunter, the Milgram-like scientist. Milgram served as a consultant for the film. While it contains a lot of fictional elements, it powerfully conveyed enough of the essence of the true story for its writer, George Bellak, to receive Honorable Mention in the American Psychological Association's media awards for 1977.
Milgram's "shock machine" still exists. It can be found at the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron. For a number of years, beginning in 1992, it was part of a traveling psychology exhibit created by the American Psychological Association.
Milgram's mentoring style was to be supportive of his students' interests rather than impose his own research interests on them. Although he chaired the largest number of PhD theses in the Psychology Department while at the Graduate Center of CUNY from 1967-84, only one of them was an obedience experiment: a "role-played" version conducted by Daniel Geller in 1975, using Milgram's machine.
Who are more obedient, men or women? Milgram found an identical rate of obedience in both groups (65%) although obedient women consistently reported more stress than men. There are about a dozen replications of the obedience experiment world-wide which had male and female subjects. All of them, with one exception, also found no male-female differences.
