斯坦利·米尔格拉姆

斯坦利·米尔格拉姆（英语：Stanley Milgram，1933年8月15日—1984年12月20日），美国社会心理学家，于1960年在耶鲁大学工作时进行了著名的米尔格拉姆实验，测试人们对权威的服从性。未能在耶鲁大学获得终身教职的他于1963年转往哈佛大学工作，进行小世界实验，因而启发了六度分隔理论。未能在哈佛大学获得终身教职的他于1967年接受了纽约市立大学的终身教授席位。终年51岁，死于心脏病。

著作

《服从权威》（1974）

Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist who conducted controversial experiments on obedience in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale University.

Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, until his death in 1984.

Milgram's obedience experiment was conducted in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University in 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The experiment unexpectedly found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey instructions to harm others, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Milgram's small-world experiment led researchers to analyze the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept. Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.

Milgram is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Biography

Early life, family and education

Milgram was the second of three children born to Jewish parents in the Bronx (New York City), in 1933. His parents were Adele (born Israel) and Samuel Milgram (1898–1953), who had immigrated to the United States from Romania and Hungary respectively during World War I. Milgram's immediate and extended family were both affected by the Holocaust. After the war, relatives who had survived Nazi concentration camps and bore concentration camp tattoos stayed with the Milgram family in New York for a time.

Milgram's bar mitzvah speech, when he turned 13 in 1946, focused on the plight of European Jews and the impact that the events of World War II would have on Jewish people around the world. He said, upon becoming a man under Jewish law: "As I ... find happiness in joining the ranks of Israel, the knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews ... makes this ... an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people—which now becomes mine. ... I shall try to understand my people and do my best to share the responsibilities which history has placed upon all of us." He later wrote to a friend from childhood: "I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some 20 years later. How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital, I'll never quite understand."

Milgram's interest in the Holocaust had its basis in what his biographer, Professor Thomas Blass, referred to as Milgram's "lifelong identification with the Jewish people". Author Kirsten Fermaglich wrote that Milgram as an adult had "a personal conflict as a Jewish man who perceived himself both as an outsider, a victim of the Nazi destruction, and as an insider, as scientist." His wife, Alexandra, later said that Milgram's Jewish identity led to his focus on the Holocaust and his obedience-to-authority research. He shared this as well with Herbert Winer, one of his obedience study subjects, who noted, after speaking to Milgram about the experiment, that "Milgram was very Jewish. I was Jewish. We talked about this. There was obviously a motive behind neutral research."