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

  • Thomas Blass
Basic Books: 2004. 368 pp. $26, £19.99 0738203998 | ISBN: 0-738-20399-8

It's a sin to tell a lie — or is it? Experimental psychology has always engaged in modest amounts of subterfuge to distract human subjects from the true purpose of investigations. Experimental social psychology, or at least one branch of it, goes much further and makes deceit in social interaction the pith and essence of investigative practice. The usual social norms of sincerity, spontaneity and good faith are discarded to provoke attitudes or behaviour in unsuspecting human subjects: this is true experimental manipulation in the interests of a science of social behaviour.

Stanley Milgram was an outstanding exponent of this style of research, but to what end? His famous experiments on obedience, where subjects were duped into believing they were administering painful and even dangerous electric shocks to other volunteers in the course of a banal learning experiment, both launched and blighted his professional career. Like so much else of his work, they made manifest a sublime talent for dramatizing and presenting what was already known about the moral frailty of humankind. Who since Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, has believed that human behaviour is governed by the rational evaluation of alternatives under the guidance of a well-examined conscience? Lawyers, perhaps. Milgram found ways of capturing this frailty without adding substantially to our understanding of it, or to our ability to remedy it.

The writer of this welcome but flawed biography, Thomas Blass, thinks otherwise. The author of more papers on Milgram than Milgram himself ever published, he veers from pointed critical evaluation of Milgram's work and character to overblown hagiographic praise. We are invited to think of Milgram as great, with an ever-present sense of muffled outrage at the failure of Harvard University to grant him tenure. The puffery extends to a dust-jacket endorsement by a professor of physics, who extols Milgram as the most influential social psychologist of the past century. When did physicists ever look to psychologists to evaluate the standing and contribution of their own peers?

A careful reading reveals that Milgram was a chippy colleague, often unpleasant to his students, and had two characteristics often taken as warning signs of unreliability: a drug habit and a sense of entitlement.

In fact, for all his undoubted talent for communication to a wider public, Milgram singularly failed to win research grants from major funding bodies, saw remarkably few students through to completion of doctoral studies, and turned increasingly to the media as an outlet for his talents. He lived his research methods. When he burst into a seminar with the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination, it was simply assumed that this was Milgram up to his usual tricks, trying another experimental social manipulation.

The other major contribution attributed to Milgram, beyond his obedience work and some technical methods for unobtrusive research, concerns the idea of six degrees of separation: that anyone can find a chain of acquaintance with anyone else on Earth that has about six links. This idea has ramifications not just in the study of social networks, but also in computing and mathematics. It is little elaborated in this work, perhaps because Milgram himself did little to elaborate it, beyond the bold statement published in the first issue of Psychology Today.

But how bold was it? To untutored common sense it may seem surprising, but untutored common sense falls prey to chain letters and pyramid selling schemes, which share essentially the same mathematics, and has little grasp of the reach of exponential arithmetic. To make six degrees of separation a fair representation of reality, on a hopelessly simple model (and the interesting issues are all to do with why such a simple model is inadequate) at the time Milgram was writing, the average number of unique acquaintance links per person was 42. This perhaps casts the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything in a new light. Our talent for procreation, however, has subsequently increased the number to 43.

This is an uneven book — perhaps an overzealous editorial hand has been at work. You will feel at home reading it if you know the detailed topography of Harvard University, what a summer salary is and why it is important, the precise nature of a proseminar, the US system of academic appointment and tenure, and East Coast Jewish culture; otherwise you may just feel a slight sense of social exclusion. On the other hand, perhaps unintentionally, the book offers an insight into a world whose public outings are usually more carefully groomed and polished in the interests of impression management.

And of course, this being Nature, all of the above statements are true. Or are they?