Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) was an American social psychologist whose two most famous experiments — the obedience studies and the small-world letter-routing studies — are rarely discussed together. This separation is a mistake. Milgram was not a psychologist who happened to study two different topics. He was a systems theorist who studied how individuals navigate structures of power and connection using only local information. His work on obedience and his work on navigability are the same project viewed from opposite ends: one studies how systems control individuals, the other studies how individuals move through systems.

Milgram received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960, working with Solomon Asch, whose conformity experiments provided the direct intellectual precursor to the obedience studies. At Yale, Milgram developed the obedience experiments that would make him famous and controversial. The experiments began in 1961, three months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem — a timing Milgram described as coincidental but which he also acknowledged as culturally resonant. The question on his mind, and on the minds of many Americans watching the Eichmann trial, was not Are