He experimented with the psychology of obeying authority: who is Stanley Milgram?

American social psychologist Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933, and died on December 20, 1984.

Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933, in the Bronx, New York, the second of three children to a Jewish working-class family. He is a successful student; In high school, which he completed in three years, one of his classmates was the social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, whom we will know in the future for the famous Stanford prison experiment. When he was young, he was a student with an interest in science and art. He studies political science at Queens College (which later becomes part of the City University of New York), along with courses in art, literature, and music.

In 1953, in his third year of college, he traveled to Europe and became increasingly interested in international relations. After completing his undergraduate degree in political science from Queens College in 1954, he was accepted to the international relations graduate program at Columbia University, but preferred the department of social relations at Harvard University and started his graduate education. At Harvard, Milgram took lessons from the leading social psychologists of the day, including Gordon Allport, Jerome Bruner, Roger Brown, and Solomon Asch, all of whom greatly influenced the direction of Milgram's academic career.

During her graduate studies, Milgram becomes a research assistant to Solomon Asch, who is concerned with integration in social groups. Asch's famous harmony experiment involves participants assessing the length of a line. Asch's experiments show that people tend to act in line with the majority opinion or avoid expressing their different opinions, even in the most obvious mistakes, even if they are aware of it. However, few individuals are more resistant to showing conformity behavior and continue to defend what they think is right. Milgram was inspired by this work and decided to do a similar experiment that would make him famous.

In 1960, after receiving his doctorate. Milgram from Harvard becomes a lecturer at Yale University. A year later, he begins to perform his famous obedience experiments.

Milgram began teaching at Harvard for a few years in 1963. However, due to the controversy surrounding the obedience experiments, his term of office is not extended due to the criticism. The City University of New York asks him to head the social psychology program they've just created, and he moves on.

People are part of a particular social group and are in an equal position to each other. However, in some cases, it is possible to comply with the wishes or orders of those who are considered to be of higher status or who have power. To accept is to decide to change one's behavior in response to a request. But to obey is to obey a given command or command. Why do people obey authority? As we can see innumerable examples in the history of the world, why do they obey orders that do not comply with their thoughts or values, and even do not comply with human or moral values, is there a limit to them? It was the search for answers to such questions that prompted Milgram to investigate the subject of obedience.

In addition, Milgram, as a Jew as a child, witnessed extensively the tragedies suffered by Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. In the face of this situation, he has always been interested in understanding what factors push people to harm others.

The basis of Stanley Milgram's experiments was to examine the extent to which people submit to social influence, and whether or to what extent a person ordered to harm someone they do not know would comply with this command. The Milgram Experiments are also known as the name of a series of experiments that aim to measure the extent to which people are willing to submit to the wishes of a powerful person or organization, even though it conflicts with their own values.

Submissiveness, authority, personality, culture, value judgments, oppression, violence, family, society, groups, etc. It is a form of behavior that emphasizes obedience and harmony with the effect of dynamics. In a sense, obedience is to implement the given order as it is, without discussing the content or results. Submissiveness can be considered as a repressed personality trait rather than a behavior based on obedience or compliance.

Milgram experiments were first studied only with university student groups, and later with volunteer participants, who were reached through newspaper advertisements.

In the experiment, participants are told that they have participated in a study that examined the effect of punishment on learning and recall. Tasks, vocabulary, etc. He gives an increasingly severe electric shock to another participant who needs to learn (the dummy subject) if he cannot learn. The shock device is designed realistically and the number of volts and its effects (such as 15-60 light shocks) are written on it in large fonts. The intensity of the shocks is controlled by a total of 30 buttons between 15 volts and 450 volts. If the other participant does not know, the necessary shock buttons will be turned in the direction of the researcher.

Of course, this mechanism does not really give electric shocks, and in fact, there is no real person to be punished. With this basic order, it is a matter of the extent to which the subjects will be able to obey orders despite the possibility of harming another human being. During the experiment, the other participant (fake subject) made various mistakes, and the researcher instructed to increase the shock level. If the subject pauses or does not agree, the researcher gave clear and precise orders such as "please continue" or "continue until the experiment is complete". If the subject continues to refuse absolutely or if the final limit has already been reached, then the session is terminated.

Before the experiments began, a group of psychiatrists was asked to estimate how many volts the participants could go up to, and an estimate was made that no one would go above 150 volts. However, the results of the studies have been such as to invalidate these estimates. 82.5% of the subjects went above 150 volts, and 65% gave the learner the highest level of 450-volt shock. Many participants did not stop working before 300 volts. From lower doses, the orderer was objected to, and in some cases, it was discussed, but the order continued to be obeyed.

The results of these experiments can be summarized as follows. One of the factors affecting the level of obedience is whether there is physical proximity/contact. If the individual does not witness the effect of the command on the victim, that is, if there is no physical closeness between them (he does not hear a painful voice in this experiment), he obeys more. If the individual does not establish physical contact/closeness with the person giving the order (in this experiment, he receives orders by phone) he is less obedient. Another factor is the hierarchical level of authority. If the person giving the order is not perceived to be at the top of the hierarchy (any officer, technician, etc. in this experiment) is less obeyed. In addition, if the subject takes orders while in a group, then the obedience behavior increases. If there is more than one commanding officer and they are saying opposite things, then the obedience behavior decreases.

Stanley Milgram publishes his book Obedience to Authority, which includes these experiments, in 1974. Milgram's experiments show that there is a tendency in humans to obey and that they can obey many orders when the right conditions are provided, but also show how much environmental conditions affect this behavior.

These experiments have been tested in a wide variety of cultures and similar results have been obtained. There was no significant difference between cultures in terms of obedience behavior. Milgram's experiments were conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More recently, Jerry M. Burger has examined whether changing understandings and values change people's obedience behavior. The opinion of the research conducted in 2009 is that a similar result will not be achieved today. However, the results did not turn out as expected. According to Burger, the same factors affecting obedience in Milgram's participants continue today.

Stanley Milgram designs another experiment; In 1967, he carried out this experiment by sending 60 letters. The letter will go somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the participants in the experiment are asked to forward this letter to their friend's friend and send it to the desired person. Although participation in the experiment was low at first, Milgram later increased this in various ways, determining that the letter reached the desired destination in an average of six steps. Later, although Milgram never used the term, it appears as the "six-step hypothesis" in sociology and network theory.

In 2001, Duncan Watts tried Milgram's experiment, this time on the internet, with 24163 different e-mail chains composed of 61168 people from 166 countries and found the average number of steps to be six again.

It is a frequently repeated phrase that the world has become a small village with the phenomenon of globalization. However, Stanley Milgram proved that the world is smaller than we thought, even in times when transportation and communication facilities were not very sufficient. The six-step hypothesis is actually known to many of us for a long time, “While we were traveling in Nepal, we came across a neighbor from our site. The world is really small!” scientific proof of the sentence. However, with the effect of technology, the world still continues to become a small village. As proof of this, we can give a conclusion reached by the Facebook data team in 2011. According to this result, the separation of six degrees on Facebook has decreased to four degrees. In short, on Facebook today, the distance between two people who do not know each other has decreased to four steps.

Stanley Milgram remained at New York University until he died of a heart attack on December 20, 1984, at the age of 51.