Allport would be a constant source of encouragement for Milgram, and he had a bemused admiration for Milgram's limitless drive and persistence in the face of obstacles. But when Allport felt the necessity, he knew how much pressure to apply to Milgram without provoking his resistance. Milgram, in turn, was always deferential enough to Allport to get his way without seeming too pushy. And when it came time to do his dissertation, Milgram asked Allport to be his chairman because of his open mentoring style. Rather than expecting his doctoral students to hitch a ride on one of his research projects, Allport let them be themselves and pursue their own interests.
Milgram's dissertation was a cross-cultural comparison of conformity performed in Norway and France between 1957 and 1959. He used an adaptation of a technique invented by the social psychologist Solomon Asch. In 1955 Asch had come to Harvard as a visiting lecturer, and Milgram was assigned to be his teaching and research assistant. Milgram became intimately familiar with Asch's conformity experiments. In these experiments, a subject, seated among seven others, had to indicate which one of three lines was equal in length to a fourth line. The other seven, however, were in cahoots with Asch and intentionally gave incorrect matches during some of the trials. Asch found that a naive subject yielded to the will of the bogus majority about one-third of the time.
Milgram modified Asch's procedure, using sound rather than visual stimuli: In each trial, subjects had to indicate which of a pair of tones was longer.
In addition, Milgram used a simulated majority to create peer pressure—before giving an answer the naive subject heard tape-recorded answers from five other subjects (they were not physically present in the lab, although the subject believed they were). In his dissertation, Milgram wryly explained the advantages of this procedure, "The group is always willing to perform in the laboratory at the experimenter's convenience, and personalities on tape demand no replay royalties."
It was an ambitious study, involving almost 400 subjects. Overall, Milgram found the Norwegians to be more conforming than the French participants. In 1959 and 1960, he worked for Asch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, helping him edit a book on conformity. During his spare time, Milgram wrote his dissertation. As a result of their association there and at Harvard, Milgram considered Asch to be his most important scientific influence.
In June 1960, Milgram received his Ph.D., and that fall he began at Yale as an assistant professor in the department of psychology. That first semester, he carried out pilot studies on obedience with his students and began the formal series of experiments in the summer of 1961, with grant support from the National Science Foundation. Going beyond Asch's conformity research, Milgram wondered whether it would be possible to demonstrate the power of social influence with something more consequential than simple line judgments.
Under the Influence
It wasn't just Asch's work that influenced Milgram. Milgram's interest in the study of obedience also emerged out of a continuing identification with the suffering of fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis and an attempt to fathom how the Holocaust could have happened. A poignant illustration of this can be found in a letter Milgram wrote from France to his schoolmate John Shaffer in the fall of 1958:
My true spiritual home is Central Europe, not France, the Mediterranean countries, England, Scandinavia or Northern Germany, but that area which is bounded by the cities of Munich, Vienna and Prague .... 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.
During a period of a year, Milgram conducted more than 20 variations of the basic experiment to see how changing aspects of the experimental situation might alter subjects' willingness to obey. Four days after Milgram's last participant was studied, the Israeli government, after a lengthy trial, hanged Adolf Eichmann for his role in the murder of 6 million Jews. The action seemed to anticipate the important role Milgram's experiments would come to play in debates about how to account for the behavior of the Nazi perpetrators.
In all, Milgram spent three years at Yale. In January 1961, he met Alexandra "Sasha" Menkin at a party in Manhattan. After a year of courtship, they were married. And in the fall of 1963, as his experiment results were made public, Milgram was invited back to Harvard's social relations department as an assistant professor.
But he was never granted tenure. Some of the opposition toward Milgram came from colleagues who felt uneasy about him, ascribing to him certain negative properties of the obedience experiment. Being banished from academia's Eden was a very painful experience for Milgram. In 1967, he accepted an offer to head the social psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) as a full professor—skipping the associate professor level—and remained there until he died from his fifth heart attack in 1984.
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