"The Man Who Shocked The World"
Samuel and Adele Milgram, two Jewish immigrants who moved to the Bronx, New York from Europe before Hitler’s rise to power, were the the loving parents of three children, including the brilliant Stanley Milgram. Stanley was born on August 15, 1933.
Looking at Milgram's childhood, one can get a sense of what he would accomplish later in life. For example, he preferred science over sports, did some chemistry experiments(which included an incident where he, assisted by his friends, lowered sodium into a river for an explosion large enough to attract not only some frantic mothers, but fire trucks), and witnessed his neighbors successfully protest for the street to become a one-way street after a child was hit by a car. Some speculate his interest in conformity and obedience may have come from a more personal desire to comprehend the events which unfolded in countries run by the Nazis in WW II and the years leading up to it. The torah portion of his Bar Mitzvah speech was focused on what WWII meant for Jewish everywhere. While Milgram was a student at Queens College, many professors would not testify during McCarthy’s Communist Party hearings, resulting in their firing. Little to no students complained to administration. Looking at the events of his earlier life, it is no wonder Stanley Milgram was so fascinated by obedience, conformity, and authority.
He attended James Monroe High School with fellow psychologist Philip Zimbardo and graduated in three years. He then attended Queen's College, where his major was political science where he received his B.A. in 1954. He then continued his education at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, a combination of social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and clinical psychology, where he had initially been rejected . At Harvard, he was mentored by Gordon Allport, who was a research assistant to Solomon Asch. Asch conducted an experiment on conformity, where he assessed whether a person a wrong answer in order to agree with a group of confederates. Asch's influence on Milgram displayed itself in his paper and his later obedience experiments. For his paper, Milgram recreated Solomon's research, but made it a cross-cultural experiment by researching groups in Norway and France.
