What have professional showmen like PT Barnum and social psychologists like Stanley Milgram got in common? Plenty, according to Michael Pettit, science historian and author … Read more »

Category Archives: Social psychology
Milgram, Travolta and the Tenth Level
In August 1976, the TV movie The Tenth Level, inspired by Milgram’s obedience research, screened to around 30 million viewers as part of CBS’s Playhouse 90 series. From the opening scene onward, Professor … Read more »
Job vacancy, Yale, 1961: obedience experimenter
Stanley Milgram drafted this ad for a research assistant in mid July 1961. The ad, like all Milgram’s recruitment materials, is cleverly crafted. It’s an … Read more »
Milgram on experimentation and insight
When an investigator keeps his eyes open throughout a scientific study he learns things about himself as well as his subjects and the conclusions do … Read more »
Fiction and flaws in social psych textbooks
When a textbook is recommended for a class, you expect that you’ll be able to turn to it for definitive answers, don’t you? Maybe you … Read more »
Kohlberg, Milgram and morals
Most people who know of Laurence Kohlberg know him as the psychologist who did so much work on how we develop our moral reasoning. He’s … Read more »
Obedience conference goes too fast
I’m just back from Canada where I co-convened the first ever Obedience to Authority conference with my colleague and fellow antipodean scholar, New Zealander Nestar … Read more »
Milgram’s obedience turns 50
It’s half a century ago this year since Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments first made their way into print. His first article about the experiments was … Read more »
Short history of shock
Shock machines were being used at educational institutions to improve student performance long before Stanley Milgram devised his obedience experiments at Yale in 1961. The … Read more »
Recordings of Robbers Cave
Social psychologists like Muzafer Sherif and Stanley Milgram were committed to recording as much of their experiments as possible. Not just on paper, but with … Read more »