The Individual in a Social World

By the time the first edition of The Individual in a Social World appeared in 1977, Milgram had moved beyond obedience to other innovative research, such as the psychology of city life, the small world phenomenon (also known as ‘six degrees of separation’), mental maps of cities, the lost-letter technique, the familiar stranger, as well as a large-scale experiment on media influence, which is still unique to the present day. In 1992, a second, posthumous edition appeared containing additional articles which Milgram had written after the first edition.

This third, expanded edition of The Individual in a Social World combines articles that appeared in both of the earlier editions as well as previously uncollected material. Among the latter is, for example, an article in which Milgram provides a perspective on the Jonestown massacre and then uses it as a stepping stone for a ringing affirmation of the power of situational determinants of behavior. Another article, ‘The Social Meaning of Fanaticism,’ is almost uncanny in its relevance to our times, despite the fact that it was written several decades ago, as is his take on the potential impact of the Internet in ‘Network Love’. Stanley Milgram possessed a relentless curiosity about the hidden workings of our social world, which he tried to make visible through his experiments and think pieces brought together in this unique, revealing and engaging book – a must-read for anyone interested in social psychology.

Stanley Milgram was born in 1933 in New York City. He took a bachelor’s degree from Queens College in political science and received his Ph.D. in the social relations program of Harvard University in 1960 under the direction of Gordon Allport. Milgram spent from 1960 to 1963 at Yale University conducting the obedience experiments for which he quickly became internationally famous, and for which he received many honours including the American Association for the Advancement of Science prize in sociopsychology. The first reports of this work appeared in 1963, but the full series of experiments was first published in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Milgram returned to Harvard in 1963 and remained there until 1967, when he moved to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as head of the social psychology graduate program. In 1980 Milgram was named a distinguished professor of psychology by the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Milgram passed away in December of 1984. At the City University of New York, Milgram conducted a seminal series of experiments on the psychology of urban living, and he wrote and produced an award-winning movie, The City and the Self, as a further expression of his insights into urban life. Milgram was a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1972 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to spend a year in Paris developing his work on mental maps of Paris and New York. He was, in addition to all of this, an amateur songwriter, photographer, and inventor of games and gadgets.