Stanley Milgram

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Stanley Milgram : biography

August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984

In 2008, folk musician Dar Williams released a song called "Buzzer", in which the narrator participated in the Milgram experiment. After being debriefed, the narrator realizes that evil is not committed by an unreachable other, but instead ordinary people and every day.

The 2008 episode "Authority" of Law and Order: SVU has Detective Munch mentioning Milgram’s experiment in reference to corporate training at HappiBurger (a McDonalds-like restaurant). Likewise, Merritt Rook (portrayed by Robin Williams) poses as a "Detective Milgram" to convince a restaurant owner to molest an employee and drive the doctor that let his wife and infant child die to suicide. He later kidnaps Detective Olivia Benson, takes her to an old recording studio, and wires her to a battery. He tells her partner, Detective Elliot Stabler (played by Christopher Meloni) to push the button on his remote that sends anywhere from 2 to 2000 volts of current into Benson. Stabler then realizes that Rook performing Milgram’s experiment on him. Each time he (Stabler) refuses, Rook becomes more enraged. Finally, when Stabler says he can’t hurt his partner, Rook calls him a human being and tells him that his partner was never in any actual danger.

The 2009 album, Avoid the Light, by German post-rock band Long Distance Calling, contains a song named "I Know you Stanley Milgram."

In March 2010, French television channel France 2 broadcast Jusqu’où va la télé, describing the results of a fake game show that they had run 80 times (each time independently, and with a new contestant and audience). The contestants received instructions to administer what they thought would be near fatal electric shocks to another "contestant" (really an actor) when that other contestant erred on memorized word-associations. Encouraged by the show’s host and by an unprimed studio audience, the vast majority followed instructions even as the "victim" screamed. Daily Telegraph, 17 March 2010

In 2010, luxury brand Enfants Perdus released a collection called "Milgram", in which the designers drew themes and inspiration from the Milgram experiment. Enfants Perdus, 11 June 2010 The design team has referenced the discussions about the human condition and the revelations of the human condition in numerous interviews.

Anti-social behavior experiment

In 1970-71, Milgram conducted experiments which attempted to find a correlation between media consumption (in this case, watching television) and anti-social behavior. The experiment presented the opportunity to steal money, donate to charity, or neither, and tested whether the rate of each choice was influenced by watching similar actions in the ending of a specially crafted episode of the popular series Medical Center.

Lost letter experiment

Milgram developed a technique for measuring how helpful people are to strangers who are not present, and their attitudes toward various groups, called the "lost letter" experiment. Several sealed and stamped letters are planted in public places, addressed to various entities, such as individuals, favorable organizations like medical research institutes, and stigmatized organizations such as "Friends of the Nazi Party". Milgram found most of the letters addressed to individuals and favorable organizations were mailed, while most of those addressed to stigmatized organizations were not.http://books.google.com/books?id=VDPftmVO5lYC&pg=RA1-PA130&lpg=RA1-PA130&dq="lost+letter"+milgram&source=bl&ots=SsClFZkcDB&sig=EP41P1eqhKvZDOScJ4m9iqdp86g&hl=en&ei=vNE_SsXBN9bBtwe0pcQb&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4