What is Stanley Milgram?
'''Stanley Milgram''' (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American [[social psychology|social psychologist]]. He is most famous for his controversial study about [[Milgram experiment|obedience to authority figures]]. In these experiments, Milgram showed that about two out of three people would follow orders of an authority figure to the point of risking the life of, or perhaps even killing, an innocent person. He got the idea from the [[Holocaust]]. He wrote a book about his experiments called ''Obedience to Authority''. The idea of [[six degrees of separation]] comes from Milgram's 1967 small-world experiment. It has been criticized a lot, but in 2008 [[Microsoft]] found that the average chain of contacts between users of its '.NET Messenger Service' was 6.6 people.<ref>{{cite journal|title=Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network|first1=Jure|last1=Leskovec|first2=Eric|last2=Horvitz|date=6 March 2008|arxiv=0803.0939}}</ref> A study published in the January 2014 volume of ''Computers in Human Behavior'' found that the average number of acquaintances separating people in unusual jobs is 3.9, and 3.2 for average [[Facebook]] users.<ref>{{cite journal|url=http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563213003427|title=We are so close, less than 4 degrees separating you and me!|journal=Computers in Human Behavior|date=January 2014 |volume=30 |pages=273–285 |doi=10.1016/j.chb.2013.09.014 |last1=Daraghmi |first1=Eman Yasser |last2=Yuan |first2=Shyan-Ming }}</ref> ==Early life== Milgram was born to a [[Jewish]] family in [[New York City]]. ==References== {{reflist}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Milgram, Stanley}} [[Category:1933 births]] [[Category:1984 deaths]] [[Category:American psychologists]] [[Category:Jewish American scientists]] [[Category:Scientists from New York City]] {{US-bio-stub}}