Chapter 1: The Post-WWII Intellectual and Institutional Context of Foundational Social Psychology Experiments

The August 1945 opening of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg marked not only the formal beginning of legal proceedings against Nazi leadership for crimes against humanity, but also a foundational epistemological rupture for the social sciences in the United States. The central question that reverberated through university halls, government agencies, and public discourse in the immediate postwar period was deceptively simple: how could ordinary, ostensibly “normal” individuals participate in systematic atrocities such as the Holocaust? The defense strategy employed by many Nazi defendants—most infamously Adolf Eichmann’s claim that he was “just following orders”—forced social scientists to confront a gap between existing theories of human behavior and the scale of documented violence. For a discipline that had, prior to World War II, been largely focused on individual differences, attitude measurement, and applied problems of advertising and education, this question demanded a fundamental reorientation of research agendas, methodological commitments, and institutional structures. It was within this charged historical context that the three experiments that would come to define the canonical core of social psychology—Solomon Asch’s line judgment conformity studies (1951), Stanley Milgram’s obedience-to-authority experiments (1961–1963), and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)—were conceived, executed, and eventually enshrined as foundational texts.

To understand the intellectual and institutional conditions that produced these studies, one must first trace the wartime transformation of American social psychology, which laid the groundwork for its postwar dominance as a laboratory-based experimental discipline. Prior to 1941, social psychology in the U.S. was a marginal subfield of psychology, with fewer than 200 members in the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI, founded in 1936) and limited funding from private foundations such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Research was dominated by correlational studies of attitudes, individual difference measures, and applied work on personnel selection and consumer behavior. The U.S. entry into World War II created an unprecedented demand for social scientific expertise to support the war effort: the War Department, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA), and the War Advertising Council contracted hundreds of social psychologists to study problems of troop morale, propaganda effectiveness, interrogation techniques, and civilian compliance with wartime rationing and blackout regulations. Between 1942 and 1945, the War Department invested more than $120 million (equivalent to roughly $1.8 billion in 2024 dollars) in social science research, employing more than 200 psychologists, including many who would later conduct the canonical experiments of the 1950s and 1960s: Kurt Lewin, Leon Festinger, Solomon Asch, and Stanley Milgram all held wartime research positions with military or intelligence agencies.

This wartime investment had two transformative effects on the discipline. First, it established laboratory experimentation as the gold standard for social psychological research, a methodological shift driven by the military’s demand for causal, generalizable findings that could be applied to real-world problems. Wartime research teams developed rigorous experimental designs for testing the effects of propaganda, group pressure, and authority directives, methodologies that were directly transferred to university laboratories after the war. Second, the wartime focus on mass persuasion, group cohesion, and obedience to authority created a durable research agenda that persisted long after the end of the conflict. For many social psychologists, the Holocaust and the rise of fascism in Europe were not merely historical events to be studied, but urgent contemporary problems that demanded scientific explanation. The dominant prewar explanation for Nazi atrocities—that they were the product of a unique, pathological German national character—was rejected by most U.S. social psychologists, who instead turned to situational and structural explanations rooted in group dynamics, authority hierarchies, and social pressure. This shift was encapsulated in Kurt Lewin’s seminal field theory, which proposed that behavior is a function of the interaction between the individual and their social environment, formalized in his famous equation $B = f(P, E)$, where $B$ denotes behavior, $P$ denotes individual characteristics, and $E$ denotes environmental (situational) factors. Lewin’s work, conducted at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT and later the University of Michigan, provided the theoretical foundation for the situationalist turn that would define the canonical experiments of the 1950s and 1960s.

The institutional infrastructure of postwar social psychology was further solidified by the expansion of federal funding for basic research in the early Cold War period. The National Science Foundation (NSF), created in 1950, allocated an increasing share of its budget to social psychology, with funding growing from $2.1 million in 1950 to $21 million in 1970 (adjusted for inflation, a tenfold increase). Universities rapidly expanded their social psychology programs to attract this funding: Harvard established a dedicated social psychology department in 1946, Yale created the Institute of Human Relations in 1949 (which housed Milgram’s research program), and Stanford launched its social psychology research group in 1952 under the leadership of Leon Festinger. This institutional expansion was not disinterested: Cold War anxieties about Soviet ideological penetration, nuclear annihilation, and domestic subversion made social psychological research on obedience, conformity, and group violence directly relevant to national security. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies continued to fund social psychology research throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with projects focused on understanding civilian vulnerability to communist propaganda, the conditions under which U.S. soldiers would obey orders to use nuclear weapons, and the psychological dynamics of enemy interrogation. Milgram’s obedience experiments, for example, were funded in part by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, a fact that was rarely emphasized in the published reports of the studies but which shaped the research agenda and framing of findings.

The intellectual context of the canonical experiments was also defined by a series of internecine debates within psychology that pitted competing theoretical frameworks against one another. The dominant paradigm of U.S. psychology in the 1940s and early 1950s was behaviorism, championed by B.F. Skinner and Clark Hull, which rejected the study of internal mental states as unscientific and focused exclusively on observable stimulus-response relationships. Behaviorism’s emphasis on environmental determinants of behavior aligned with the situationalist turn in social psychology, but by the late 1950s, it was increasingly challenged by the cognitive revolution, a cross-disciplinary movement that argued for the scientific legitimacy of studying internal mental processes such as memory, attention, and belief. The 1956 Symposium on Information Theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, attended by George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Noam Chomsky, is widely cited as the formal beginning of the cognitive revolution, which quickly spread to social psychology. Leon Festinger’s 1957 book *A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance* was a landmark contribution to this shift, arguing that individuals experience psychological discomfort when their beliefs and behaviors are inconsistent, and will adjust their beliefs to reduce this discomfort. This theory provided a cognitive mechanism for understanding why individuals obey authorit