Yeah, this, this looks like spam.ĪNNIE MINOFF: June Shields in Wichita, Kansas does not think this is spam.ĮLAH FEDER: > She decided to send it to Augusta in New York.ĮLAH FEDER: Who sent it to Robert, who sent it to Meg…ĪNNIE MINOFF: > Sent it to Florence.Manamaka.ĮLAH FEDER: It looks like it took a chain of ten people to get this particular letter to Alice. That’s one way this could happen.ĮLAH FEDER: > Your help is greatly appreciated. who is very surprised to hear from me! >ĪNNIE MINOFF: A little out of the blue.ĮLAH FEDER: She sends it to her college roommate and so on, who sends it to Alice Mahan. So for example, I get the letter, I send it to my former landlord. Because the idea is you’re sending it to someone who’s gonna help you get the letter to Alice through a chain of people.ĮLAH FEDER: Right.
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They have to send it to someone who they know personally. Former schoolteacher, resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts.ĪNNIE MINOFF: So the catch is that they can’t just send the letter to Alice. Can they get this letter to a stranger halfway across the country?ĮLAH FEDER: Right. This is what they sent out to people.ĪNNIE MINOFF: And it says, “We need your help with an unusual scientific study…”ĪNNIE MINOFF: Milgram picks some random people in Kansas.
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So to find out, he writes a letter.ĮLAH FEDER: > We are looking at the communications project mailing. So Milgram was the guy who showed that we will totally shock strangers with what we think are a hundred fifty volts of electricity because someone in a lab coat asked us to.ĮLAH FEDER: But not all of Milgram’s experiments were quite this disturbing.ĮLAH FEDER: Relatively speaking some of them were kind of warm and fuzzy! Like in the sixties, he got curious about how connected Americans were. > Wrong! 150 volts!ĪRCHIVAL AUDIO (SECOND MAN’S VOICE): Ahhh!ĪNNIE MINOFF: Yeah. And if you know him, it’s probably for some pretty memorable research that he did with a fake shock machine.ĪRCHIVAL AUDIO (MAN’S VOICE): Answer. Handwriting.ĪNNIE MINOFF: Stanley Milgram was a social scientist in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And you’re listening to Undiscovered, a podcast about the backstories of science.ĮLAH FEDER: > Oh my god, is this Stanley Milgram’s writing?ĪNNIE MINOFF: So a few months ago, Elah, you and I took this trip to Yale University to root around in the archives of Stanley Milgram.ĮLAH FEDER: We did, and we had to whisper, because you know, library.ĪNNIE MINOFF: > He had really.
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Also, if you are quoting from an Undiscovered episode, please check your text against the original audio as some errors may have occurred during transcription.ĪNNIE MINOFF: And I’m Annie. Important things like emotion and emphasis are often lost in transcripts. Undiscovered is produced for your ears! Whenever possible, we recommend listening to-not reading-our episodes.