Milgram gained notoriety for his obedience experiment conducted in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University in 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Naziwar criminalAdolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the ''Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology'' and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, ''Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.''
His other small-world experiment, while at Harvard, led researchers to analyze the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept. Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.
He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology. A ''Review of General Psychology'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.