Stanley Milgram's Lost Letter Experiment

Stanley Milgram’s Lost Letter experiment was far less controversial than his experiment on obedience to authority for which he is widely known and criticized. The lost letter technique was developed while Milgram was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and was first described in Public Opinion Quarterly in Fall 1965. The study was not filled with interviews and questionnaires, but was “one that would measure attitudes without people’s knowledge, through their actions instead of their words” Milgram (1977, p. 336).
The first study consisted of four sets of letters, which were addressed and stamped but had not been mailed. The four hundred letters were randomly distributed, one hundred for each addressee, on sidewalks, in shops and on cars throughout New Haven, Connecticut in ten preselected areas. The letters were addressed to four separate entities that included Friends of the Nazi Party, Friends of the Communist Party, Medical Research Associates, and Mr. Walter Carnap. Each letter had a code for placement and was sealed in a particular way to show if it had been opened prior to return. The experiment

There was an assumed positive pretest because two set of letters were addressed to a medical group and an individual to whom the researchers assumed the respondents would already have a positive view and therefore provide an increased response rate. These two sets of letters also served as the control group in this experiment. There was an experimental group, defined by Babbie (2013) as “… a group of subjects to whom an experimental stimulus is administered.” In this case, it was both the Nazi Party and Communist Party. The post testing was the remeasurement of the dependent variable or how many letters were returned to which particular