Television and Antisocial Behavior: Field Experiments

The book addresses whether antisocial acts portrayed on television lead to antisocial acts in viewers. Milgram and Shotland, with the cooperation of CBS, produced three versions of an episode of the prime-time series Medical Center: one antisocial without punishment, one antisocial with punishment, and one prosocial. A fourth condition used an entirely different episode as a control . After viewing, subjects were placed in a situation where they could steal from a charity collection box for Project Hope. The dependent variable was theft, chosen because it was a clear antisocial act that could be embedded naturally in the plot without interpersonal violence. The authors concluded that television's influence on antisocial behavior was 'not proven' .

The theft rates were low and showed no significant differences across conditions. Approximately 5.2 percent of subjects broke into the charity collection box, regardless of whether they had seen an antisocial or prosocial version of the episode . Milgram interpreted these results as inconclusive rather than as evidence that television has no effect. In a 1983 letter to the episode's director, he wrote that the equivocal nature of the results made the study 'somewhat unheralded,' and he lamented that experimenters cannot control how subjects respond—'Only the questions are under our control, not the answers' . The 'not proven' verdict was deliberately Scottish in its caution, leaving open the possibility that effects existed but were not detected by his measures.

George Comstock, former science adviser to the Surgeon General's committee on television and social behavior, published a detailed critique arguing the experiments were 'poorly conceived, flawed, and largely irrelevant to prior research' . He noted that the hypotheses were hardly developed and did not engage existing literature from Berkowitz or Bandura on observational learning and inhibition . The antisocial act Milgram chose—smashing charity boxes to pulsating jazz—was, in Comstock's view, dramatically absurd and not the realistic behavior a viewer might imitate; the drunkenness and frustration that motivated the act were the more plausible imitative targets . He also criticized the low participation rate (only 5-7 percent of those recruited showed up) and the study's high cost relative to its modest contribution .

Comstock's review mentions a telephone experiment as 'especially appealing because it involved the home' . This component extended the investigation beyond the gift-center theft situation to measure whether viewing the antisocial episode would affect behavior in a different setting. The full experimental series included multiple measures across separate studies, all sharing the same basic manipulation—the televised content—but varying the dependent measures and contexts. Comstock noted that the high correlation across separate studies meant that any flaws or biases in the core manipulation contaminated all of them, a structural weakness of the expensive, inflexible field design once it was underway .

Television and Antisocial Behavior extends Milgram's signature methodological approach: creating a situation in which the experimenter controls the independent variable while leaving the subject's response genuinely open. In his letter to director Vincent Sherman, Milgram situated the TV study within this framework, noting that while experimenters 'may design their questions with a certain creative flair,' the denouement is always left to the subject . The book also shares the obedience experiments' ethical structure—deception, hidden observation, and a contrived frustration situation—though the antisocial act studied (theft) was less severe than the shocks in the obedience paradigm. Both projects reflect Milgram's conviction that situational forces, not character, drive behavior, though the TV study's inconclusive results undercut that thesis in this domain.

The book has been omitted for two reasons. First, a substantial body of earlier research had found evidence that televised antisocial behavior does influence viewers, making Milgram's null result an outlier that challenged the prevailing consensus . Second, the results were inherently ambiguous: they could mean television has no effect, or that Milgram's particular measures simply missed effects that occurred at a later time or in a different form . As Thomas Blass notes in his biography of Milgram, the equivocal nature of the findings made the study 'somewhat unheralded' despite its unique design. The book's methodological innovation—gaining network cooperation to manipulate actual prime-time programming—was a degree of control over the independent variable rarely achieved in media effects research, but the yield did not justify the cost .