Behind the Shock Machine (10 page)

From July 27 to August 4, Milgram ran what he described as “summer pre-tests,” or trial runs, of the experiment, in which he and his actors practiced on around twelve adult New Haven subjects, with Milgram noting how many “penetrated the cover story.”
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They explored what effect increasing the volume of the victim’s cries had on people’s willingness to obey and what happened when the victim was made more visible to the subject. By tweaking, changing, and noting any suspicions that subjects had, Milgram developed what he thought was a solid cover by the time the experiment started. He saw evidence that many people were distressed by the conflict they faced, with several sweating, trembling, and protesting to Williams. Very few blithely followed orders: many, even those who continued to the maximum voltage and were classified as obedient, protested and argued with the experimenter. Each time they protested, Williams countered with a series of statements aimed at pressuring them to continue.

The first experiments began in Linsly-Chittenden Hall’s interaction laboratory on August 7, 1961. It was an impressive-looking studio with large one-way mirrors, thick carpet, and drapes. Four variations, comprising 160 subjects (forty per variation), were run there. By the time it was Bill Menold’s turn in October, the experiments had relocated to the basement of the same building because the lab was needed for classes. The new lab, previously an art storage room, was entered by a set of stairs down from High Street. While the basement lab was
smaller and noisier than the one upstairs, Milgram wrote that it had other advantages:

It has a somewhat harsh, though quite scientific appearance . . . it looks more . . . forbidding. Street noises penetrate, there is an occasional toilet flush heard, and the room, in comparison to the radio-studio silence of the Interaction Laboratory, produces reverberation quite easily. Indeed, the buzz on the shock generator sounds somewhat louder.
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Milgram had double glazing put on the windows, improved the lighting, and gave the lab a new coat of paint and a less forbidding door before the fifth variation of his experiments began. He and his team had been running experiments from 6 to 11
P.M.
on weeknights and from 9
A.M.
to 10
P.M.
on weekends, a grueling schedule that he told campus police would continue until the end of spring term, or the end of May 1962.
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As I made my way through Milgram’s notebook, with its detailed instructions and scripts, I could see the setup that he had created was carefully crafted to make it difficult for people to disobey. I could see, laid out, the unfolding of a slow process of trial and error as he refined, tightened, and scripted a scenario that would deliver the results he wanted. Milgram would argue that his experiment merely revealed what was natural and universal, that “[t]he objects with which psychological science deals are all present in nature fully formed, all that the prince-investigator has to do is to find them and awaken them with the magic kiss of his research.”
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But it was clear to me that the papers in the archives told a different story: he knew before his first subject arrived on August 7, 1961, what sort of results he wanted to achieve, and he had used pilot studies and pretests to hone the design to achieve just that.

The next time Bill Menold and I met, Bush was out, Obama was in, and Bill was thrilled that we had “finally got rid of those lowlifes.” When I rang to let him know I had arrived, he said, “I’d like to get you out of that hotel room,” and picked me up and drove me to his house.

On the way, he told me that if you can’t drive in Florida they put you in assisted accommodation: “I’m serious!” I had forgotten how much Bill made me laugh.

We arrived at a ranch-style house in Palm Springs with Mexican-looking roof tiles, situated on a development with an ornamental lake two feet deep. Barbara had done the interior decoration, he said proudly as he introduced us. She was a striking woman with fine cheekbones and a low, resonant voice. They met, she told me, when Bill put an ad in the paper: “Urbane eclectic man seeks attractive woman for best friend/lover.” She was intrigued by his description of himself—it was the first time she’d seen “urbane” and “eclectic” in the same sentence.

We sat in the dining room and Barbara moved around in the kitchen, making tea. Watson, their dog, pushed his nose against my hand and I scratched behind one large, floppy ear. Bill told me that a couple of years before he met Barbara he had been interviewed by the BBC for a documentary about torture. Before he could propose to her, he had made her watch it. I asked if it was because he wanted Barbara to know his darker side. Bill laughed. “I don’t know why I did it.” He leaned toward me and touched his heart. “But there’s a little evil in there, you know what I mean?”

After the experiment ended, Bill tried not to think about it. He put it out of his mind for years. Then in the early 1980s, he dated a psychology professor who was teaching her class about Milgram’s experiments. When he told her that he’d been a participant, she “went nuts” and immediately wanted him to talk to her class. “And I never gave it a second thought. I said ‘Sure.’” Bill laughed sheepishly at his own naïveté. “So, I’ll never forget this, I’m fortysomething and these are eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids, and I showed up—well, you would have thought Adolf Hitler walked in the room. I never really thought about it that way, you know?”

This image—of Bill suddenly seeing himself as others saw him—would stay with me all the way back to New Haven and, later, Australia, probably because I had been guilty of the same thing, of making assumptions before I had even met him. The first time I had visited, I admitted to myself now, I hadn’t expected to like him. I had expected
someone bad, a kind of monster. Instead, I had found myself drawn to him, and I could see why. He did not shy away from talking about the experiment; he had a kind of unflinching internal gaze when it came to his behavior in Milgram’s lab. He was gutsy.

Barbara came in with the tea, excused herself, and disappeared into the study. She had recently discovered family history, Bill grumbled, and now they had to share the computer. We talked some more, and as I was leaving I asked Bill if he was glad that he had taken part in the experiment. He paused, then said, “I don’t know. Yeah, I think so. I guess so. Not that I’m terribly proud of it . . . but I’d rather know than not know.”

Bill’s experience that night in 1961 has forced him to think about things others haven’t had to—a term that one critic of the experiment called “inflicted insight.”
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Milgram’s subjects learned unwelcome things about themselves as a result of their involvement in the obedience experiments, and they’re different from the rest of us because of that. Bill had told me, “Most people are card-carrying cowards. If they had been involved in something like that, they just wouldn’t want others to know. Most people want to be considered ‘nice.’”

But according to academic Don Mixon, Milgram didn’t measure immoral behavior in his lab. On the contrary, he argued that what Milgram measured was misplaced trust.

When I met Don in Australia, he wore a red wool beret perched on the side of his head, a flash of color against the white of his hair. He looked exotic, intellectual, in bare feet on a freezing midwinter day. A tall and rather frail man, he folded his long frame into a chair that looked out to the afternoon sky over the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney. He reminded me of a proud eagle in his aerie, a house perched high on the aptly named Cliff Drive, with vertiginous views down sheer rock faces.

When Don enrolled in a PhD program in Nevada in the late 1960s, there was no question that he would do his doctorate on Milgram’s obedience experiments. “It was the only social psychological research that interested and excited me. I liked it because it was political. It seemed to show that ordinary Americans behaved in ways worse than
those in Nazi Germany. They seemed to behave in a terribly immoral fashion.”

Don wanted to repeat Milgram’s research but quickly realized that, ethically, he didn’t have the stomach to deceive subjects in the way Milgram did or to watch the stress that they would go through. He thought of using role playing rather than deception. In his version of the research, Don set the scene for his actors—a term he preferred to “subjects”—by telling them to imagine that they were teachers in a learning experiment, in the room next door was the learner, and in front of them was the shock machine. (He used a mockup of the machine.) Don followed the original script closely, instructing subjects to increase the voltage level with each wrong answer, describing the learner’s cries of pain, and urging subjects to continue if they hesitated.

Don found that his subjects became engrossed in the experiment once it began—so engrossed, in fact, that they became agitated and distressed, caught between the commands of the experimenter and the cries of pain from the learner. Even though they knew that the experiment itself was a simulation, their emotional reactions were real. Don had underestimated the power of drama, how easy it was for people to inhabit a role. In hindsight, he felt that he should have known: originally an actor, he knew what it was like to take a part and step inside it, to become a character in a play. Dismayed by their reactions, Don had to call the experiment off. He shook his head and said slowly, “I wasn’t finding out anything that was worth the distress.”

Don found the same results as Milgram but came to completely different conclusions. He argued that it wasn’t immorality that drove Milgram’s subjects to flip the switches but trust in the experimenter, who, despite the cries from the learner, calmly told them to continue and gave the impression that there was nothing to worry about. People were agitated because the experimenter’s behavior was so ambiguous and confusing in this context. According to Don, Milgram simply measured the faith that people put in experts: “He found just the opposite of what he thought he found; nothing about subjects’ behavior is evil. In fact, people go to great lengths, will suffer great distress, to
be good. People got caught up in trying to be good and trusting the expert. Both are usually thought of as virtues, not as evils.” The only evil in the obedience research, Don came to believe, was “the unconscious evil of experimenters.”

Don argued that, faced with the ambiguity of the situation, people believed that the expert scientist was good and protective and read his imperviousness to the learner’s cries as reassurance that nothing was really wrong. He told me to look at the results Milgram got in those variations where the experimenter looked concerned and behaved as if he believed the shocks
were
harmful. In condition 12, the experimenter told the teacher to stop, despite the learner’s cries to continue; in condition 14, it was the experimenter who was hooked up to the chair and, when shocked, cried out in pain; and in condition 15, there were two experimenters, one who told the teacher to stop and the other who told him to continue. In all three conditions, obedience dropped to zero. Milgram explained the results in terms of the power of the authority figure as opposed to the power of the learner, but Don argued that when the teachers were presented with the unambiguous message that the shocks were harmful, they stopped giving them.

Before he retired from the University of Wollongong, Don used to screen Milgram’s documentary film
Obedience
each year for his students, but over time he found it increasingly difficult to watch: “Seeing that movie over and over, the more convinced I was that it was something terrible that he did. I was so moved by that one man in the film who so respectfully kept asking the experimenter to stop, just suffering such agony from a desire to do what’s right but couldn’t figure out what’s right. It was terribly cruel.” The man that Don was referring to was Fred Prozi.

I asked what he made of the fact that so many of Milgram’s subjects said they were glad to have taken part. “You don’t know just from ticking off boxes why they’re glad. I think they were conned into learning something about themselves that wasn’t true. I would be greatly heartened if Milgram’s subjects were more critical of experts and did not torture themselves.”

Some time after I met him, Don wrote to me, sending me extracts
from a book he’s working on. Beautifully written, it ranges across history, philosophy, and of course psychology. As a postscript to one letter, he added:

The experiments encourage us to feel superior to obedient subjects. We are confident that we would be defiant. . . . The experiments seemed to offer strong support for history’s oldest, most momentous self-fulfilling prophecy—that we are born sinners. Most people, even atheists, believe that it is good for us to be reminded of our sinful nature. Milgram scripted a powerfully dramatic reminder.

Milgram assumed that increased self-knowledge was a good thing. In an unpublished note about the ethical issues of the experiments, he wrote, “I do not think I exaggerate when I say that for most subjects the experiment was a positive and enriching experience. It provided them with an occasion for self-insight and gave them a first-hand, personalized knowledge of some social forces that move human conduct.”
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But I began to wonder how it could be a uniformly positive experience when what people learned about themselves was shameful, painful, or confronting. When I looked at Milgram’s unpublished analysis of subjects’ responses to the question about what they had learned, around 80 percent were self-critical, with both obedient and defiant subjects surprised by how submissive they were and disappointed with their gullibility, many vowing to be more suspicious of science in the future. The remaining 20 percent, largely disobedient subjects, were self-congratulatory, saying that they were pleased to learn they weren’t as submissive as they’d thought.
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It is clear that, like Bill Menold, many subjects regarded the experiment as a test of character that they had passed or failed. Subject 116 wrote in a questionnaire some time later: