Behind the Shock Machine (11 page)

After completing the experiment I really was ashamed of myself! I kept thinking why didn’t I refuse to give pain to my fellow man, instead of going through as directed to the end! In discussing this with a friend, who also took part in the experiment, at another time, he related the whole incident to me, not knowing I went through the same bit, he on the other hand refused to give punishments and walked out. Thus I hated myself all the more for not doing the same! Why I didn’t, I still don’t know.

Subject 222 wrote:

What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance to a central idea ie . . . the value of the memory experiment, even after it became clear . . . it was at the expense of another value . . . ie don’t hurt someone else who is helpless and not hurting you. . . . I hope I can deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter.

Subject 1814 confessed: “I learned not to trust anyone, even a person whom you believe would not fool you.”

Meanwhile, Subject 507 boasted: “I can think and act according to the dictates of my own conscience.”
³⁴

Milgram may have regarded such self-insight as valuable, but just how subjects were able to integrate such unwelcome and disturbing insights about themselves is not explained.

The night after I met Bill and Barbara, I listened to the interview I had recorded with Bill earlier that day. There was a long pause on the tape that I hadn’t noticed at the time, after I had asked him what he’d said to those students of his girlfriend’s back in the 1980s. After the initial shock of being treated like a Nazi, Bill told the silent, judging students: “It’s very easy to sit back and say, ‘I’d never do this or that’ or ‘Nobody could ever get me to do anything like that.’ Well, guess what? Yes, they can.”

I was starting to believe that Bill was right.

3

THE LIMITS OF DEBRIEFING

Herb Winer, one of Milgram’s subjects, had e-mailed me before I left for New Haven and offered to come to Australia for his interview, if I could arrange for it. I already liked his sense of humor.

He didn’t live far from the house in New Haven where I was staying, and I set out at 8
A.M.
to walk the few blocks to his condominium, part of a luxury development on a hill shaded with the seemingly ubiquitous oak trees. But I had underestimated the humidity: the morning air was thick and soupy, and my brisk walk slowed. By the time I got there, I was late and he was looking out for me, standing on a wooden walkway that led to his front door. I was used to the days starting cooler and getting warmer as they wore on, but Herb told me, as I dabbed my face with a paper napkin I had found in the bottom of my bag, that in summer the humidity was worse in the mornings. This explained the empty streets.

Inside the split-level condo the rooms were cool and airy, everything white or beige: beige carpet, beige walls—even Herb’s remaining hair blended well with his cream-colored sweater. We sat in the dining room, beside the open-plan kitchen where Hannah, Herb’s wife, was discussing the dishwasher with a handyman. Herb had a pile of folders and a stack of books on the table at his elbow, all about Milgram and his research. Among them was his “most prized and precious possession,” an inscribed hardcover copy of Milgram’s book
Obedience to Authority
. On the flyleaf, Milgram had written:
To Herb Winer, with my thanks for your participation and interest in this project, Stanley Milgram
. Herb is a self-taught expert on the Milgram experiments and is a fervent admirer of Stanley Milgram, although he will never forgive Milgram for what he put him through.

I was annoyed with myself for being late because Herb’s most recent interview experience had not been a happy one. He didn’t come off well—in her account of Herb’s part in the experiment, the writer implied that he had been more concerned about his own welfare than the learner’s, and Herb was still angry about it.

Leaning toward the microphone and speaking with his fruity, made-for-radio voice, the same in which he records books for the dyslexic and the blind, Herb began his story.

Back in the summer of 1961, he told me, he was a forty-year-old assistant professor of lumbering at Yale’s school of forestry. “I saw the ad in the
New Haven Register
, which I read every day, and it was soliciting volunteers in an experiment.” He paused for effect, then announced, “On memory and learning.” He answered the ad in the paper, he said, because “four dollars fifty was not a negligible honorarium at that time.”

Herb should never have been accepted as a volunteer—Milgram had instructed his assistant Alan Elms to exclude college students and Yale staff, but Herb was one of a handful that slipped through the cracks. It would end up giving him an advantage that few other subjects had.

It was October 1961 when Herb arrived for his appointment in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. We know the rest: Williams greeted him and soon a second man arrived—an ordinary-looking fellow who appeared to have come from an office job—and the experiment began.

Herb was in one of the conditions that featured the learner’s complaint about a problem with his heart. Just after the learner was strapped into his chair, he mentioned that he’d had treatment for a heart condition and asked if he should be worried about the shocks. Williams gave his scripted, dismissive reply that while the shocks might be painful they weren’t dangerous.

When Williams showed Herb how the machine worked, giving him a sample shock of 45 volts (“an unpleasant sensation,” he said), Herb
realized for the first time that he would be giving shocks to the learner. “As a younger man, I had done a little electrical work, house wiring and that sort of thing, so I knew what a 120-volt shock felt like and it was very, very serious. So when I saw this 450 level and ‘extremely dangerous,’ I thought, indeed it is.”

Yet when Herb described the machine to me, admiration crept into his voice. “It was an extraordinarily credible piece of fakery. It was made in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Waltham was renowned for its scientific instrument manufacturers. There was a gentle click, as you would expect on a toggle switch, and the light went on above the toggle switch when you pressed it to indicate that indeed the voltage had been delivered at the designated level. That was just part of the setting that Stanley created. I guess he might have had some help, but the blinding imagination that he showed in some of his other, later experiments seemed to be reflected from the very start.”

It disconcerted me, this switch that Herb made from subject to fellow academic, from emotional to clinical. It was not clear to me how or why he had made this adjustment. I didn’t know how he could move so easily from one emotion to another, almost as if he were flicking a switch within his own mind. The memory test began, and “it became quite obvious that he was a very dim-witted learner.” Herb realized that it was going to involve giving more than just one or two shocks.

Every time the learner got an answer right, Herb felt a wave of relief. But then he’d get one wrong, and then another. The voltage started to rise very rapidly. After the fourth or fifth shock, to his dismay Herb heard the learner cry out in pain. He told Williams that he didn’t want to hurt the man, but Williams urged him to continue. “The experimenter standing above me was instructing me very seriously that I had to go on.”

As the wrong answers multiplied and the voltages increased, the learner’s protests became louder. “I could hear him, his cries of pain and requests—‘stop this,’ ‘cut it out,’ ‘this hurts,’ and similar expressions.”

Herb was feeling increasingly agitated, but each time he protested that the learner was getting hurt, Williams responded with “You must continue” or “The experiment requires that you continue” or “You
have no choice.” “The pressure was unbelievably intense. The thing that bothered me the most was that I could feel my heart rate increasing, and I was under very severe stress, and I finally realized that my stress, however it might bother me, could hardly compare with the pain and stress I was inflicting on the learner. I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and quit. I said, ‘That’s it, I can’t continue.’”

Herb said that it might have been the learner’s cries to stop that finally forced him to dig in his heels and refuse to go on, but he doesn’t remember. In fact, he doesn’t remember at exactly what voltage he stopped. “I blocked that out of my memory. I’d like to think it wasn’t much over 120 or so.” He’s certain he stopped before the maximum voltage because “if I’d ever have gone all the way to 450 volts, we wouldn’t be talking now. I would keep this a secret. I wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

It was a point that Herb would return to each time I met him: that he didn’t remember the voltage at which he stopped. It is something we won’t know until all the subject files, including his, are made public in 2039. He worried at it, like a stone in a shoe. I wondered if perhaps he didn’t want to remember.

What he did remember vividly was how wound up he felt afterward. Any soothing words or explanations of the experiment were ineffectual; they did nothing to alleviate his mounting outrage. “I took the four dollars and fifty cents—I had no compunction about that—then I went back to my office in Sage Hall, about half a mile away, on Prospect Street, and I looked him up in the faculty phone directory. I was ready to call Yale’s president if Milgram hadn’t been in the phone directory. I then phoned assistant professor Stanley Milgram—I felt that I had no reason to grovel before him because I was an assistant professor and he had no rank above me—and I told him that I wanted to see him at his earliest convenience because I’d just been a participant in his so-called memory study and I was very angry and concerned about it.”

Herb was still “boiling with anger” when he confronted Milgram in his office two days later. “I said, ‘Whatever your motives or incentives, you had absolutely no business subjecting a medically unscreened person
to that sort of stress.’ I think he was hit. I asked him, ‘Haven’t some of your other subjects come in to complain?’ And he felt that my reaction was extreme, and I wasn’t put off or ashamed of that. I think I made my complaints known because it was easy—I was in a good position. Someone who had come in from a job at Winchester or A.C. Goldberg or some factory position may well have felt intimidated by this high-level Yale academic.

“He was very receptive to my concerns and we had lunch together, and over the course of the next few months I sort of realized that from a purely research standpoint . . . he had made a landmark contribution.” Surprisingly, the two men ended up developing a friendship of sorts.

By the time Milgram left New Haven for Harvard eighteen months later, Herb had become a fervent admirer, albeit one with mixed feelings. “The last thing I told him when he was leaving was that I still resented the way he had acquired the insider knowledge he did, but I was very grateful that we had it. I followed Stanley’s career with great interest.” Herb gestured at his books and papers. “He just had the imagination and inventiveness, to me, of a true genius. I came to appreciate Stanley’s principal conclusion that we behave as we do largely as a result of the situation we’re in. You don’t have to be a psychopath to follow orders.”

Herb’s friendship with and admiration for Milgram would play a far greater role than he would ever know. He did not realize that Milgram, after being attacked by colleagues for what they saw as his cruel treatment of his subjects, would console himself privately with thoughts of the friendships he’d developed with subjects like Herb. In fact, the support and enthusiasm of some subjects would later help Milgram face his critics and their accusations of cruelty.
¹
Milgram would enlist Herb’s support in the publicity about his book when it was published in 1974—what better ambassador for his research than one of his own subjects? By then, Herb had left Yale and was working as director of research at a pulp mill in Quebec. In a newspaper clipping about Milgram’s book, Herb is quoted as saying, “I stopped as soon as I could. I know I didn’t go up to 450 volts, I think I repressed the knowledge of what I did immediately. I would have liked to have
stopped before.” Underneath a picture of a dapper, dark-haired, and much younger Herb, the caption reads, “Dr. Herbert Winer: still in sympathy with Milgram’s purposes.”
²

We ended the meeting, but it had left me unsettled. In the same way that Herb moved between anger and admiration for Milgram, I was moving between certainty and confusion about Herb. His sudden emotional shifts lost me: why had he been so angry in the first place, and how, given that he was still enraged, did he have room for such admiration?

Later, I came to understand that I was confused because Herb’s perspective surprised me. If I was honest about it, I had gone along to meet Herb, as I had with Bill, without really expecting to learn anything new. I had thought that he would tell me a story of how proud he was to have been defiant—how it affirmed something for him and allowed him to come out of the experiment with an improved sense of moral certainty and increased self-esteem. I had thought that Herb would be typical of the majority of subjects, who, Milgram wrote, had learned something valuable from the experience and were glad to have taken part. I had not expected Herb’s ambivalence and anger. It made me realize that I had accepted Milgram’s classification of people as either obedient or defiant, as if you could make absolute statements about them depending on where they stopped on the shock machine. Bill Menold showed me that some subjects saw the result as a reflection of their character, but even though Herb believed he had stopped before he reached 450 volts, he had actively blocked the memory of how far he did go because in his own eyes he was still obedient—it was just a matter of degree. It didn’t matter where he stopped; he felt bad about even having begun.