Behind the Shock Machine (17 page)

Hannah: I mean, I felt so afraid for him. So far as my boys—punishing them this way, I didn’t know what I was proving after a while!

Milgram: Well, of course—you were, you were listening to him.
[referring to Williams]
You didn’t want to go on. He wanted you to go on.

Hannah: And still I continued.

Echoing Williams, Milgram took a soothing tone with Hannah, reassuring her that she had done the same as a nurse would in following a doctor’s instructions to give a hypodermic injection to a protesting patient because “she has confidence in the superior knowledge of the doctor.”

It’s interesting that Milgram came into the lab as Williams was showing Hannah out—it suggests that she looked upset or that Milgram wanted to demonstrate his debriefing skills to his audience.

Perhaps Milgram, Williams, and McDonough thought that they had reassured Hannah by the time she left the lab that day. It’s true that by the end of the recording she didn’t sound as upset as she did earlier. After this exchange, they shepherded her out of the lab in preparation for the arrival of the next subject. As their footsteps faded, Hannah’s voice could be heard. “It’s a
terrible
feeling!”
¹⁵

While Hannah’s experience of the experiment was unique, having listened to so many conditions by now, I could see a pattern. Hannah’s repeated requests for reassurance from Williams and her struggle with whether to continue were very familiar, as was her use of subterfuge to help the learner. Hannah wasn’t the only subject who defied Williams by accentuating the right answer—I had heard it on a number of recordings. Nor was she the only one rebuked by Williams for not pressing the switch down hard enough. Between February and May 1963, Dr. Paul Errera conducted follow-up meetings with groups of subjects. Milgram watched these group interviews from behind the one-way mirror and recorded the proceedings. In one group meeting with Dr. Errera, three unidentified men compared notes on ways in which they’d tried to help the learner.

First man: I’d like to ask you this question: did anyone lessen the shock?

Second man: I did.
[laughter]

Third man: . . . it was a long list and . . . his percentage was bad and . . . I really got very tricky and I would just tap from the bottom. I felt—I was saving him maybe an eighth of a second, you know.
¹⁶

In another, one man revealed that he had “cheated” by trying to minimize the duration of the shock. “I was—I was angry at the situation. I felt sorry for the guy. I figured the poor idiot, why is he doing so badly, you see. I cheated a little by—well, I tried to cheat a little by imposing as brief a shock as possible.”

Another man noted: “Gee, we all did that.”
¹⁷

In an interview a month later, another subject said: “I did everything in my power to emphasize the correct answers . . . and I hoped the supervisor watching it didn’t catch on
[laughs]
’cause . . . I might find myself in the chair.”
¹⁸

Others offered to swap places with the learner, in the belief that they would be better students.

Errera: You would have exchanged places?

Subject: Definitely, yes. In fact, I offered it at the time.
¹⁹

Another subject noted, “I kind of felt sorry for him and I think I told the instructor, the supervisor, let’s switch places . . .”
²⁰

In the early stages of his research, Williams had kept a tally of the subjects’ attempts to help the learner by accentuating the right answers or delivering minimal amounts of shock, but by condition 20 these had been abandoned. Voltage levels were all that mattered.

Like many women, Hannah had been nonplussed by Williams’s use of physical punishment as a teaching technique, and she had indirectly challenged this, telling him that she had found much more effective ways than the one he was testing in the lab to help her children learn. Her analogy about the man at the fair is revealing: it is clear that she thought what she was being asked to do was pointless and cruel. Even Williams’s reassurance had not convinced her.

She had, like all of Milgram’s subjects, been required to sign a waiver before the experiment began, “releasing Yale from any legal claims” as a result of taking part. The legal waiver was another factor that made subjects feel obligated. One woman wrote: “Seeing I had signed my name first, I didn’t think I could have stopped during the experiment.”
²¹

In addition to the legal waiver, the pact that subjects were asked to make with Williams—the promise that they wouldn’t discuss the experiment—enveloped the process in a kind of secrecy. It must have compounded the guilt for those who felt ashamed of what they’d done. One woman wrote that the “hardest part [was] not telling anyone.”
²²
I
found it interesting that fifty years later Hannah didn’t seem to recall any of her resistance, her protests, or the pressures to continue—just a sense of shame.

There was something else that nagged at me. Hannah’s sons, with their push-pull advice, reflected her ambivalence about talking to me. But she didn’t have to meet with me at all; she could have said no, or canceled, or simply not shown up. It made me think about what it was that made people decide to answer my ad, take my phone call, drive to meet me. For some, it was the desire to be helpful or to put the record straight—to offer their point of view on a subject they felt had been skewed until now. Maybe others were just too polite to say no. But with Hannah I sensed it was something else. When we finally parted, she called our meeting “delightful,” and I took her effusiveness as a sign that she was relieved. Perhaps she’d expected something else—criticism, perhaps, or censure. Maybe it wasn’t just a fear of Yale that inhibited her but the fear that, like the students behind the one-way mirror, I would brand her in some way because of what she did. Behind her tight-lipped, almost offhand account of what happened, she was still filled with horror, both at what she’d done and at the prospect of being judged.

I remembered that, in his e-mail, David had mentioned how vivid her feelings still were:

I can tell you from a very personal perspective this event opened questions in her mind which she still finds troubling and still speaks about. It forced her to confront herself in a very “real” situation which confrontation she may not have been prepared for. That’s life, one might say, but it doesn’t belong in the name of scientific research. The trauma of being caught between a screaming subject who just minutes before told her about a heart condition and a Dr. who insisted that she proceed as instructed and agreed upon remains fresh in her mind.

I wondered whether there was something about Hannah’s background that meant she was particularly vulnerable to the experience, some unacknowledged trauma that made the experiment even more
troubling. But I didn’t know anything about her background—and neither had Milgram. When people came to his lab, all he knew about them was the information they’d returned on the postage-paid coupon: their name, address, age, occupation, and phone number.

And yet Milgram himself acknowledged that people brought a social and personal history with them into the lab, in the same way that he brought his own. Milgram was slow to admit publicly that his Jewish background was a factor that shaped his research, probably because he thought it might undermine perceptions of his scientific objectivity, but he noted it on numerous occasions in his private papers: “My interest in [obedience] is purely personal, and concerns the fact that many of my friends and relatives were badly hurt by other men who were simply following orders.”
²³

In fact, at the same time as he was confidently reassuring the NSF about his treatment of subjects, Milgram was confiding private doubts:

Several of these experiments, it seems to me, are just about on the borderline of what ethically can and cannot be done with human subjects. Some critics may feel that at times they go beyond acceptable limits. These are matters that only the community can decide on, and if a ballot were held I am not altogether certain which way I would cast my vote.
²⁴

I wondered if he had thought about the effect it might have on Jewish subjects. If it was a confrontational experience for all of his subjects to be placed in the role of a torturer or, as it came to be popularly conceived, a Nazi, wouldn’t it have been worse for Jewish people, both during the experiment and afterward?

The televised trial of high-ranking Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961 had brought the horror of the concentration camps into American living rooms. Milgram wasn’t the only one making the connection between obedient subjects and perpetrators of the Holocaust. As Subject 328 noted, “The ramifications of a test like this are tremendous . . . my friends [said] ‘Wasn’t that something Eichmann did?’”

Subject 222 confessed, “As my wife said, ‘You can call yourself Eichmann.’”
²⁵

An unidentified man told Dr. Errera: “One of the girls in the office . . . said . . . that [those who went to the end were] no better than the people who ran concentration camps during the war.”
²⁶

Presumably, Jewish subjects in Milgram’s experiment were making the same connection, and the prospect must have been horrifying. While Milgram argued that it was his sensitivity to the Holocaust that shaped his research, he didn’t seem to recognize a similar sensitivity in his Jewish subjects or that in a way he was placing them in the role of Nazis. If he did wonder about the implications for Jewish subjects, he made no reference to it in his written concerns about the ethics of the experiment. The fact that they may have had personal connections to survivors, as he did—or, in fact, have been survivors themselves—is not mentioned in his private or published papers. Perhaps Milgram identified himself as a scientist first, and he viewed the people who took part in his study as no more than subjects.

And yet more than one Jewish subject confronted Milgram angrily after he had taken part. I went back to visit Herb Winer to find out how much of his still-burning rage was because of what Milgram had asked him to do. I wanted to know whether he and Milgram had discussed the implications for Jewish subjects. “It was implicit in all our conversations,” Winer told me. “He was Jewish, I was Jewish. It drove his research.”

Another Jewish subject who had complained to Yale after taking part was a city official. He had been in condition 9, the same variation as Bob Lee probably was, so two other teachers, as well as the experimenter, had urged him to continue. The alderman, who had refused to continue, left the lab without being told the true nature of the experiment. He recounted how he went to New York City afterward, where he described the experiment to a Holocaust survivor, “the wife of a UN official”: “[She was] a very sensitive person who had been a survivor of Nazi oppression and the sole survivor of the family. I just related [the description of the experiment] and asked her what she thought. From what I understand, this woman had not
slept that night and succeeding night, and she was very upset about this.”
²⁷

The woman had said to the alderman in horror, “How could you have continued beyond the first protest?”

The alderman wrote indignantly to Milgram, still under the impression that a man had been shocked, that “as an alderman of New Haven with a sense of responsibility for the welfare of its citizens,” he had no choice but “to report this matter to Yale University authorities.” He’d decided to take his complaints to the very top of Yale’s administration.

Milgram rang him after he received the letter of complaint, and they spent more than an hour on the phone. Milgram wrote in his notes of the phone call: “He said he was relieved to know that the victim was not in reality shocked, and entered into a detailed discussion of the implications of the experiment for the world situation.”

By the end of the call, Milgram seemed to have pacified the alderman, who asked him to speak about the research to his synagogue discussion group.
²⁸

Sixteen months later, in his discussion with Dr. Paul Errera in a group meeting, the alderman described how he felt after the phone call, in which he had learned that many subjects (which included, by implication, Jewish subjects) had gone to the maximum voltage: “I was really—I don’t know how to describe it—just completely depressed for a while . . . that night I think I was—one of the few times in my life—that I was really depressed.”

Later in the same meeting, Errera told the alderman that trying to guess how you would act in the situation was pointless. When a hundred people were asked how they’d react, ninety-nine said they would not continue, yet “when you put a thousand people in the situation, six hundred do.” The alderman objected: “You know, it’s curious and amazing [but] . . . it’s a kind of fancy statistical analysis without referring specifically to any religion.” He told Errera that he had asked Milgram to give a lecture to his B’nai B’rith group at the synagogue because “the implications are so disconcerting” that he wanted to “convert some of my unhappiness into something constructive.”
²⁹

It was not only the potential for trauma among Jewish participants that came up in subjects’ questionnaire responses and interviews with Errera. Some were also concerned about the physical and emotional condition of subjects. One woman noted, “Since I became so upset during the experiment, I’m not sure that you were entirely responsible in picking your subjects. Suppose I’d had a heart condition?”