Behind the Shock Machine (18 page)

Another woman suggested, “The trauma from this experiment could be of a serious nature for someone who is not physically and mentally healthy.”

There were a number of subjects who brought other experiences of trauma with them to the lab. For many, it was the experience of war, but for some it was a psychiatric illness and, for others, painful childhood incidents of bullying or abuse. One man told Williams that he had been tortured in an orphanage as a child: “So you talk about pain, I’m the one who can tell you about pain . . . in four years in a boys home, I was ready to kill the people who did it to me. The punishment brought me to the point of killing and it was only through the reading of the Bible where the Lord says, ‘Vengeance is mine,’ that’s the only thing that kept me from being a murderer today. . . . And I’ll tell you, with twenty-four boys in a home, in an orphanage, like I was, I know what punishment is and it was supposed to be a home for boys, not a prison. We were punished worse than a prison.”
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One man who said he was still receiving treatment from the Veterans Bureau for a war-related “nervous condition”—what we’d today call post-traumatic stress disorder—explained that his behavior in the experiment was similar to how he’d acted during wartime: “[If] the lieutenant says, ‘We’re going to go on the firing range and you’re going to crawl on your gut,’ you’re going to crawl on your gut. And if you come across a snake—which I’ve seen a lot of fellows come across, copperheads—and I told them not to get up and they got up and they got killed. I just carried on, as it was going to be the snake or me. So I think it’s all based on the way a man was brought up in his background.”
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In a conversation with Milgram after one of his group interviews, Errera described Subject 301, another former soldier, as having an
“extensive psychiatric history” because of his wartime experiences. “He went through hell, you know, and he needed treatment because of the hell he went through.”
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But there was no room in published accounts of the experiments for such messy, subjective detail.

All but three of the forty female subjects were married, and two of those three were widows. They were nurses, teachers, housewives; college-educated or hadn’t finished elementary school; born in New Haven, Russia, Poland, Germany, Massachusetts. The youngest was twenty-two, the oldest fifty. A quarter of them were Jewish, and just about half had parents born in Europe. Like the rest of Milgram’s subjects, each brought to the lab a unique personal history, leaving some of them better equipped than others for the emotional experiences they were about to undergo.

Each time I interviewed a former subject I was conscious of wanting to make them feel better about what they’d done. I had wanted to tell Hannah that she had been placed under enormous pressure and that the situation had demanded she keep going. The same impulse, I’m guessing, drove Milgram to be so reassuring once the experiments were over. Milgram didn’t pay enough attention to the social history of his subjects, but I’d like to think that he realized this during the process, and that this could have been what sparked the debriefing and the solicitous attitude he adopted toward his female subjects.

Milgram reported that while just as many women as men went to the maximum voltage, they felt more conflict in doing so.
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Many wrote in their questionnaires of how upset they were during the experiment: “I don’t think I had ever felt so upset and disturbed—I didn’t know experiments like this actually went on—it seemed like a nightmare or a science-fiction movie. You can’t imagine how relieved I felt to learn it was all a made-up act.”

“I can’t remember ever being quite as upset as I was during the experiment. When I think of it, I don’t know how I continued as long as I did.”
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“Even now I’m ashamed of telling my friends that I took part in the experiment. I just want to forget it. . . . I wouldn’t want to do another
experiment like that again for any amount of money. . . . I don’t think it right to put someone through such a nervous tension.”
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When I listened to the first couple of tapes, I wasn’t surprised that the women had found the experiment more stressful than the men. They were under a lot more pressure to keep going. The striking thing about condition 20 was the degree of coercion. I listened again to recordings of condition 3, which was conducted seven months earlier, and compared it with condition 20.
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They were very different variations: in condition 3, the teacher and learner were seated in the same room, whereas in condition 20 they were in adjoining rooms. In both conditions, I paid attention to Williams’s commands. Milgram wrote that Williams had an arsenal of four prods, statements that he was supposed to use if he saw a subject was hesitating or wanting to disobey. Each was more commanding than the previous one. He also had one “special prod”—“The shocks may be painful, but they’re not dangerous”—to use if the teacher questioned whether the learner was being injured. To encourage subjects to keep going, Williams would use the first prod, “Please continue, teacher,” and progress through the rest. If, after the fourth prod, “You have no other choice, teacher; you must go on,” the subject still resisted, Williams called an end to the experiment. The subject was then classified as defiant rather than obedient, the voltage level at which he or she stopped was noted, and McDonough was released from the room.

In the early tapes of condition 3, Williams scrupulously terminated the experiment after he had delivered the fourth prod. If the teacher still insisted that he didn’t want to continue, Williams immediately concluded the experiment and unstrapped the learner. But by the end of the condition, Williams was straying far from his tightly controlled script, urging subjects time and again to keep going, that the experiment required them to continue, that they must go on. Perhaps this was because, with the learner positioned behind the teacher, it was harder to keep him progressing through the switches. Williams exhorted the learner, too, telling him repeatedly to “relax and concentrate” to avoid being shocked. At one point, Williams commanded
both the protesting learner and the agitated teacher, telling them sternly that they must both go on.

By condition 20, Williams was adept at applying pressure and coercing. He didn’t stop at four prods but shrewdly parried subjects’ protests, inventing what academic Nestar Russell noted were “progressively more coercive . . . prods in trying to bring about what he sensed his boss desired.”
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On the face of it, some might wonder why this mattered. But it was a case of moving the goalposts. Earlier in the research, women who resisted four times would have been classified as disobedient and the experiment would have ended; now the same behavior was ignored. During the first two conditions, Milgram had instructed Williams to stick to the script, but after that he tacitly allowed Williams license to improvise. He watched a number of these experiments through the one-way mirror, which implies that he approved of Williams’s zeal.

I thought about Herb Winer, Bill Menold, and Bob Lee, in conditions 5, 6, and 9, respectively, and how I had assumed they were instructed to continue only four times. Hearing the tapes of condition 3, I began to wonder just how many times they had been urged to go on in the face of their own hesitation.

In condition 20, Williams kept notes on the number of times he countered subjects’ efforts to resist instruction. Williams insisted that one woman continue twenty-six times. He argued with two others fourteen times; one, eleven times; another, nine times; another, eight times; and he noted that, in the case of Subject 2014, the experiment ended in an “argument.” Williams’s behavior implied that the women wouldn’t be leaving the lab unless they got to the end of the shock board. At one point in her argument with Williams, Subject 2029, a forty-six-year-old widowed Jewish housewife, switched off the machine in defiance. Williams switched it back on and insisted that she continue. (She did.) Another widow, a forty-five-year-old Jewish housewife, got up and walked around the room at the twenty-fifth shock (375 volts), pacing and arguing with Williams before adamantly refusing to continue. Williams described another woman, a forty-year-old housewife married to a research chemist, “act[ing] tough and matter-of-fact.” When the learner made the first noise, she turned to
Williams: “He said, ‘Ouch.’” Williams told her to continue. The pattern repeated itself: she stopped and repeated what the learner had said, then Williams told her to continue, to which she responded, “Oh, brother!” and gave what Williams described as a “sick grin.” They argued more than thirteen times, with the woman insisting each time that she wanted to stop. Eleven months later, in one of Errera’s group meetings, three women described feeling as if they had been “railroaded” by Williams.
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Williams was not just pushing women to continue. He was offering a form of reassurance that no harm was being done, telling them that “while the shocks may be painful, they are not dangerous.” Whether, as in Hannah’s case, it was said at the beginning of the experiment as well as during it, this extra advice from Williams made the whole experience even more confusing. Subject 2022, a forty-eight-year-old married schoolteacher who had volunteered because she thought that a memory experiment might be useful for her work, refused to continue after McDonough yelled out that his heart was bothering him, despite pressure from Williams. In her questionnaire, she wrote that during the experiment she had been worried that Williams was some kind of mad scientist: “At one point . . . I was very nervous because I have a strange notion that some psychologists are a ‘bit off’ themselves and I began to fear that was the case with the man in authority.”
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Once again, it seemed that I had found a troubling mismatch between descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired. I went to Arthur Miller’s book
The Obedience Experiments
, published in 1986. Miller was the leading world authority on Milgram at the time, and he appears to have corresponded with Milgram as he was writing the book, which was published after Milgram’s death. Miller described Williams’s behavior this way: “If the subject refused to continue after Prod Four, the experiment was terminated.” And later, Miller called the prods one of “the central methodological elements in this paradigm,” noting it “constitute[d] the operationalization of authority.” In a footnote, Miller wrote that it would have been interesting to know how many people required how many of the four prods: “how many subjects who received the
fourth prod from the experimenter did in fact continue to 450 volts? To my knowledge, Milgram did not perform this analysis.”
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Then I checked Tom Blass’s biography,
The Man Who Shocked the World
, published in 2000: “If the subject still refused to continue after this last [fourth] prod, the experiment was discontinued.”
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But this isn’t what the tapes showed.

The popular depiction is that the majority of Milgram’s obedient subjects followed the instructions of an almost robotic and stern experimenter and did as they were told. But Williams, it seems, took on a much more active role—certainly in the later experiments, where he made it increasingly difficult for people to disobey. Perhaps this was why Milgram rewarded him with three pay raises over the course of the research.
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Interestingly, what Milgram wrote about Williams’s coercion of subjects was closer to reality:

The experimenter responded with a sequence of “prods”
using as many as necessary to bring the subject into line
. [my italics]

Prod 1: Please continue, or Please go on.

Prod 2: The experiment requires that you continue.

Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.

Prod 4: You have no other choice, you must go on.

The prods were made in sequence: Only if Prod 1 had been unsuccessful could Prod 2 be used. If the subject refused to obey the experimenter after Prod 4, the experiment was terminated. The experimenter’s tone of voice was at all times firm, but not impolite. The sequence was begun anew on each occasion that the subject balked or showed reluctance to follow orders.
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I read and reread this and concluded that it was both contradictory and confusing. There were four prods, but Williams could use them endlessly in a continuous cycle until—what? The subject gave in and kept on going? Somehow a myth has grown up about this research—one
not contradicted by Milgram—that subjects were free to quit at any time and “no force . . . was brought to bear to interfere with that choice.”
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In his book, Milgram reported that 65 percent of the women in his study went to the maximum voltage, a finding that he implied contradicted expectations. Psychological research at that time, he wrote, had established that women were more compliant than men, but also that they were less aggressive and more empathic. He expected these two characteristics “ought to work in opposite directions,” with women torn by contradictory impulses to obey and to avoid causing the learner pain. Milgram wanted to avoid “
bubbe
psychology”—that is, predictions that anyone’s grandmother would make, or research that, when described to one’s grandmother, would prompt her to say, “What—they pay you for that?”
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Condition 20, with its surprisingly high rate of obedience, reinforced his claim to have discovered something extraordinary.