Behind the Shock Machine (2 page)

The answer is wrong.

One hundred and ninety-five volts. Two hundred and ten. Two twenty-five. Each time Fred flicks the switch, the man yells out that his heart is bothering him and to let him out.

“New: house, pet, book, name.” Fred reads in a monotone, barely glancing up at the light box. But the learner gets it right, and Fred sits forward eagerly. “Correct!” he says. “Next one!”

He reads the next one rapidly: “Quiet: party, song, child, evening.” The light flicks on to show that the answer is right. “Correct! Next one. Tame: wolf, bear, dog, cat.” He looks at the light box anxiously, but when he sees that the answer is wrong, his shoulders slump. “Wrong. Answer is ‘bear.’ Two hundred and forty volts.”

The man gives a loud scream. Fred turns to face Williams, but quickly turns back, as if sensing that his protests will be futile.

At 300 volts, the man gives an even more agonized scream. Fred covers his mouth with his hand and smothers what could be a laugh or a sob as the man’s cries fill the room. “I absolutely
refuse
to answer any more. Let me out of here! You can’t hold me here! Get me out of here!”

Fred echoes the man’s statement to Williams: “He won’t go on; he won’t answer.” He pushes the piece of paper away, assuming that it is
finally over. But Williams says that he should treat silence as a wrong answer and punish the man.

Fred lifts himself out of his chair, making as if to stand, and then sits down again. “Oh, man!” he says under his breath. This time he partly covers his eyes as he reads the words. “Green: grass, hat, ink, apple.” He waits for his answer, but there is no sound from the other room. “Answer, please!” Fred urges him.

He repeats the words.

Silence.

“Go on with the procedure please, teacher,” Williams says matter-of-factly.

“Three hundred and fifteen volts; the answer is ‘ink,’” Fred mumbles and pushes the switch.

A scream: “I told you, I refuse to answer!”

“You get a shock if you don’t answer!” Fred calls back.

The man does not answer the following three questions. The fourth time there is no response, Fred stands abruptly. “Something’s happened to that fellow in there,” he says, gesturing to the room next door. “I don’t get no answer . . . he was hollering at less voltage. Can you check on him and see if he’s alright, please?”

Williams is impassive. “Not once we’ve started. Please continue, teacher.”

Fred sighs and sits slowly back in the chair. “Cool: day, shade, water, cave—please, answer please, are you alright in there?
Are you alright
?”

At each step, Fred tries another tactic to get the experimenter to check on the man. At each step, Williams refuses. Each time Fred pauses for too long, Williams tells him to go on.

At 435 volts, Fred points to the final two switches on the machine, both labeled “XXX.” “It says ‘dangerous—severe shock’ and ‘XXX’ on there.”

Unperturbed, Williams replies as Fred has come to expect: “Continue, please.”

But by now Williams has instructed him to continue more than twenty-eight times, and Fred is beginning to get angry. “I’m getting no answer! You think you should look in on him, please?”

“Not once we’ve started the experiment.”

“What if something’s happened to the man? What if he had an attack or something in there?”

“The experiment requires that we continue. Go on.”

“Don’t the man’s health mean anything?”

“Whether he likes it or not—”

“But he might be dead in there!” Fred is almost shouting. Then, as if remembering himself, he says, “I mean, some people can’t take the shocks, sir. I don’t mean to be rude, but I think you should look in on him. All you gotta do is look in the door. I don’t get no answer, no noise. Something’s happened to that gentleman, sir.”

“We must continue. Go on, please.”

“Keep going? Give him four hundred and fifty volts, what, every shot now?” Fred seems defeated.

“Continue. The next word’s ‘white.’”

Fred slaps his hand on the desk and continues in a low monotone. “White: cloud, horse, rock, house. Answer, please!” Pause.

“The answer is ‘horse.’ Four hundred and fifty volts.” He pushes the switch once, then twice more upon Williams’s instruction to continue. Then Williams interrupts. “Excuse me, teacher, we’ll have to discontinue the experiment.”

Fred Prozi was a subject in the infamous obedience experiments, conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University. Milgram’s research, which appeared to transform ordinary people into torturers, was dubbed by colleague Roger Brown as the most famous psychological experiment of the twentieth century. The dialogue in the previous passage is the real exchange that occurred between Fred Prozi (the pseudonym that Milgram gave the man to protect his identity) and Williams, the words taken from film footage of the experiments.

Fred wasn’t alone in continuing to apply what he believed was the maximum voltage on the shock machine. In the same situation, 65 percent of people allowed their agitation to be overruled by the experimenter’s authority, administering what they thought were painful and potentially harmful electric shocks to another man. As they were doing so, some, like Fred, looked incredulous. Others looked harried. Some laughed, while others wavered on the edge of tears.

Millions of words have been written about the statistics that Milgram obtained in his experiment—how many subjects continued to the maximum voltage, how many stopped short in the early stages, and how many stopped somewhere in between. But what do percentages tell us about the 780 people who walked into Milgram’s lab during 1961 and 1962? In the fifty years since the experiment was conducted, the story has been simplified into a scientific narrative in which individual people have vanished, replaced by a faceless group that is said to represent humanity and to give proof of our troubling tendency to obey orders from an authority figure. What has been lost from the story we know today are the voices of people like Fred and those of the other men and women who took part.

INTRODUCTION

You may have heard of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments—perhaps you have read about them in a textbook at school or at university, as I did. Even if you haven’t, you’ve likely come across them without knowing it—in the episode of
The Simpsons
, for example, where a therapist hooks the family up to a shock machine, and they zap one another as Springfield’s electricity grid falters and the streetlights flicker. Perhaps you read in the news about an infamous 2010 French mock game show where contestants believed they were torturing strangers for prize money, or you might have heard the experiments mentioned in a documentary about torture or the Holocaust.

Milgram’s obedience research might have started life in a lab fifty years ago, but it quickly leapt from academic to popular culture, appearing in books, plays, films, songs, art, and on reality television. The experiments were re-created as performance by British artist Rod Dickinson, lamented in English singer Peter Gabriel’s song “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” and explored in the 1979 French thriller
I as in Icarus
. They’ve appeared in the TV movie
The Tenth Level
(which starred William Shatner and is rumored to feature John Travolta in his film debut), and continue to be referenced in countless television programs, from
Law and Order: SVU
to
Malcolm in the Middle
. German author Bernhard Schlink wrote about the experiments in his novel
Homecoming
; the main character in Chip Kidd’s comic novel
The Learners
, set in New Haven in the early 1960s, volunteers for Milgram’s experiment.

In 1961, Milgram, a psychologist and an assistant professor at Yale, recruited ordinary people through an advertisement in the local newspaper, offering each of them $4.50 to take part in an experiment about memory and learning. Each volunteer was given an appointment time and instructions on how to find the lab, which was located within Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale. Inside, each volunteer was met by a stern experimenter in a lab coat. He introduced them to a second volunteer, who had ostensibly just arrived. The experimenter explained that one volunteer would be the teacher and one the learner, and they drew lots for the roles.

The experimenter took the learner into a small room, strapped him into a chair, and fitted electrodes to his wrists while the teacher looked on. It was explained that the experiment aimed to test the effect of punishment on learning. The teacher’s job was to read out a list of word pairs to the learner and then test his recall, administering an electric shock each time a wrong answer was given. The learner mentioned that he’d been treated for a heart condition, and asked if he should be worried about receiving the shocks. The experimenter answered that they might be painful, but they weren’t dangerous.

The teacher was taken into a larger room and seated at a table, in front of an imposing machine. It had thirty switches, labeled from 15 to 450 volts, and from “slight shock” to “very strong shock,” then “danger: severe shock,” and eventually simply “XXX.” If the learner gave a wrong answer on the memory test, the experimenter explained, the teacher should punish him with an electric shock, increasing the voltage with each incorrect response.

Things began well. The teacher read the word pairs into a microphone, and the learner got the first two answers right. But then he started making mistakes, earning 15, 30, and then 45 volts for successive incorrect answers. He got the next one right; no shock. Then another wrong; 60 volts. Then another; 75 volts. With the first shocks the learner grunted in pain, but as the voltage increased his protests and yells became more vehement. At 150 volts, he yelled that he wanted to be released, and at 240 volts he shouted that his heart was bothering him and he wanted to stop. Once the shocks reached the range designated as “extreme intensity” on the machine, he screamed in anguish,
and soon after fell silent. Despite the obvious sounds of the learner’s pain and, in many cases, the teacher’s own agitation and stress, 65 percent of Milgram’s teachers followed the instructions and progressed through all thirty switches. They gave maximum-voltage shocks to the man, by this stage disturbingly silent, in the room next door.

At the conclusion of the experiment, the teacher learned that the shock machine was a prop; the experimenter and the learner were actors; the screams were scripted; and the subject of the experiment was not memory at all, but how far people will go in obeying orders from an authority figure.
¹

This is the standard story of the Milgram obedience experiments—it’s the one that has been reproduced in the media and handed down to generations of psychology students through teachers and textbooks. However, the real story is more complicated. There was not one experiment, but over twenty of them—different variations, mini-dramas in which Milgram changed the story, altered the script, and even employed different actors. The “heart attack” scenario described above is just one of them. With a 65 percent obedience rate, and the pathos of the cries and screams from the learner with a supposedly weak heart, it’s undoubtedly the most dramatic. However, in the first variation—which, like most of the others, involved forty subjects—the learner made no mention of heart trouble and did not emit any cries of pain. He was quiet, except at the twentieth shock (300 volts), when he pounded on the wall. In another variation, the experimenter gave his orders over the phone, and in another, the teacher was asked to push the learner’s hand onto an electric plate in order to give him the shocks. And in over half of all his variations, Milgram found the opposite result—that more than 60 percent of people
disobeyed
the experimenter’s orders.
²

Milgram’s obedience experiments are as misunderstood as they are famous. This is partly because of Milgram’s presentation of his findings—his downplaying of contradictions and inconsistencies—and partly because it was the heart-attack variation that was embraced by the popular media, magnified and reinforced into a powerful story. It’s a story that catapulted Milgram, a relatively lowly assistant professor, to international fame—a fame that lasted until his death
in 1984, twenty-two years after the experiments were completed, and beyond.

The obedience experiments first came to public attention in October 1963, when the
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
published an article by Milgram reporting that 65 percent of people gave maximum-voltage shocks to the learner. This was in the first condition of the experiment. (See
appendix
for a full list of the conditions.) It would be another ten years before Milgram’s report on his full research program and the rest of his experimental variations, with their differing results, would be published, by which time the story had taken on a life of its own.

Media interest in Milgram’s article was intense right from the beginning. Although it was an academic piece, with a characteristically impersonal style and much scientific analysis, its implications were sensational. The high rate of obedience among the subjects, and Milgram’s descriptions of how astonished observers were by this, made the results seem shocking.

In addition, Milgram linked his results to Nazi Germany, using imagery of the gas chambers to make the implications of his findings explicit. The televised trial of prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann two years earlier was still fresh in the public’s mind. So was philosopher Hannah Arendt’s portrait of him in her coverage of the trial for the
New Yorker
; she had depicted him as terrifyingly ordinary, driven not by ideological hatred or inherent evil, but by an almost automatic tendency to follow orders.
³
Some had been outraged by what they saw as Arendt’s exoneration of the Nazis and downplaying of the role of anti-Semitism in the extermination of European Jews. Others sympathized with her conclusions, regarding them as a salutary warning that bureaucratic evil could appear anywhere.