Behind the Shock Machine (22 page)

What Taketo’s analysis provides is an insight into the believability of Milgram’s cover story from one condition to the next. Conditions 3, 12, and 24 were the most effective, with over 70 percent of subjects in each convinced that the learner was being shocked. On the other
hand, more than two-thirds of people in conditions 1 and 2 doubted that the experiment was real.

Milgram made a note on the bottom of Taketo’s analysis, arguing that the results couldn’t really be taken seriously because of course his subjects were more likely to say afterward that they suspected or knew the experiment wasn’t real. (Those unreliable subjects again, contaminating data.) He did have a point—many people, having read the report that explained the experiment, with its uncomfortable conclusions, may have chosen to rewrite their experiences to make their behavior more palatable. But if he couldn’t trust what people said in the questionnaires because they rewrote history, why was Milgram so ready to use the questionnaire data in other ways—to prove, for example, that the majority of his subjects were glad to have taken part? When it suited him, he used this data; when it didn’t suit him, he ignored it.

Taketo’s analysis, based on people’s self-reported feelings about the experiment a year after it ended, has its flaws, and some will question its reliability. But it raises doubts that are hard to put to rest. If, as Taketo’s analysis suggests, people were less likely to obey when they thought the man was being hurt, then Milgram’s experiment tells us the opposite of what we’ve been led to believe: it’s not that inside all of us there’s an Eichmann waiting for the right situation—a commanding authority figure whose destructive orders we will follow blindly. Instead, Taketo’s analysis suggests the opposite: that the majority of Milgram’s subjects resisted orders when they truly believed they might be hurting someone.

I decided that I had to find and speak to Taketo Murata.

Some time later, I was at the Toronto Writers’ Centre—an anonymous-looking building nestled between Korean restaurants and discount grocery stores on Bloor Street West—waiting for Taketo Murata. He was right on time. The photos of Taketo online show him in a business suit, but today he was dressed casually. I hurried down the steps to let him in after he pressed the buzzer, conscious of my tiredness as we made our way up to the top floor again. The hotel where I was staying had live jazz in the bar into the
small hours, and it had kept me awake. That morning I had had to rely on the icy wind to propel me the ten blocks from the hotel to the writers’ center.

Taketo had been up for a while, too. He had left his home just outside of Toronto before 7 A.M. to get to Bloor Street by nine, but despite this he looked remarkably perky. He had planned the route to avoid traffic, allowed for the construction that would slow him down, and built in a delay just in case. He was methodical, well organized. It was these qualities that impressed Milgram, who wanted someone careful and thorough to analyze the hundreds of questionnaires that came flooding back from his subjects in the summer of 1962.

Taketo was twenty-five when he started work for Milgram. He’d been at Yale for four years, arriving in 1958 to do a doctorate in psychology. He came with a first-class honors degree in biological science from McGill, a dream to be a university professor, and not a lot of money. To save, he lived in the medical dormitory across the street from the psychology department. Many nights when Taketo was going to sleep, he saw the lights in the psychology building burning after midnight as junior professors like Milgram worked late, turning out research that they hoped would bring them closer to tenure. Taketo found the intense competition between staff in the psychology department off-putting. “The junior guys were spending more hours working than the students were. It was an up-or-out kind of environment for them.”

By the end of his second year at Yale, in 1959, Taketo had decided that psychology was not right for him. The focus on specialization and the pressure to publish were intense. “Even the older people who were known in the field were cranking out stuff left, right, and sideways to enhance their reputation. A lot of them would take a particular topic or subject they were studying—they usually had a whole bunch of assistants paid for by grants—and they would write the same stuff in different ways to go in different journals, even though they were basically the same thing. The general rule of thumb was, when you came up for tenure, the important thing was to make sure that you got your reprints of journal articles with heavy covers so they would weigh more. Because the people reading this stuff, the people passing
judgment, often didn’t know exactly what the hell you were writing about because they are specialized over here, and you are specialized over here. The volume you produced was more important.” He felt that most of his classmates were engaged in research that was “going nowhere” and wouldn’t stand the test of time. “Well, it became kind of meaningless in the end, you know. And I’ve passed this on to my kids. A lot of jobs, even if they’re prestigious, they don’t do anything.”

By the time he met Milgram in 1962, Taketo had abandoned psychology for sociology, which he found liberatingly “open-ended.” To fund his studies, he taught introductory sociology to nursing students, but then the job of graduate research assistant to Milgram came up. People warned him about Milgram. “They said to me, you know, he’s a very prickly character, he’s kind of moody, he’s kind of abrupt, he can be rude. But I didn’t find him that way at all.”

Taketo began work for Milgram in the summer of 1962 and watched a few experiments in what would have been the final condition through the one-way mirror. In contrast to the kind of “trivial” research he’d seen conducted in the rest of the psychology department, he felt that Milgram’s was different. “It seemed more meaningful, to have extensions beyond just getting tenure. And it was a very unusual kind of experiment—it wasn’t just the deception, it was the actual stress that people were going through. And that was a major difference from what everyone else was doing.”

I asked if it bothered him, if he wondered what Milgram was doing when he saw how upset subjects became. “No, we were all ethically dead at that time,” he responded, and laughed. I laughed along but was taken aback at his honesty.

The major part of his work that summer was the data analysis, the coding of subjects’ answers to the questionnaire. Taketo worked with a calculating machine and the pile of more than seven hundred questionnaires in his room or in the library, having no real office to speak of. I showed Taketo the four-page paper that he’d written comparing the level of shock people gave against whether or not they believed the experiment was real. Taketo leaned forward to look. I spread the densely typed pages across the boardroom table, and we stood before each page. Taketo read bits aloud and shook his head. He recognized
his handwriting but didn’t remember doing the analysis. He stared at the pages of columns of numbers, the hypotheses, the means, the terminology of statistics; he picked up a page, read bits of it under his breath. Then he sat down again and leaned back in his chair. As we took in the ant-like jottings, the ruled lines, the columns and rows of figures—the hours and hours of work—Taketo said the level of detail showed that Milgram got caught up in the minutiae of statistical analysis and lost sight of the bigger picture. “I think so—that’s really what it is. There are a lot of other things that are beyond this collection of data—it could be something else that’s entirely different from what’s involved. In medical terms, it might not be the drug that’s doing this; it could be the fact that a guy’s genetic makeup might be a little different in this group versus that group, and that’s what’s produced the different results, not the drug itself.”

But talk like that would have been heresy back in his Yale days, surely? Taketo agreed that it would. Then he pointed at a small paragraph of text that summarized what he’d found and nodded his head. “There. If you fully believed that this whole thing was real, then you were likely to punish the guy less. Makes sense.”

Of course it made sense. But as Milgram pointed out, it wasn’t perfect science. Taketo was comparing the degree of shock people gave during the experiment with what they said they believed after the event was over. There was plenty of room for error. Yet why did Milgram get Taketo to spend so much time on it and then not use it? Perhaps Milgram realized that publishing it may have offered his critics ammunition. And publication suggests a confidence and a sense of security that Milgram, perhaps starting to become worn down by criticism, may have lacked.

Although Taketo was impressed by Milgram’s boldness in conceiving of the obedience research, he eventually came to regard his employer as almost reckless. For it wasn’t the work he did for Milgram on the obedience study that stuck in Taketo’s mind—after all, that was just a sophisticated form of number crunching—it was his involvement in Milgram’s next research project. Milgram, with graduate students Leon Mann and Susan Harter, devised a way of measuring community attitudes not by asking people what they thought but by
observing how they behaved. If you found a stamped but unpostmarked letter addressed to a major political party lying on the footpath, wouldn’t you be more likely to post the letter in the nearest mailbox if it was to a party that you supported? Milgram and his students reasoned that whether a letter addressed to a particular political party reached its destination would provide a measure of the support for that political party in that neighborhood. They called it “the Lost Letter technique.”

Milgram and his students road-tested the technique in New Haven in April 1963. Four hundred letters were addressed to three organizations—Friends of the Nazi Party, Friends of the Communist Party, and Medical Research Associates—and an individual, Mr. Walter Carnup. Interestingly, over 70 percent of letters addressed to the medical research company were posted, indicating that in New Haven science was held in high regard.
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But—some might say typically—Milgram had underestimated the effect on those who found the letters. The letters addressed to the Friends of the Nazi Party in particular caused a flurry of panic among Jewish shopkeepers, who, as Milgram acknowledged in his notes, were “over represented among the small store owners in New Haven.” The shopkeepers, having “found” the Nazi Party letters in or near their shops, subsequently contacted the head of the local antidefamation league of B’nai B’rith, who made it his business to pass the letters on to the FBI for fingerprinting.
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Undeterred, Milgram was interested in testing the water in a more volatile environment than New Haven. He sent Taketo and his roommate Charlie Buchwald down south, where civil rights was a hot issue. Taketo and Charlie set off with a sense of adventure and freedom, buoyed by the prospect of a week on the road, away from offices and faculty and pressure, their trunk full of letters addressed to pro– and anti–civil rights groups.

It wasn’t until they were on their way to Raleigh, North Carolina, that they had second thoughts. “We didn’t realize the potential danger involved in going down there. Our first realization of it was as we were passing a Howard Johnson’s motel and there were a couple of big buses and police cars all around, and they were rounding up all
the blacks who were demonstrating in front of the Howard Johnson’s and taking them to jail. It was kind of racially charged.” They had passed the Howard Johnson’s on Chapel Hill Highway in Durham, the site of a mass demonstration in which two leaders were arrested when they tried to enter the segregated restaurant.
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Four hundred African Americans and a handful of whites had locked arms and sat down outside in the parking lot in protest, singing, “We’re going to eat at Howard Johnson’s one of these days.” At around 7 P.M., when Taketo and Charlie drove past, they saw people being dragged to their feet and pulled toward one of the five waiting buses. The men were suddenly conscious that “this was no laughing matter.” Their license plates identified them as from out of town and, even worse, from the north. “If you went further, on to Mississippi, they were killing some of these people that had come out of the north and were perceived as agitating the locals to get uppity.”

They drove on, aware of how it would look if the police pulled them over and opened the trunk, which was full of more than five hundred letters addressed to pro- and anti-segregation groups. They spent seven days traveling down through Charlotte to Raleigh, by day locating all the white and all the black neighborhoods, and returning at night to drop the letters. Not surprisingly, the study found “a high rate of return of the pro–civil rights letters from the Negro neighborhoods and a high rate of return of the anti–civil rights letters from the white neighborhoods.”
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Taketo described the trip with a tinge of something like awe, even though it was his own experience he was describing. It gave him a fresh perspective on his employer, and made him contemplate the consequences for participants in some of Milgram’s research. “I often wondered whether or not Milgram even thought about the dangerous implications in some of these things.”

Taketo had been a successful businessman and was now a government consultant. He said that Yale gave him a way of thinking about people that had been invaluable. “We’re too trusting,” he told me. “Look at Bernie Madoff, the investment adviser who scammed millions.” Taketo thought that Milgram’s subjects should have been a bit more skeptical. I wondered later if he was talking about himself, too.
When he spoke about that road trip, his voice was full of a kind of wonder—which I first thought was because he couldn’t believe he’d done it. Or was it that, in hindsight, he couldn’t believe that Milgram had placed him in such a dangerous position?

What was it that caused people to ignore their gut feelings? I thought of Taketo continuing to deliver his letters on his journey south, despite his sense of danger. I thought of Joe Dimow and others who were suspicious but rarely raised their doubts during the experiment itself. Was it the tension of the moment that propelled them, was it the authority of the experimenter, or was it something else, greater than the experiment itself, that caused them to hesitate—was it the setting or even science itself?