Behind the Shock Machine (29 page)

It had an impact. Obedience dropped from 65 percent in condition 5 to 50 percent in condition 6. But what this difference means is unclear. It could mean that a soft and passive experimenter commanded less authority. Or did it mean that the teacher was less likely to shock a guy who looked like he might come out afterward and punch them? Or was it simply that both men, new to their roles, were poorer actors and less convincing?

What interested me about tough guy Tracy was that he eventually defied Milgram. He worked on three conditions with Milgram—6, 8, and 10—before he quit. The tipping point came when an army buddy arrived at the lab. Tracy had served with him in New Guinea in World War II, and “the bond of being in the army together meant he couldn’t go through with it.” Bob Jr. told me that he was “kind of proud” of his father’s behavior. Tracy was unable to put a friend through the experience and withdrew rather than having it on his conscience.

Bob Tracy’s behavior intrigued me because it was a marked contrast to McDonough’s and Williams’s. What was it, then, that allowed Williams and McDonough to do something that not everyone could? Was it a case of becoming desensitized to the point where they stopped noticing the anguish they were causing? Certainly, Williams’s voice in condition 3, in September 1962, sounded more youthful and energetic than his voice in condition 20, just six months later, which was a weary monotone.

Perhaps Bob Tracy was right to object to the role that Milgram placed him in. Obedience to authority didn’t just apply to Milgram’s subjects. In a parallel of the experiment itself, Milgram commanded obedience from his staff—people who, as part of their job, were required to subject a naive volunteer to intense pressure to follow instructions. Yet the two men had a hold over Milgram that his subjects
didn’t. Without them, his experiment would have been impossible: he needed to retain them for the entire experimental program because inconsistency in staff could contaminate his results.
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The public has never known much about Milgram’s experimenter or learner, except that Williams was appropriately stern-looking and McDonough was appropriately amiable. Milgram described their physical contrasts in a way that made me think of a straight man paired with a clown, a scientific version of Laurel and Hardy.

Of the two, McDonough in some ways had the easier job. His role after the shouts and screams—which were eventually prerecorded on tape, so that he just sat in the room and operated the recorder—was to emerge unscathed. He got to lighten the mood by showing himself unharmed and joking with the person who had pushed the switches. While next door, he could still hear what was going on in the lab, but he didn’t have to face the consequences of people’s distress as directly as Williams did.

Milgram described McDonough’s job to one subject as “like
The Wizard of Oz
. Did you see the film? You know, like Frank Morgan behind the curtain, pulling the switches.” Later in the same conversation, he described McDonough’s job in more detail.

Milgram: He operated the tape recorder.

Unidentified subject: Good grief.

Milgram: And he was actually smoking a cigar or drinking coffee at the time.

Unidentified subject: He must have enjoyed it.

Milgram: No, it was very hard work after a while. . . . Twenty times is okay, but, you know, the eight hundredth time would get a little tedious.
¹⁰

Another subject talked about his feelings about the learner: “I felt so bad afterward. He mentioned his name and he lives in East Haven
and I—after the test I had to go to my office, which is here in the courthouse, and do some work—although it was a Sunday, I wanted to go and finish up some work . . . and I went to the telephone book and looked up the name—he used the name ‘Richardson’ or something, and unfortunately there were three of them with exactly the first and last name and just [in] East Haven and if—I say this—I didn’t make the call because I didn’t know which one to call. It would have sounded—you know, I felt it would have sounded very stupid on the phone saying, ‘Are you the fellow that was at Yale?’ and, you know, but if there would have been one I wanted to call and actually apologize.”

The same man described how the experiment forced him to lie to his wife that day, after he got home from the office: “I calmed down a lot, but when I got home my wife said, ‘Oh, what was it all about?’ I said, you know, I was actually ashamed in a way. . . . And I said, ‘Oh, it was just a test about obedience.’ She said, ‘Oh’—she asked me some questions and I said, ‘Oh, it wasn’t really very interesting at all,’ which was an absolute lie. [I just didn’t want] to talk about it. . . . I’m a person who sleeps well every night no matter what happens during the day—if I fight with my wife or anything I sleep fine [but] I had trouble sleeping . . . it would come across my mind while I was at work or driving to work or watching television on an idle minute . . . I would say ‘Gee, I wonder what happened to that guy,’ you know, but I never once attempted to call him as I had when I first went to the office.”
¹¹

Tragically, both men who played the role of the learner with heart problems died soon after from heart attacks, McDonough in 1965 and Tracy in 1967. With the obedience experiments, sometimes it’s hard to know where illusion ends and reality begins; Jim McDonough’s real-life heart problems may well have inspired the most famous condition in the experiment. Bob McDonough told me that when his family saw Jim on television, talking to the experimenter about being treated for a heart problem at the veterans’ hospital, they had thought he was referring to a real experience. “Shortly before he died, he was scheduled to have a valve replacement in his heart and so he
may have had a heart condition when he was involved in the experiments,” Bob said. Had McDonough mentioned his heart problem to Milgram—perhaps in the job interview or even the first time he was being strapped into the chair during the rehearsals in the summer of 1961?

I found evidence on tape that McDonough’s heart was in fact bothering him during one experiment in May 1962.

Williams: Well, let me tell you a little bit about this experiment, Mr.
[blank]
. Mr. Wallace was not really being shocked in there.

Subject 2321: He wasn’t?

Williams: No, he’s part of our experimental team.

Subject 2321: Oh, I see, yeah.

Williams: He works with us, you see.

Subject 2321: Yeah.

Williams: Name’s Jim McDonough. Why don’t I get him? . . . Ah, Jim, why don’t you come on in and say hello to Mr.
[blank]
.

Subject 2321: You bum, you had me worried there. I was worried about you. I didn’t know what this was all about, and the thing that had me worried was when you said you had a bad heart, and I thought, jeez, I might have killed that poor guy.
[Laughs]

Williams: You know, it was only a week or so ago we were sitting in here—and he uses that line on everybody, you know—and he’s sitting in back in there one night and he had heart palpitations.

[General laughter]

McDonough: I thought I had gas or something and my goddamn heart was going
brrrrrrm
. Scared the daylights out of me.

Williams: He’s been handing out this line for so long, then all of a sudden he got it himself.

[General laughter]

Subject 2321: I was worried when you were hollering in there and, jeez, when I didn’t hear you, ah, jeez, maybe he dropped dead. That’s why I asked you, “Should I stop or go on?,” and you said, “Continue.”
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I wondered about the effect that McDonough’s and Williams’s roles had had on them. I remembered sitting in Don Mixon’s living room outside Sydney, with Don gazing out at the rim of the Blue Mountains and telling me that you could experience real emotions in playing a particular role. He had seen how engrossed his actors became—so engrossed that they became agitated and distressed, caught between the commands of the experimenter and the cries of pain from the learner. Even though they knew the experiment was a simulation, their emotional reactions were real.

If Don’s subjects became distressed playing their role in a forty-five-minute session, what was it like for Williams and McDonough? Or for the seven other men whom Milgram employed during the course of the experiment to act the role of the hard-faced experimenter and the screaming victim? Was it a failure to shed his role that made Williams petulant and short-tempered with his son? I wondered, too, how McDonough felt about the people he came out to meet who had “shocked” him. Had his faked pain stayed with him until it became real, when he clutched at his chest, his face contorted, and he fell to the floor that cold morning in 1965?

I had seen a documentary featuring Philip Zimbardo, Milgram’s high school classmate and the man behind the Stanford prison experiment. This experiment had university students playing the roles of guards and prisoners and was aborted because of the stress
those playing the prisoners underwent at the hands of those playing the guards. Zimbardo spoke about how taking part in that experiment had changed him. When his fiancée came to visit the “set,” she was horrified at the violence and animosity that had developed between the guards and prisoners. “She said, ‘It’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys!’ She had tears in her eyes.” She ran out of the building, and Zimbardo, “furious,” ran after her. Outside, he told her how fascinating the experiment was, how powerful the situation. “I don’t know how, if you’re a psychologist, you don’t appreciate this,” he told her.

And she responded, “How could you not see what I see?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to have anything to do with him anymore. Zimbardo said, “It was like a slap in the face.” Just as the situation he had created had transformed his subjects into vicious wardens and haunted prisoners, Zimbardo saw that it had brought about changes in him, changes so dramatic that his girlfriend felt as if she didn’t know him—and she didn’t like the man she saw.
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I am reluctant to judge McDonough and Williams, in the same way that I’m reluctant to judge Milgram’s subjects. Williams’s role was much more stressful than McDonough’s, in that he was solely responsible for the conduct of the experiments in Milgram’s (frequent) absence. He was left to deal with things he wasn’t trained for. And McDonough seemed genuine in trying to put subjects at ease. When he reappeared in the lab after the experiment was over, it was his jovial, rather sweet voice that cajoled subjects and almost without fail made them laugh.

Did Milgram place the men in an untenable situation? He was clearly dependent on them to maintain the experiment’s integrity. After the research was over, Milgram offered each of them the choice of an upfront $100 bonus or 2 percent of U.S. book royalties up to $500 (beyond that, the amount owed was “subject to any restriction that I may deem just”).
¹⁴
Both men needed the money at the time and took the cash—an act that Williams later regretted. Bob McDonough told me that his family regretted his father’s choice, too. The fact that both men took the bonus suggests that they had little idea of the importance or eventual fame of the experiments, although
Williams told subjects time and again that the research was important and, by implication, that any stress they had gone through would be worthwhile.

Milgram made the men feel important. Maybe, like the subjects, they were in awe of science, and of Yale. Perhaps Williams enjoyed the idea of contributing to scientific endeavor. Maybe McDonough relished the opportunity, despite the “tedium” of the job, to make people feel better afterward. Perhaps, like Milgram, they didn’t believe that what they were putting people through would have any lasting ill effects. I like to think that, like the subjects, McDonough and Williams knew they were adopting a role that had nothing to do with who they were outside of the lab. Outside, they were men of faith, well loved and respected at work and in their local communities.

Bob McDonough told me the first time we met, “Every time I meet a psychologist I like to brag and say my father was the victim in the Milgram experiments.” Then he laughed and recounted that once, when he had delivered this line to a psychologist, she said something that made him think. “She looked me in the eye and said, ‘That’s kind of strange—the only way you see your father is as a victim.’ I said, ‘I’ve never thought of it that way.’”

It is too easy to simply describe either man as a victim. Like the subjects, Williams and McDonough were misled about the nature of the job they applied for—the ad had called for assistants in an experiment about memory and learning. It’s unlikely that Milgram would have told them in the interview exactly what would be required, although he seems to have asked about their acting skills. The truth came later, after they had accepted the job—perhaps even after they had showed up for their first day at work. They hadn’t stopped when they saw that people were undergoing distress, distress they had played a role in bringing about. But at the same time, they hadn’t set out to hurt anyone: for both men, it was a simple matter of needing a second job to support their families.

This got me thinking about the nature of love—what it drives people to do, how far it can stretch, and what forms it can take. Perhaps the lightheartedness I could hear on the tapes was simply Williams and
McDonough making the best of a bad situation. No, I couldn’t judge them. Behind them, in the wings, was Milgram, urging them on, pressuring them to continue, and reassuring them that their participation was essential and for the greater good—for Yale, for truth, and for science.