Behind the Shock Machine (3 page)

Milgram’s findings added the weight of scientific proof to Arendt’s claims. In referencing her work in his article, he turned her philosophical theory into scientific fact. His research also reinforced Eichmann’s defense, and the defense of those tried at Nuremberg—that their involvement in the extermination of European Jews was a case of obeying orders. Milgram argued that he had captured both an explanation
for the Holocaust and a universal truth about human nature in his lab. All of us, according to him, could have driven the trains, marched the prisoners, or staffed the death camps.
⁴
It wasn’t the case that Nazism sprang from the German character or that Germans had a monopoly on blind obedience—the Holocaust could just as easily have happened in the United States or in fact in any Western country. Milgram suggested that those who argued with his results or criticized his research were simply uncomfortable with the implications. To him, it was a case of shooting the messenger.

Despite Milgram’s subsequent publication of results that showed lower levels of obedience, it was the sensationalist version of the experiments that took hold. Even though they are now historical curiosities, unrepeatable today, they have lost none of their power as a story. In fact, they have acquired the status of a modern fable, warning of the perils of obedience to authority. Their power comes from what they’re said to reveal: that in the face of authority, the human conscience is frail and insubstantial. The experiments appear to pit our expectations about the way we would behave against the reality of our shortcomings and to offer recognizable answers to the unthinkable questions, explanations for the unthinkable deeds that humans sometimes commit. Many still regard Milgram’s obedience research as an untouchable truth about human behavior, and it becomes more powerful each time it is invoked—to provide an insight into the murderous behavior of Nazis during the Holocaust, the massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers in My Lai during the Vietnam War, and the torture of prisoners by guards at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
⁵

Yet at the same time, we have become aware that science is as much a process of construction as of discovery; that scientists, too, are storytellers. We are increasingly skeptical of the claims that science makes. We now understand intuitively, and have plenty of evidence, that scientists can produce results to support particular political or personal agendas and that an individual scientist’s hopes for his research can often shape the outcome.

The standard account of Milgram’s experiments suggests that ordinary people can be manipulated into behaving in ways that contradict their morals and values—that you or I could be talked into torturing a
man. But could we? In the course of my research, I discovered unpublished data and an experiment Milgram kept secret—an even more controversial variation—that made me question the results Milgram claimed to have found. It made me realize how much we have trusted Milgram as the narrator of his research and how important it is to question the stories we’ve been told.

If you’d asked me five years ago where my fascination with Milgram came from, I would have said that it started when I was a seventeen-year-old undergraduate in Australia in the mid-1970s, stranded in an alienatingly scientific psychology degree. I was wondering why I had chosen psychology (perhaps, looking back, it was because I was still struggling with who I was and hoped that psychology would give me an answer). The rather vague and romantic notion I had of psychology was very different from the sort taught in lectures and labs at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. I discovered that psychology, or at least the kind that was to be taken seriously—particularly at a newly established university keen to make its reputation—had its roots firmly grounded in medicine, biology, and statistics. Until I got to university, I had been a humanities student, studying history and literature. Now I found myself conducting psychology experiments and writing lab reports based on studies of animal behavior. I had to learn a whole new language: monkeys were primates, babies were neonates, hunches were hypotheses. We timed mice learning their way out of mazes, measured vision in newly hatched chickens, and studied the effect of chemical neurotransmitters on rats’ brains. I struggled to keep up and to catch the thread that connected these disparate topics to one discipline.

I would have said it was Milgram’s research, introduced in a drafty lecture hall halfway through my first year, that saved me. For the first time since I had started my degree, I felt excited, exhilarated even, aware suddenly of the potential of what I was studying. I wasn’t troubled by his methods, just blown away by his results and creativity. Milgram’s research was ingenious and daring; it spoke to politics and history. Through him, I saw that psychological science could be creative, powerful, and relevant to wider society. Milgram breathed life into the dry, clinical world of the laboratory.

That would be one story of how my fascination began, but now, on
the other side of my research, I’m not so sure. As a high school student I had hung out with my older sister and her friends, who were university students—some of them psychology students—living on campus at La Trobe. I went to their parties, crashed on their floors, and listened to their gossip about lecturers. Now I wonder if maybe it was there, in those late-night conversations, that I first heard of Stanley Milgram. Perhaps I overheard among those low voices a whispered secret that the obedience experiments were being conducted at La Trobe. It was a thread that I picked up thirty-five years later, while researching this book, when I found that these rumors had a basis in fact. I would find that in its first three years, 1972–74, La Trobe University’s psychology course required undergraduates to conduct the obedience experiment as part of their coursework. Using deception and misinformation, over two hundred students recruited friends and fellow students to be the unwitting teachers, making it the largest replication of the research outside of Yale. A number of these former La Trobe students talked to me about their experiences. Hearing their stories made me wonder what else I might have forgotten about the experiments and how close I’d come to being involved myself.

What I am sure of is that ever since I first heard about the obedience experiments, I’ve wanted to know more. The story always felt incomplete. I was left wondering what happened to the volunteers afterward—how did they reconcile what they had done in the lab with the people they had believed themselves to be? What did they say to their wives and children when they returned home and what did they think about their behavior weeks, months, and years later?

I was just as interested in the man behind the science. Exactly how and where did Milgram get the idea for such an ingenious—and, as I would come to realize, ethically problematic—experiment?

Before Milgram, psychologists had faked epileptic fits to gauge bystanders’ willingness to help, staged savage robberies to assess people’s reactions to violence, and pumped smoke through classroom air vents to see how students would respond to an emergency.
⁶
Deception was a regular feature of social psychological research, but published criticism of it was rare—that is, until publication of Milgram’s first research
article, which ignited a heated and impassioned debate and a drastic reexamination within the profession about what was acceptable in the treatment of research subjects. Opinions among the psychological community were divided: some called the experiments the most important research of the twentieth century; others called them “vile” and in line with Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners.
⁷
Some argued that Milgram shone a light on a previously unexplored part of human nature, while others regarded his work as little more than a sadistic practical joke.

Milgram’s obedience research fueled a crisis of confidence in the social sciences because it appeared amid a burgeoning concern for human rights. It was published against a backdrop of revelations about medical experiments on concentration-camp inmates and allegations that leading American scientists had been involved in the development of the atomic bomb. The civil rights movement was also in full swing, and the women’s movement was gaining momentum. Among Milgram’s peers, there was a heightened sensitivity to, and an increasing concern with, the rights of subjects in social psychological research.

Milgram claimed that his research was harmless and that his subjects’ distress was short-lived. He argued that any anguish they had experienced during the experiment was diffused by the subsequent interview and “dehoax.” Yet I found that Milgram used the term “dehoax” loosely. He did not mean that, after each experiment finished, he told the volunteers the truth—that it was all a setup, no shocks were given, and the learner was an actor. Instead, he tried to soothe and diffuse their distress by telling them another story. He reassured them that their behavior—regardless of whether they had obeyed the experimenter—was normal and understandable under the circumstances. He told them that the shocks weren’t as bad as they seemed (that the machine had been developed for use on small animals, so the labels were misleading), and that the man who had been yelling in pain had been overreacting. He brought the learner out to show that there was no harm done. Milgram’s notes indicate that he failed to immediately dehoax around 75 percent of his 780 subjects. Some would wait months to learn the truth; others, almost a year.
⁸
A few would never know what really happened.

Milgram wrote that the experiment was no worse than a roller coaster ride or a Hitchcock movie for his subjects.
⁹
He could have added that it was no worse than an episode of
Candid Camera
, a popular television show in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Candid Camera
followed ordinary people in everyday situations—browsing in department stores, walking down the street—and recorded their reactions to impossible, mystifying, and sometimes embarrassing situations set up by the show’s creator, Allen Funt. The hidden camera recorded people standing open-mouthed in front of talking mailboxes or watching incredulously as the taxi in front of them split in half. The tension built with their confusion and discomfort, while Funt’s laugh track and narration directed the viewer’s attention to the joke. Finally, when it was almost excruciating to watch, a voice would sing gaily, “Smile! You’re on
Candid Camera
,” and all would be revealed. Social psychologists such as Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, Milgram’s high school classmate and the scientist behind the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, celebrated early reality television and
Candid Camera
in particular.
¹⁰
Zimbardo called Funt “one of the most creative, intuitive social psychologists on the planet” and distributed videotapes of the program, with an accompanying manual, to psychology teachers to show students how everyday psychological truths could be captured in ingenious and engaging ways.
¹¹
Milgram wrote an admiring article about the program and argued for its relevance to social psychology.
¹²
Like
Candid Camera
, Milgram’s experiment involved trickery and secret surveillance aimed at capturing people’s “real” behavior.

Today, while experiments such as Milgram’s have been outlawed in university settings, they have reappeared on television screens as a form of popular entertainment. Both Milgram’s obedience experiment and Zimbardo’s prison experiment have been re-created for reality television.
¹³
Ironically, both experimental social psychology and reality television have been accused of becoming increasingly manipulative and gimmicky and of straying far from the socially informative role originally envisioned for them.

In 2004, I came across news of Thomas Blass’s biography of Stanley Milgram, and I interviewed Tom by e-mail and phone. I figured that,
given the fame of Milgram’s experiments and the fact that this was the first time Milgram’s life story had been told, an Australian newspaper might be interested in a story. But I couldn’t get an editor interested; no one wanted to read about Milgram then—not until the story of Abu Ghraib broke six months later. Then, overnight, Milgram’s obedience experiments, and what they seemed to say about torturers, authority figures, and the nature of evil, were everywhere.

Tom and I stayed in contact, first with me updating him on the progress, or lack of it, on my article. Then we kept in touch because of our mutual fascination with Milgram. It was Tom who told me about the hundreds of audiotapes of the experiments at Yale and of how compelling he’d found it to listen to the voices as the events unfolded. Slowly, an idea began to take hold: I could write the story of Milgram’s subjects myself. I’d look for the voices in the archives at Yale, where Milgram’s papers and the hundreds of audiotapes were held. I’d track down any volunteers willing to talk.

I planned a four-week research trip to visit the archives and to meet and interview any of Milgram’s subjects I could find. My aim was to fill in the gaps in the story, to resurrect the silent voices of Milgram’s subjects. I was hoping to piece together the story of what happened to them after the lab was closed, the lights were switched off, and they returned home to their families. I was less interested in the science of Milgram’s experiments than in the stories; naively, I thought that I would be able to separate the science
from
the stories, the results of the experiments from the people who took part, the scientist from the subjects. After all, I remember thinking back then, no one could argue with Milgram’s results.

Before I left Australia, I had managed to find two of Milgram’s volunteers. I was hoping that an ad in the Yale alumni magazine, as well as in the
New Haven Register
, would turn up more.