Behind the Shock Machine (30 page)

8

IN SEARCH OF A THEORY

Dr. Paul Errera leaned forward with a sigh. It was 7 P.M. on Thursday, April 18, 1963, and he’d just finished an hour-long interview. He was likely tired. It had been a long day, and the meeting tonight had been particularly demanding. Only one man had arrived—let’s call him Robert—and I imagined that he was still on Errera’s mind as Errera loosened his tie and sat back in his chair. Robert, a forty-year-old radio technician, had been distressed by his obedience. He’d described his conflicting feelings during the experiment—how at times he thought it might be a setup and at others had been convinced that he was hurting the man. At one point, Robert said mournfully that it would have helped him to know earlier that the experiment was a hoax. He was having trouble squaring what he did with his conscience, and with God.

Robert had killed enemy soldiers during World War II, but that was a case of “kill or be killed.” He had no such justification here, he told Errera. Errera had listened attentively, helping him weave together the confused and emotional strands of his story into a coherent whole, talking through with Robert where this tendency to conform had originated, and the forces in his life that had shaped him that way. When Robert was four, he told Errera, his father had left his mother and she in turn had handed him over to his strict grandfather, who agreed to raise him on the condition that she had no further contact with them. Errera encouraged Robert to recall himself as a four-year-old trying to fit in with a new family, a new home, in a town of around
four hundred people in rural Vermont, not understanding where his parents had gone. As Robert’s story unfolded, Errera pointed out the ways in which his obedience had helped him to adapt and survive and how, as a small boy, he had learned early that conformity was the best way to get by. It must have taken a huge concentration of effort on Errera’s part—he had only an hour, after all, to try to move Robert through these feelings to something resembling a resolution.

Eventually, Robert seemed to adopt Errera’s view that his behavior in the lab could be seen as logical. He described how he found the army easier than others. “When they took me away from Vermont, the hills, and put shoes on me and sent me away [to the army], I didn’t find it difficult adapting at all, like some other fellows did who had never really been away from home. . . . Really, I felt as though my mother and father were gone. I didn’t have that hopeless feeling that other fellows had.”
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Paul Errera was a thirty-five-year-old assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale at the time, and he also taught in the local hospital’s outpatient clinic. Yale had asked him to assess potential psychological damage to subjects in Milgram’s experiment. The university must have also been concerned about its reputation, after some subjects had made formal complaints and at least one had consulted a lawyer. Between February and May 1963, Errera conducted eleven interviews with subjects to identify whether taking part had caused them harm.

Twelve people had been invited to Robert’s meeting, the seventh of the eleven, but Errera probably welcomed the chance to talk with one man alone and in depth. Milgram would have been disappointed by the turnout—although by that point he should have been used to the fact that, at most, a handful of the dozen invited people would show up to each meeting. I pictured Errera as tall and lean, with his tie loosened, looking rumpled and tired while getting to his feet when Stanley Milgram—in my mind, visibly on guard, short and dark, and dressed neatly in suit and tie—came into the room from his viewing spot behind the mirror. I imagined Errera appraising Milgram in the same way he did those who arrived for the meetings, trying to read from a gesture, a look, what he was feeling. As usual, Milgram asked Errera what he thought of the meeting. Errera said it had been good
to talk with Robert about more than just how he felt in the experiment—to have the chance to talk about obedience as a pattern in his life. He almost preferred having one-on-one meetings, he said.

But Milgram was unconvinced. “I know what’s going to happen. I think I know what’s going to happen in the individual interviews. I think everyone is going to have a life story which makes reasonable his action in the experiment. They’re going to be very different kinds of life stories.”

Errera hastened to reassure him that this was not an obstacle, but Milgram was impatient. “But this is a very critical problem. I think this is what is going to happen. I fully expect it. What does one do with this? In the way of explaining what went on. If [for] every man it’s a different—one man may be asserting his masculinity in going on. Another man may be conforming to a pattern of compliance that’s been a lifelong pattern for him. Another man may be showing something else that’s going on.”

“I don’t think this detracts anything from your. . . . All it shows is that—”

“No, no. How does one relate it?”

“I think all you can say is that they all show the same end results, which is important . . . you can explain it on sociological grounds, you know, it has to do with our culture.”

“If there isn’t some common feature in a person that’s responding to this external factor, then the external factor has no relevance . . .”

“Okay, so there is—the common feature is the hostility involved. Or if you—it depends on your theory.”

“I haven’t got a theory.”
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Milgram’s frustration was palpable. While it was true that he had no theory, he knew what he wanted to prove—he’d known it from the very start of his research. He wasn’t interested in explaining disparities in obedience as differences in life experiences or culture or as individual differences between people. He was looking for some thread, some characteristic that bound people together, not ones that made them stand apart.

If Errera had been unsure of Milgram’s reason for tape-recording and watching each session, it would have become clear in this conversation.
Milgram was consumed with his research. He had achieved extraordinary results; all he had to do was find a way to explain them. And here he was, two years after the experiments ended, still looking for an answer. The meetings were an opportunity not only to establish that he had not harmed his subjects but also to find an answer to the question of why they behaved as they did.

This close focus was obvious in Milgram’s approach to planning the interviews, too. The administrative detail had been left to him. He chose the same room in which most of the experiments had taken place as the meeting venue, with the recording equipment and one-way mirror still present. This could simply be viewed as unfortunate, but it also appears to reveal that Milgram found it difficult to let go of the role of scientific observer. He seemed less interested in subjects learning more about themselves and more interested in what he could learn about them.

Errera, on the other hand, was focused on helping people to understand why they had behaved as they did. He offered a kind of in-depth debriefing that probed their feelings and helped them to accept their actions. His gentle style encouraged subjects to come to their own conclusions, as with a man who said he stopped because it was against his principles.

Errera: Is it principles? I’m asking . . . this is one of the things we are learning by. . . . What makes a person stop and another not stop?

Subject 405: When they don’t stop, they’re sadistic to a degree.

Errera: Is that what you think it is? Could be. This is your feeling?

Subject 405: This is my feeling, but I am completely—strictly a high school graduate—and I am limited as to what makes people tick psychologically.

Errera: You’re not limited as to what makes you tick. You know yourself pretty well. You’ve been living with yourself for a few years now.
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It was Errera who was aware of the unfortunate associations of the setting and commented on it apologetically to subjects. It was also Errera who, in the third meeting, brought Milgram out from behind the mirror to answer practical questions about the experiments that Errera couldn’t. Perhaps Milgram misinterpreted this invitation: the following week, he joined the group as Errera was winding down the meeting. Milgram asked Subject 405, the same man Errera had coaxed to talk about what made him “tick,” whether he remembered pushing the learner’s hand onto the shock plate and how he felt about it. Milgram wasn’t interested in the man’s principles but in finding out what made him stop.

Milgram: Did you feel that the fact that you had to touch the man had anything to do with your not wanting to go on?

Man: I honestly don’t recall.

Errera interrupted. The hour was up, and he had to leave right at 7 P.M. for his next commitment. But after Errera had gone, Milgram persisted in questioning Subject 405. What did the learner say to him? Did he feel that the learner was really trying to prevent the shocks? What did he think he would have done if the learner had been in another room? Milgram quizzed the man to test the efficacy of the experiment, identify inconsistencies in instructions from Williams, and isolate any issues for his developing theory. In the transcript, the man sounded as if he were squirming under the persistence of Milgram’s inquiries.

At first glance, the neatly labeled boxes in the archives and the manila folders with their numbers instead of names look organized and scientific. In addition to the subject files and copious notes, there are boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and photographs. The sheer amount of information jumbled together is overwhelming. It seemed as if Milgram were trawling, trailing a huge net to capture all sorts of information that he would go through later.

Some of the data that Milgram gathered and statistical analyses he
had done seem absurd. Someone recorded the numbers of times each subject laughed and smiled during the experiment. Then the numbers were analyzed by condition to see if there was a pattern. But there was no answer for why they were laughing. It was as if only numbers could give an explanation.

Milgram seems never to have doubted the meaning of his results; he knew early on that he had found Nazis in New Haven. But explaining the how and why of what they did was another matter.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, during the months that Milgram was making his preparations for the experiment, set the stage for how he would later interpret his subjects’ behavior. The Nuremberg trials had finished in 1948. Since then, Eichmann, a high-ranking official in the Nazi hierarchy, was the most wanted of the high-profile Nazis still at large. He had been head of the section of the Gestapo that led the enforced relocation and mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps. After the war, Eichmann hid for a while in Allied prisoner-of-war camps, and then fled to Argentina with his wife and children in 1950. In the spring of 1960, Israeli agents tracked him to a suburb of Buenos Aires, kidnapped him, and smuggled him out of the country.

Despite international protests, Israel went ahead with plans for his trial. A large theater in western Jerusalem, Beit Ha’am, was chosen as the venue, and plans were made to accommodate a large media contingent; of the 756 seats in the theater, 474 were reserved for media. In a television first, the trial was to be filmed, edited, and rushed to nearby Lod airport for dispatch to major U.S. and European networks. Footage of the trial would be shown in thirty-eight countries. Of all the nations, America would be shown the most footage—up to an hour a day from the previous day’s proceedings.

The trial began on April 11, 1961, with much anticipation, particularly among Jewish survivors. Due to the dearth of photographs of him, this would be the first time that most had seen the man charged with responsibility for the killing of Jews. Security was tight. The audience was separated from the stage by bulletproof glass and onstage a bulletproof glass box surrounded the dock.
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In the lead-up to the trial, Eichmann’s crimes had been identified, elaborated, and discussed in detail. By the time the trial began, people
were expecting to see a monster. But his appearance in the dock was an anticlimax: Eichmann, with his balding pate, dark suit, and large, horn-rimmed glasses, looked disappointingly ordinary. His appearance supported his defense: that he was a small cog in the vast machinery of state, his only crime having been that “his flaw was unfailing obedience.” Some felt Eichmann should be tried wearing his SS uniform.
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The televised trial was a landmark in television history. The close-ups of Eichmann, audience reactions during the trial, and the immediacy of the day-old footage gave American viewers the sense of being in the front row, witness to events as they unfolded. In addition, Americans were likely to have heard the term “the Holocaust” for the first time during these broadcasts. Through Eichmann, the Holocaust entered American living rooms and into the popular consciousness. His trial educated a new generation and rekindled interest in the experience of European Jews under Nazism. Milgram, described by his wife as a “news addict,” likely followed the trial closely.

The presentation of Eichmann in the American media emphasized his ordinariness, suggesting that his crimes had not been the result of anything specifically “German” in his psychology. Jeffrey Shandler, a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, argued that, unlike the Israelis, who established the trial as a way of alerting the world to a specific historical event, the American media cast the narrative more broadly, framing it not as the trial of an individual but of all humankind. American viewers were told that they were witnessing evidence of psychological crimes that, by implication, could have taken place anywhere.
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From the beginning of Milgram’s research, his description of his subjects echoed this media portrayal of Eichmann. He stressed the ordinariness of the men in his lab, their imperviousness to the suffering they were inflicting, their lack of remorse, and their unthinking obedience to the commands of authority.