Behind the Shock Machine (32 page)

But these subjective doubts never made their way into official accounts of his research. Publicly, Milgram presented as the objective, rational scientist. Out of those hundreds of boxes and thousands of sheets of paper now archived, Milgram presented statistics—voltage level and percentages—as his primary data. In writing his article, he simplified a mass of complex information into a case of whether people were obedient or not. What mattered was purely behavioral: their hand on the switch. Only in his unpublished writings and notes can we see that he struggled with what he was doing to the people he’d recruited for the research.

The apprehension over the ethical implications of Milgram’s experiments continued to grow during his last semester at Yale. It was in February 1963 that Yale, concerned over the treatment of Milgram’s subjects, initiated the series of follow-up interviews by Dr. Paul Errera. Ironically, this turn of events provided Milgram with an opportunity to act on the criticisms in Hall’s letter.
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Paul Errera was a good choice. Having worked with war veterans, he was used to dealing with men who were experiencing problems as a result of highly stressful events. Errera’s son Claude told me that his father’s stint as an intern at New Haven Correctional Center had sensitized him to the suffering of war veterans, a number of whom were awaiting trial at the center.

Errera began his meetings on February 28, 1963. The 135 pages of transcripts are available in the archives, but I found them difficult to read because everyone taking part—Errera, the subjects, and Milgram—seemed at cross-purposes over why they were meeting. Milgram was hoping that Errera would find that no subjects had been harmed, although he later told subjects in one meeting that Errera’s role was “to spot people who have been seriously damaged by participating in the experiment.”
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Errera had the difficult position of having
to work alongside, but not become influenced by, Milgram. He was likely told to cooperate with Milgram, but he must have been surprised to find that Milgram would, on some occasions, be watching from behind the mirror. And who knew what the subjects thought? The letters of invitation were written in the third person but signed by Milgram, although they stated that Errera had been asked to make “an independent assessment” (just who asked him, Milgram doesn’t say). Only selected subjects were invited to participate, and they weren’t told why they had been chosen. They weren’t informed that there had been complaints to Yale or that other psychologists had raised questions about their welfare. In an echo of the newspaper ad Milgram had used to recruit them, the tone was flattering, implying that people might have been invited because of their intelligence and their ability to make a substantial contribution to “important work.”
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As Milgram discovered, people were reluctant to take up the invitation. He invited groups of twelve at a time, and on some occasions only one or two people showed up. The largest group was eight men, who arrived at the first meeting. Once it became clear that former subjects were wary about returning, Milgram began following up his letter with a phone call as a more persuasive method of convincing people to come. In total, Milgram invited more than 140 people, 20 percent of his original group of 780 subjects. Only thirty-two showed up.
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When Errera waited in the laboratory for his meeting at 6
P.M.
each Thursday, he never knew who would arrive. Nor was he prepared, at least at first, for the number of questions the subjects had. The first meeting functioned as a kind of debriefing: none of the men knew one another or how far the others had gone. While they waited for the rest of the group, four compared notes on their experiences, trying to piece together the story of each variation: Did your learner mention heart trouble? Were you in the same room? You got your orders by phone? Where was the experimenter? They turned to Errera to fill in the gaps. But Errera acknowledged that he hadn’t been briefed about the detail of the experiments: “I assume others of you also wonder what it’s all about. I think you—most of you—know more than I do. I’ve just started in this at this part, in terms of evaluating how you people feel about it afterwards.”

Instead, he was keen to keep to what he saw as the purpose of the meeting: “Some people have said, well, this can be very harmful—to put somebody through what you went through. It wasn’t quite a Korean concentration camp, but it was an unpleasant experience. . . . I am interested in what aftereffects does this have, because somebody could say, and I think maybe with a lot of justification, that what you went through is a very harmful experience.”
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In several meetings, Errera had to counter subjects’ fears that the meeting might be another experiment. In the second meeting, only he and one other man were present when a third arrived. It reminded him, the third man said, of arriving for the experiment and being met by two men who appeared to be strangers.

Man: I don’t really trust anything about the whole thing, including this session here. I never saw this guy at all in my life. You might be a graduate student of psychology as far as I’m concerned.

Errera: Let me just say here: this is not a hoax, to the best of my knowledge. I am a psychiatrist. I’m the—

Man: I’m assuming—I’m assuming—I’m operating as if that were true, but
[laughs]
I’m on edge.
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Perhaps as a result of this, at the third meeting Errera addressed these sorts of concerns early. “This is not another experiment,” he told subjects. This pattern continued throughout the interviews: “No, there is no trick here. I don’t expect you to believe me, why should you. . . . I’m a real psychiatrist and Subject 405 is a real maintenance mechanic and you’re a real counselor, I guess”; “the gimmick this time is that we’re trying to figure out, to understand why people acted the way they did in the experimental situation.”

Errera also allowed subjects to be critical of Milgram.

Man: I’m not just sure and I’m not the one that should in any way I suppose criticize a man such as Dr. Milgram, who probably knows what he’s doing far more than I know how to speak about it—

Errera: With that introduction, let’s go ahead.

Man: All right. I do question whether the setup here was, with sufficient controls, to get the desired result.

Errera: Huh, huh. I think that’s a very good question.

[. . .]

Man: I’m not too sure, either, whether it is the sound basis for determination of a principle to be ostensibly doing one thing and actually doing something else. This may or may not be a basis on which to inform an adequate judgment as to what people will do when asked to push a button that would destroy Switzerland, for instance. I’m not sure whether the basic premise is entirely right. . . . Maybe some of the people who went through with this would not push a button in warfare that would destroy many people.

Errera: . . . You’re right, you can only say that in this situation it happened, and it’s very dangerous to go beyond that.

Man: If it’s to be used as a basis of further conclusions, [then] I’m not sure whether those conclusions would be valid.

Errera: This is the important watchword in any kind of research, not to go beyond . . . just what you see . . .
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Errera’s interviews provided some subjects with the full and thorough debriefing they had thus far not been given. He listened and encouraged them to express their feelings. During each session, he asked open-ended questions; while not everyone was equally talkative in some of the larger group meetings, I imagine that the quiet ones got something out of listening to the others. Especially because, in each meeting, Errera sounded them out about how far they went on the machine.

Milgram’s role in the meetings, however, was ambiguous. Errera explained to each group that the session was being recorded and that
Milgram was watching from behind the mirror, but he didn’t explain why. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. When Milgram did interact with subjects, on the occasions when he came out to join the discussion, his behavior was changeable. When they seemed distressed, he was sympathetic, reassuring them that they shouldn’t feel bad. For example, when one man’s wife came to a meeting and told Milgram that her husband felt as if he was “acting as if [he] couldn’t think,” Milgram tried to put them both at ease.

Milgram: Well, they are not acting in terms of their own motives . . . you sort of give your thinking function over to this man and listen to what he says.

Subject 501: I thought I had the feeling, “Well, he’s controlling this thing and he’s completely controlling me.”

Wife: They still are—that’s the fourth cigarette you’re lighting.
[General laughter]

[. . .]

Milgram: . . . the whole point of the experiment is, in order to stop, you have to actually face—to face—defy this man, and say, “I’m not going to do it anymore.”

Man: Forty percent did.

Milgram: But they were—you see, it depends on a particular experimental condition you’re in. There are some conditions that were much more easy. For example where . . . you had to actually push [the learner’s] hand down to give him the shocks—he wouldn’t get the shock unless his hand was on a plate, and at a certain point he refused to press his hand on the plate.

At the end of the hour, as the subjects were leaving, Milgram was clearly still concerned about the man.

Milgram: Thanks very much for coming. I hope that—I really seriously hope that it did not—basically, I hope you don’t have the feeling that you would rather not have been in it. You may have that feeling [but] it’s an interesting life experience.
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At other times, it was as if Milgram were asking his subjects for their approval, perhaps wanting to be reassured that they were unharmed.

First man: We were the subjects, not the person getting the pain.

Second man: We were taking the punishment.

Milgram: In a way, that’s true. But how do you feel about the—do you think an experiment of this sort should—just forgetting that it’s Yale behind it, do you think that one should do an experiment of this sort, assuming that you do learn something? We learned something about human nature and that’s what the aim is, and yet is it proper to call a person in and to bribe him with $4.50 and the promising of an interesting experiment? . . . Do you think you’ve been abused by having been sucked into this?

First man: If I thought so, I wouldn’t be here now.

Second man: I think asking us over here—

Third man: I think it’s sort of a reward, but, I mean, we’re still in on it, so that—if we just never heard anything about it maybe then we would have been a little bit annoyed after a while.
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Yet sometimes Milgram was defensive. In the following exchange, after Errera had left for the evening, Milgram argued vehemently with a man who challenged his statement that only subjects were qualified to judge whether such experiments should be allowed.

Milgram: One of the problems is that some of the most interesting questions of human nature do touch on moral dimensions.
Now, ordinarily as a scientist you’re interested in creating situations that increase behavior or decrease it along this particular dimension. This means, in a sense, on the one hand, that you’re inducing people to do things that from many standpoints may be considered immoral. That’s probable, but how do you deal with it? Those significant aspects of behavior which we call morally—morally relevant—I must—it’s a dilemma . . .

Man: This question may be out of line or not fruitful to even discuss now, but may I just ask it? Can you get any guidance at all from other psychologists, or other psychiatrists, who are more objective?

Milgram: I haven’t found it very helpful, particularly people who haven’t seen the experiment. They tend to express the same kind of concern that you’ve expressed for others, but the only concern that’s truly important is what one—how you feel in person? And if you’ve gone through it and you’re glad you’ve gone through it, if you are . . . that’s the only answer. Why deny to another person what you regard as a positive experience?

Man: Well, I would like to ask Dr. Errera if he was here . . . are you saying that no psychiatrist reading this thing or looking at it could really understand what went on unless he were a subject?

Milgram: Well, he has to be a psychiatrist who has had contact with the subjects who’ve been in it and that’s one of the reasons why Dr. Errera was here.

Man: Oh, I see.

Milgram: I think it’s a difficult question. I don’t think one should make it more difficult than it is because, after all, people have been through—let’s say people have been through concentration camps, and you ask them, “Are you glad you were in—if you had the choice would you do it again?” There’s no question, you see. No, I wouldn’t have done it again if I had the choice and the—

Man: ’Course this is kind of an iffy question.

Milgram: The kind of manipulations to which you’re subjected in the real world by all sorts of people who have no interest in values that you cherish, like scientific advance, is extraordinary, and—

Man: But of course they’re not taking advantage of your—I don’t know. We’ve been over this and I see your point without being able to—