Behind the Shock Machine (34 page)

It’s no wonder that the media leapt on the article: it met all the criteria for a highly newsworthy story. In the pages of a rather dry academic journal, Milgram appeared to have reported on something extraordinary. According to him, he had replicated the same processes of blind obedience that turned the wheels of destruction and murder in Nazi Germany but with ordinary Americans. He also made much of the surprising and shocking nature of the obedient subjects’ behavior and how observers were astounded by the results.

But, curiously, Milgram seemed desperate to limit the publicity. He turned down several offers, telling ABC broadcaster Ted Koppel that
he did not want the experiment publicized “at this time.” He even went so far as to phone and telegram Walter Sullivan, a
New York Times
reporter, to discourage him from publishing a story.
⁵

Just why he was so intent on keeping the research under wraps is unclear. It could have been because he was still hoping to conduct more research—although, six months earlier, he had assured the NSF that no further experiments were planned.
⁶
It might simply have been that he was worried that premature news of his research would make his book old news by the time it was published.

The flurry of press reports tended to emulate the emphasis of the
New York Times
story, focusing on the sensational aspects of the results. Newspaper reports reproduced and strengthened Milgram’s claims about human nature. Journalists translated Milgram’s scientific prose for lay readers and frequently used the second person, inviting readers to identify with the subjects and to view themselves as “potential Nazis.”
⁷
It tells us something about the power of science that reporters disseminating news of the experiment, which was beamed worldwide, had failed to report or failed to notice that the condition that Milgram wrote about in his article was the first one he had conducted and involved just forty men.

Only a handful of pieces questioned the morality of Milgram’s methods. An editorial in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, published on November 2, 1963, concluded that “the more genuine gauge of human cruelty was not the subjects but the experimenters; that the showing was not one of blind obedience but of open-eyed torture” and questioned whether “there was anything in the performance worthy of a great university.”

Milgram responded quickly, arguing that the responsibility for the experiment was his and that Yale had in fact “advised caution.” But he had gone ahead with his “test of humanity” because he felt that it was important to “teach men to be free from destructive obedience.” He wrote that he couldn’t have foreseen either the high rates of obedience or the high levels of stress and “unexpected tension and conflict” among his subjects (“an experimenter does not have a crystal ball in his pocket”). As for the accusation of cruelty, this was not a view shared by subjects, who “overwhelmingly endorsed”
the experiment. Finally, a doctor, Paul Errera, had conducted follow-up interviews with subjects and pronounced the experiment “safe.”
⁸
These points, along with his later assurances about the careful debriefing he offered, would become his standard response to accusations of cruelty.

Milgram
was
tempted by media interest in February 1964, even going so far as meeting with Dick Siemanowski, the executive producer of CBS’s
Chronicle
news program. Siemanowski described the proposed program in a follow-up letter:

The first half of the show would be devoted to your description of the nature and conditions of the experiment. I think what we could accomplish here is what you suggested in our conversation, namely, we could build up in our audience the kind of anticipation of results which the experiment and the film would counter.

Clearly, Siemanowski had realized that one of the compelling features of the research was the pitting of expectations about how people would behave against the reality of what they did. The second half, Siemanowski went on, would include a moderated discussion between Milgram, Hannah Arendt, and social psychologist Erich Fromm.
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Milgram would, by implication, join the ranks of leading Jewish American intellectuals. But Milgram backed away. Two days later, he had his literary agent, Joan Daves, tell CBS to “hold off any TV commitments [for] . . . a year or 18 months.” It was a decision she agreed with: “I believe the decision to hold off is the right one. I will be in a stronger position to negotiate and the exposure and publicity will be of great benefit to the book.”
¹⁰

While reaction from the media was immediate, reactions from Milgram’s peers took longer to make themselves known. Journal articles could take months before they made their way into print, so the first published response from a fellow psychologist, Diana Baumrind, did not appear until June 1964, eight months after Milgram’s article. Unlike most of the media reports, Baumrind’s focus was on Milgram’s methods rather than his results.

For many American psychologists, Baumrind’s highly critical
article—published in
American Psychologist
, a high-profile journal distributed to all the members of the APA—would have been their first introduction to Milgram’s research. Baumrind described her misgivings forcefully. His obedience experiment, she argued, raised the ethical issue of the duty of care that researchers owed to participants. She was bothered by what she saw as his “posture of indifference” toward his subjects. She questioned how, given the trauma that his subjects went through, his cursory debriefing could have prevented long-term damage to their self-esteem or faith in authority. After all, she argued, many people must have left the lab with new and perhaps unwelcome knowledge of what they were capable of, and the “friendly” debriefing that Milgram described offered them little chance to express any anger. Milgram, Baumrind argued, had underestimated the potential for long-term psychological harm, and his “casual assurances” that no one was harmed were “unconvincing.”

Second, Baumrind argued that Milgram was less concerned with his subjects’ welfare because he felt the gain in knowledge outweighed their distress—but she doubted that Milgram could justify any risk of harm to subjects on the grounds that the results offered “concrete benefit to humanity.” She challenged the link that Milgram sought to make to Nazism. The social psychologist’s laboratory, she argued, could hardly replicate a “real-life experience” such as Nazi Germany. His subjects had little in common with SS subordinates: the SS man was likely to regard his victims as subhuman and believe both he and his superior officer were working together for a “great cause.” The guilt and conflict of Milgram’s subjects were further evidence that the parallel between the Yale laboratory and concentration camps was weak. She implied that experiments such as Milgram’s brought the profession into disrepute and should not be condoned.
¹¹

While the appearance of Baumrind’s article was unexpected—Milgram later said that he had had no warning of it—the content wouldn’t have been a surprise. He had already had plenty of evidence of others’ uneasiness and distaste for his research. As he put it in a letter to Leon Mann, “There have [
sic
] been foreboding from
the timorous, the concerned, and the stupid for many years now.”
¹²
And even before the article, Milgram seems to have been marshaling arguments in his defense. In a document dated April 1964, Milgram anticipated just the sort of points that Baumrind would make. He described “several well known studies” in which “considerable degrees of stress were considered acceptable for the attainment of particular research goals.” One study of the effects of sensory deprivation had handcuffed and blindfolded subjects, making them spend twenty to forty hours exposed to constant noise. As a result, they hallucinated and felt “extreme anxiety and severe malfunctioning of the psychic system.” He cited another study in which subjects were drugged without their knowledge and “provoked into states of extreme emotional arousal.” He also included Asch’s experiment in this litany of predecessors, of which he said that subjects were “likely to feel great stress and conflict” because they were forced to lie and could “feel ashamed and devalued.” If other psychologists got away with pressuring subjects to lie, giving them electric shocks, and terrifying them by pouring smoke into a room, he argued, why was he any different? He was merely continuing an experimental tradition.
¹³

However, his private reaction to Baumrind’s article was not nearly as full of bravado. She had obviously touched a nerve. Among his papers at Yale, there’s a drawing of a dog with a human head, captioned, “After reading Dr. Baumrind’s article, I feel bad.”
¹⁴
It’s dated June 1964, and Milgram must have drawn it just after he got his copy of the APA journal.

Milgram obviously felt aggrieved at being singled out for criticism, especially in such a high-profile publication. He told one interviewer that he “wasn’t prepared for criticism of that sort, being rather thin-skinned.”
¹⁵
He had some justification in this: ethically questionable psychology research had existed long before his, but published criticism of it was rare. Yet he may have failed to understand the social context surrounding Baumrind’s article. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and antiwar demonstrations—which Milgram would probably have been sympathetic to, given his apparently liberal political views—meant a change in what was seen as acceptable treatment
of subjects in scientific research.
¹⁶
What had been par for the course was now under scrutiny.

Even though Baumrind’s criticisms echoed many of the doubts he had struggled with during his research, Milgram made no mention of this in his published reply. Nor did he reveal that for more than three-quarters of his subjects, the “dehoaxing” didn’t take place for months, and, when it did, it was by letter. His reply was a variation on the same arguments he had given in his letter to the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
he claimed that the stress his subjects experienced wasn’t intentional and that he hadn’t expected either the high levels of obedience or the degree of distress. While a lab was certainly not the same as a death camp in Nazi Germany—it was a “background metaphor”—it was important that he had been able to illuminate the power of authority. He also argued that he did treat his subjects with dignity and in fact assumed that they were capable of making choices about how to behave, in contrast to Baumrind’s view that they were passive recipients of orders. While he agreed that their distress was intense, he argued that it was only temporary because he had conducted a “careful post-experimental treatment,” which included a “dehoax.” Most found it “instructive and enriching,” and 84 percent said they were glad to have taken part. Milgram also mentioned that the follow-up questionnaire and interviews had found no evidence of long-term harm. He promised that the detailed results of the questionnaire and Errera’s report would be published in a “forthcoming monograph,” but he would never make good on this promise.
¹⁷

But if he thought he had laid the ethical controversy to rest, Milgram was wrong. The public disagreement sparked what has been called “the most intense debate on research ethics in the history of psychology,” contributing to a crisis of confidence among social psychologists that would continue until the late 1970s.
¹⁸
Baumrind’s dissatisfaction with experiments such as Milgram’s was echoed and amplified by a chorus of critics, who engaged in a public reexamination of the role of the discipline, its motives, and its methods in journal articles and book chapters during the next decade.

Some felt strongly that this form of social science dehumanized
participants, subjecting them to embarrassing and traumatic experiences in the name of science. They argued that the lab had become “a theater where experimenters get to stage-manage their creative fantasies” with little thought of the emotional cost for those involved. Experimentation had become an intellectual game for many of the psychologists who used deception; they competed with one another in a kind of macho one-upmanship to see who could come up with the most ingenious scenarios. The goal of social psychological research, an increasing number of critics complained, seemed to be to provide intellectual amusement for experimenters, who confused “notoriety with achievement” and engaged in gimmicky manipulations that offered little serious contribution to the understanding of human behavior.
¹⁹

Others argued that creating such believable and vivid experiments was an art, and those creating them should be treated as artists. Shelley Patnoe noted:

The procedures became little dramas with the subject as both the star and the audience. . . . Giving form to emotional experience is one central function of art. These men were creating art and then testing it. Seen in this light, it is possible to understand some of the frustration expressed by experimental psychologists when the ethics of their enterprise came into question. They reacted as painters would if deprived of the nude for study, simply on the grounds of moral outrage.
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Psychologists of this ilk, Milgram among them, saw their work as a validation of the discipline—their experiments were grand revelations of the depths of the human soul, in the same manner as art. For such psychologists, the end justified the means, and many no doubt felt that the subjects should be honored to have been included in such a triumphant scientific exercise at all.