Behind the Shock Machine (36 page)

This sounded familiar to me: Milgram as sympathetic but cruel; both warm and cold; encouraging and, a breath later, dismissive. I had encountered these same attitudes in the archives, in particular in his writings about his subjects. But although Milgram could be abrasive, Harold had no memory of any student standing up to him.

Milgram’s alternately gracious and rude manner extended to colleagues, too. According to Tom Blass, Milgram was “controlling and domineering” and behaved like a “prima donna” at CUNY. Tom suggested that Milgram’s mood swings—between dictatorial and democratic, between charming and scathing—could have been fueled by his use of amphetamines, cocaine, and marijuana, a practice that began in his student years at Harvard.

I asked Harold if he thought that his teacher’s behavior might have been influenced by his drug use, and he said he had “no firsthand knowledge” of this. Instead, he thought that one explanation for Milgram’s erratic behavior at CUNY could have been the stress of unwelcome and continual critical attention. He characterized Milgram as a “very sensitive man” whom criticism “hurt deeply.” He recalled that Milgram viewed criticisms of his research as a “trial by fire” and that responding to it “wore him down.”

It seemed that Milgram was particularly touchy about people who said that his results were predictable or little more than common sense. Harold told me, “One thing that really got to him was when he was giving a talk on obedience, and someone in the audience would
inevitably question Milgram’s claim that he was astonished by the extent of people’s obedience. Someone would ask, ‘Didn’t you know at some level that this would happen? You must have anticipated it.’ And he would get really angry. He felt it undermined the importance of his research, that the person was saying that it didn’t make a contribution. I remember one time he was really furious with a lady—we had to restrain him.”

No wonder he got so mad. The notion that he had made a profound discovery was a central justification for what he had done.

But Milgram also disliked being associated with only one piece of research. “He got tired of it. He saw it as only part of his career. He said in one article that he felt typecast in the same way the actor James Arness was typecast with
Gunsmoke
. He had been typecast with obedience. And yet most of his work was not obedience. He was such a creative researcher—his other research was so diverse, it had no relation to obedience.”
²⁸

And the criticism was totally unfair, Harold said. “There’s just no question about it: they were attacking what he found, rather than how he studied it.” People tuned out the research because the results made them uncomfortable. Was this what I was doing, I wondered, conscious of how hard I found it to pay attention as Harold went on to defend the research? “The worst you could say about it is that 12 percent of people wished they hadn’t participated. Eighty-four didn’t care or benefited. People attacked him as a boogeyman who did something unethical. Which wasn’t the case; he was never reprimanded by the APA—in fact, he was elected a fellow. Even his critics acknowledge that you can’t teach a course in social psychology or introductory psych without mentioning his work. It’s frozen in time.”

Harold believed that the fame of Milgram’s obedience research was proof of its value. “If people thought his work was unethical, they wouldn’t cite it. The fact that they do cite it means he won the day. They wouldn’t cite Nazi research on twins or things like that because they are unethical. And I would challenge anyone to find an introductory psych textbook that doesn’t cite his work.”

* * *

Carla Lewis, another of Milgram’s former students, was waiting for me and Harold when we got to the Indian restaurant on Broadway. Harold had asked her to meet us and share her reflections of the CUNY lecturer who had dazzled her back when she was a graduate student.

The restaurant was blessedly cool after the intense heat outside. Despite having caught the express from 125th Street in Harlem—which I imagined would have been hot and crowded—Carla looked cool and fresh. On our way up to the buffet, she told me that she always felt “so fortunate to have been taught by such a genius.”

Carla told me that she had kept all of her notes from Milgram’s classes for a long time after she had finished her degree.

Harold interrupted. “Don’t tell me you threw them out!” he exclaimed, aghast.

She looked sheepish. “I live in an apartment,” she said. “You always have to make room.”

Harold told us how a visiting Russian Milgram scholar had rummaged delightedly through Harold’s thirty-year-old lecture notes as if he’d struck gold.

I didn’t feel like eating; it was too hot. So I picked at my food while Carla told me that her class had worked with Milgram on his cyranoid study, named after Cyrano de Bergerac, the title character in a play who supplies his friend with just the right words to woo a lover. Milgram’s cyranoids repeated, word for word, what Milgram relayed to them through an earpiece from his hiding place behind a one-way mirror while the cyranoid was engaged in a supposedly natural conversation with a third person. Milgram was the ventriloquist, and the cyranoid was the dummy. The research was designed to explore how people form judgments of others. In one variation, Milgram sent two boys—one of whom was a cyranoid—to a selection panel of six teachers who would assess them for placement in their school. The panel recommended that the cyranoid boy be placed two years above the non-cyranoid boy. Carla said it was fascinating to watch other variations from behind the mirror—for example, as a shoe-shine boy spoke animatedly to a young woman about Greek philosophy and existentialism, being fed the lines by Milgram.

The cyranoid idea was just one of “a thousand ideas” that Milgram had at that time, according to psychologist and author Carol Tavris, who interviewed Milgram at CUNY in 1974 for
Psychology Today
. In her article, she summed him up tellingly: “I have never met anyone quite so serious about his whimsy or quite so logical about his imagination.”
²⁹

When I spoke to her on the phone from California, Carol told me that she had no trouble recalling the interview, even thirty-six years and countless interviews later. Milgram apparently sang her songs, read her stories, and showed her drawings. “I found him funny, charming, and very smart,” she said. “He was a dynamo, he was a flame, he was exuberant, he was exhilarated by ideas in psychology. Our conversation was freewheeling, very spontaneous. He loved social psychology—he loved coming up with ideas to show the influence of a situation. He was very committed, and full of passion for the work he was doing.”

Carol told me that, compared to other psychologists, Milgram was different because he didn’t follow the typical career path. “It was—and still is—usual to choose an area of research and stay there, and become expert in that, doing many different refinements of it. In contrast, Milgram did excellent research on a wide variety of topics, from obedience to cognitive maps to the ‘familiar stranger,’ but because he was such a good experimenter he got away with it. That is, his colleagues respected his work rather than seeing him as a dilettante.”

Milgram certainly wasn’t a stuffy academic. “His appeal was that he was interesting, lively, and passionate about his work and its importance to the ‘real world.’ He took social psychology out of the ivory tower and brought it straight into people’s lives.”

Perhaps it was this—his sense of fun, his playfulness, and his passion, which drove him from one research topic to another—as well as the notoriety of his obedience research, that hampered him professionally. During his time at CUNY, Milgram failed to get funding for his many project ideas. While he obviously had a lot of “idiosyncrasy credit” with his students, the same couldn’t be said with professional funding bodies. Funding would have given him the capacity to turn
ideas into measurable problems, but would also represent the endorsement of the psychology community. The obedience research and the continuing controversy it had sparked might have made him famous, but it had cast a shadow over his reputation.

But Milgram had something up his sleeve that he hoped would silence his critics and put any criticisms of his obedience research to rest. It was his book
Obedience to Authority
.

10

MILGRAM’S BOOK

It wasn’t until I was through customs at Calgary International Airport that I realized I didn’t know who to look for. I had never seen Hank Stam; I had only e-mailed him and read his articles. I glanced around anxiously.

Luckily, we found each other surprisingly quickly. He looked like a Hank: tall and tanned with thick, graying hair. Dependable-looking. I probably looked how I felt: startled and out of place.

I had come to Canada because it was home to a thriving community of scientists and historians who had a more critical view of North American social psychology. They were interested in the psychology of the psychological experiment.

Hank, a professor at the University of Calgary, had pinned black-and-white photographs of two of Milgram’s subjects on the bulletin board behind his desk.
¹
One was a plump, giggling woman in a pillbox hat and cat’s-eye glasses. The other was a man with his head bowed, mouth open in a wide smile. These photographs are stills from the documentary film
Obedience
, which Milgram shot in May 1962. Hank and his colleagues Lorraine Radtke and Ian Lubek had been fascinated by the laughter of Milgram’s subjects. They had also been fascinated over the years by the laughter of their students when they watched the film for the first time.

“Why do the students laugh?” Hank wondered aloud. “Is it nervous laughter? Is it because the film looks like a sixties period piece—is that what makes it funny? Or are they laughing because of what the film
says about social psychological research? Is it because they can’t take it seriously?”

No matter how often Milgram wrote about this laughter (and he did, on and off, for fifteen years), it was something that he never understood. Then again, he may never really have seriously tried to understand it—he saw it as symbolic and looked no further.

Hank sat opposite me behind his desk, the images of the two subjects just visible above his head. As he spoke, he stroked the ink blotter in front of him and, when he made a point, he made little chopping movements on the blotter with the edge of his hand.
Sssshh, ssshh; thump, thump
. It made a kind of music. Soothing and then unsettling.

Hank believed that Milgram’s research told us more about 1950s social psychology than anything else. Experiments like Milgram’s became important demonstrations of the power of the newly created discipline. “Look, we can show you in a laboratory the exact process by which the Holocaust occurred, and it applies to everybody—it’s a universal process. No matter who comes into the lab, we can create the right conditions. The implicit analogy is between the cholera bacteria, which becomes an epidemic. Here you have in a lab a demonstration of obedience to authority that, let loose on the world, becomes the Holocaust. You have this neat analogy. But without that rhetorical framework, Milgram’s experiments become no more than reality TV. It’s clothed as science and, once clothed as science, you can sell it as science. The rhetorical framing is crucial to the survival of the obedience studies.

“Do we understand what went on in Milgram’s lab? I think social psychologists have no idea what went on in there. They’ve called what someone does obedience, but if you change the context you could call it something else. Call it rule following, or trust.”
²

I looked at the gray clouds outside the window, threatening snow. Was it really as simple as that? In this warm office, in this moment, Hank’s analysis was convincing, but if I agreed with him, didn’t that mean that I had, somewhere along the way, accepted an alternative rhetorical frame through which to view the experiments? What about Milgram’s results? What about the number of people who went to the
maximum voltage? The hand on the switch, which had seemed to me so long ago a clear and unambiguous act, had become mysterious. I just wasn’t sure what it represented.

I tuned back to Hank, who seemed to have sensed my distraction. “There’s all sorts of ways of categorizing what Milgram’s subjects did. You could put another label on Milgram’s behavior, too. You could say he facilitated torture. He was asking those people to torture someone. He let them do it. They didn’t know that they weren’t. So wasn’t he in some sense facilitating torture?”

The heater was sending up ripples of air, making the photos on the notice board quiver. The giggling lady had her hand to her mouth, mischievously. Hank smoothed his hands across the blotter. “What do the results really tell us? And why did he ignore those conditions in his research that showed people resisting authority? He had this other story in mind already. He knew what success would look like.”

Take another look at Milgram’s journal articles, Hank told me, and compare them to the film. He gestured at the photos behind him. “People are absent. There’s no sense of actual people participating. He has established an experimental context that is abstract. Milgram refers to what happens in terms of functional categories: subjects, obedience, conformity, and conditions. You have no real sense of who people are and what they are doing.” And neither, Hank implied, did Milgram.

So, I asked him, it all came down to what label you put on the subjects’ behavior, on Milgram’s? Hank shrugged. “You get a 65 percent aggregate response, but you know nothing about why they did it. People are defined by what they do or don’t do in the lab. There’s a kind of emptiness, as if psychologists are interested in just one small aspect of people. In fact, they were real people with real lives somewhere.” To really understand what went on in the experiment, Hank said, one had to understand people “not just as those things that appear briefly in the lab and interact with the equipment,” but to look at the world in which they lived. For an experiment that claimed to be about social psychology, to Hank it had a “very limited perception of the social world.”