Behind the Shock Machine (38 page)

Milgram provided lengthy case studies of individual subjects in his book. However, he warned that even though each person’s experience gave us “clues” as to why they behaved as they did, we shouldn’t rely on such accounts:

While we must take seriously everything the subject says, we need not necessarily think that he fully understands the causes of his own behavior. A line must be drawn between listening carefully to what the subject says and mistaking it for the full story. The subject is controlled by many forces in the situation beyond his awareness, implicit structures that regulate his behavior without signaling this fact to him.
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This disclaimer had the effect of reinforcing negative stereotypes and casting doubt on the notion that subjects were reliable narrators—particularly the sort of people who obeyed orders from authority.

Milgram’s descriptions of ten subjects reveal that he associated obedient behavior with lower intelligence, less education, and the working classes.
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In contrast, his defiant subjects are depicted as intelligent, educated, and middle to upper class. For example, here is a description of Jan Rensaleer:

The subject is a thirty-two-year-old industrial engineer, sporting blond hair and a mustache. He is self-contained and speaks with the trace of a foreign accent. He is neatly dressed. In the interview he tells us that he emigrated from Holland after the Second World War and that he is a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. He is mild-mannered and intelligent.

In Milgram’s eyes, Jan Rensaleer was cultured, well turned out, polite, and smart. Although he defied the experimenter at 225 volts, “he still feels responsible for administering any shocks beyond the victim’s first protests. He is hard on himself and does not allow the structure of authority in which he is functioning to absolve him of any responsibility.”

Contrast that with the description of Bruno Batta, a working-class man who was simply dressed:

Mr. Batta is a thirty-seven-year-old welder. He was born in New Haven, his parents in Italy. He has a rough-hewn face that conveys a conspicuous lack of alertness. His over-all appearance is somewhat brutish. An observer described him as a “crude mesomorph of obviously limited intelligence” . . . [yet] he relates to the experimenter with a submissive and deferential sweetness.

Implying that Batta was slow, Milgram noted, “He has some difficulty in mastering the experimental procedure and needs to be corrected by the experimenter several times.” Batta, who was required to push the learner’s hand onto the electric plate to receive the shock, at first ignored the learner’s complaints and continued. Milgram’s description of his behavior was far from flattering:

He maintains the same rigid mask. The learner, seated beside him, begs him to stop, but with robotic impassivity he continues the procedure. What is extraordinary is his apparent total indifference to the learner; he hardly takes cognizance of him as a human being. . . . The scene is brutal and depressing: his hard, impassive face showing total indifference as he subdues the screaming learner and gives him shocks. He seems to derive no pleasure from the act itself, only quiet satisfaction at doing his job properly.
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As scholar Omer Bartov pointed out, these portraits reflected Milgram’s assumptions, rather than facts, about Nazis.
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Milgram seemed to have held a belief that the morally weak were more likely to be less educated and of lower class. Unlike Jan Rensaleer, whose behavior Milgram excused sympathetically, Batta was an object of disgust. Rensaleer expressed his remorse; Batta, it was implied, felt none.

But it was Milgram’s portrait of housewife Elinor Rosenblum that made me consider whether his dislike of some subjects went beyond their education level and class. This passage, unlike the others, did not begin with her age or a physical description—instead, it was her personality that was the focus. Milgram’s sarcasm was palpable as he related her achievements to the readers:

Mrs. Rosenblum takes pleasure in describing her background: she graduated from the University of Wisconsin more than twenty years ago, and her husband, a film distributor, attended Dartmouth. She does volunteer work with juvenile delinquents once a week and has been active in the local Girl Scout organization and the PTA. She is fluent and garrulous and projects herself strongly, with many references to her social achievements.

This uncharitable portrait continued as Mrs. Rosenblum proceeded with the experiment: “She attempts to project an image of competence and social grace. . . . She maintains a pretentiously correct, almost authoritative tone in reading the word pairs to the learner, which contrast with the weak, girlish comments she directs to the experimenter.”

Afterward, in discussing her reactions with the experimenter, Elinor explained that she was “nervous because I was hurting him” and still shaking. Milgram concluded, “She was nervous not because the man was being hurt but because she was performing the action. . . . A self-centered quality permeates her remarks.”
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I was fascinated by this searing portrait of Elinor Rosenblum. I wanted to know why Milgram disliked her so intensely, apart from her obedience. What had she done that had so antagonized him? I went looking for her in the archives and found her. As Milgram’s pseudonym suggested, she was Jewish. She was also a forty-four-year-old whose parents had been born in Poland and Germany. When I listened to the tape, I could see why she had antagonized Milgram, who appeared to have been watching from behind the mirror, and Williams. She wasn’t a willing or passive recipient of Williams’s orders—she was firm and sassy. After Williams gave her a sample shock, he asked her to estimate the voltage that she’d just been given.

Elinor: 255?

Williams: No—

Elinor:
[interrupts]
That was terrible.

Williams: That was 45 volts.

Elinor: Oh, don’t give him that, he’ll have a heart attack, cross my heart. You don’t have to do that with an adult. It’s ridiculous! Give him the very littlest! Give him that.

As Williams embarked on his rapid spiel, she corrected him when he made a mistake, then stopped him to ask if he could repeat the instructions.

At only 120 volts, when McDonough said that his heart was bothering him, she started to falter. When she read the word pairs, she deliberately emphasized the right answer. She sounded positively elated when McDonough got one right and said loudly, “Correct!” What was going through her mind, I wondered, when Williams, who could clearly hear her prompting McDonough with the right answer, said nothing to stop her? She got bolder. Her emphasis became more pronounced, but even so, McDonough got the next one
wrong. She kept up a running commentary to Williams: “I’m worried, I’m shaking, I’m shaking here.” But he would only tell her to keep going.

Within minutes, she was challenging the experiment’s rationale, telling Williams that the idea of shocking a person to help them learn was “ridiculous.” She worked with high school dropouts, she said, and punishing them was not the answer. The way to help people to learn was praise, encouragement, and love.

Milgram related this in his book, too, but he used it to highlight what he saw as her hypocrisy—she was a “loving” leader to the boys but willingly shocked McDonough. He did not say that she told Williams repeatedly how much she was shaking, or how horrified she sounded when Williams kept telling her to continue, or how at times she almost shouted the correct answer to McDonough as the voltage climbed.

When it was over, and she had gone to the maximum voltage, Williams gave her a form to complete while he unstrapped McDonough. She was shaking so hard she couldn’t write. As the debriefing began, she turned on Williams.

Elinor: Well, you asked me and I told you it was ridiculous, the whole thing!

Williams: It isn’t, really; it isn’t, really. From a scientific viewpoint, we are actually—

Elinor:
[talking over him]
Why should you, why should you? You wanted to see how I feel in punishing someone.

Williams: Well, not—well, something like that. We’re interested in—

Elinor:
[to McDonough]
I didn’t want to do it to you. I didn’t know what to say to you when you came out here. Forgive me, please.

Later, Williams told her that she had behaved normally—just as a
nurse would in giving an injection to a protesting patient because the doctor had ordered her to.

Elinor: There’s a difference. A complete difference.

Williams:
[sounds irritated]
Well, sure.

Elinor: A complete difference. Being the oldest, there were many times I had to put iodine on my little brother or sister, let’s put it that way. I knew I was inflicting pain, but I didn’t get nervous—you know why?

Williams: Because it was to help them.

Elinor: That’s right.

Williams: Well, we know there are differences, but it’s, er, the situations do have some similarities.

Elinor: I don’t think so.

Williams: Well, the fact that they are inflicting pain and are reluctant to do so—

Elinor: But they’re helping them!

Williams: This is the similarity.

Elinor: No.

Williams: Well—

Elinor: No.

Williams: Well, okay.
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Elinor Rosenblum might have been an obedient subject, but that
wasn’t her only crime in Milgram’s eyes. She turned on Williams and refused to accept his explanation. There was a kind of horror and outrage in her voice. Milgram’s portrait of her was suffused with loathing not just because of her obedience during the experiment but also because of her disobedience afterward.

The book also describes Fred Prozi, the man who starred in Milgram’s documentary
Obedience
. He was fifty years old, unemployed, and dressed “in a jacket but no tie”: “He has a good-natured, if slightly dissolute, appearance. He employs working-class grammar and strikes one as a rather ordinary fellow.” It went without saying from this description that Prozi would eventually continue to the maximum voltage. Milgram described how he became agitated and argued with the experimenter, at one point pleading to check on the learner. The transcript that Milgram included bore witness to Prozi’s confusion and distress. Despite this, Milgram concluded:

The language employed by the participant is revealing. Despite the considerable tension of the situation, a tone of courtesy and deference is meticulously maintained. The subject’s objections strike us as inordinately weak and inappropriate in view of the events in which he is immersed. He thinks he is killing someone, yet he uses the language of the tea table.
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It was hard to believe, reading Milgram’s description, that this was the same man who, in the film, so attracted my sympathy. In the book, Milgram instructed readers to have no sympathy with him at all.

Pasqual Gino, or Subject 1817, was portrayed as a typical obedient subject. But Milgram did not mention something that he and Errera had discussed—Gino was under psychiatric care for a “nervous condition,” which we would nowadays call post-traumatic stress disorder. Without this information, Gino’s description of what he said to his wife when he got home seemed shocking and callous.

“I said to my wife, ‘Well, here we are, and I think I did a good job.’

“She said, ‘Suppose the man was dead?’

“‘So he’s dead—I did my job.’”
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Milgram couldn’t have asked for a better line, given his thesis about Eichmann, but it was merely another example of the way he selected and manipulated information to lead the reader toward a conclusion. The portraits of obedient subjects were shot through with what Omer Bartov labeled “contempt and disgust.”
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This depiction of his obedient subjects as proxies for Nazi perpetrators was evident in early drafts of the book. Here is a passage of imaginary dialogue in which the subject addresses the experimenter that Milgram wrote while the book was in its early stages:

Now we have given him the maximum current; is there anything more we can do to him. He was only a fat, flabby old man, garbage who deserves what he gets. This was an exhilarating moment for me; let me work by your side. I have always wanted a leader; the Germans have a word for it: Fuehrer. [Subject stands and raises his right arm.]
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He may well have written this in a spell of idle doodling but it is revealing. The individual has disappeared and an evil archetype has taken its place.

And yet, for all his manipulations, Milgram appeared to have a genuine fondness for some of his subjects. The book’s acknowledgments simply read: “I owe a profound debt to the many people in New Haven and Bridgeport who served as subjects.” But the draft version reflected at length on his gratitude:

Finally, but perhaps most important, grateful thanks to our 900 subjects, individual men and women who made this study possible. I remember many of them so vividly, fine men and women who, caught up in an altogether human conflict, and trying to resolving it according to their best sights. [
sic
] While we cannot mention all these contributors by name, perhaps I may take the liberty of mentioning a few.