Behind the Shock Machine (39 page)

He goes on to mention six, including Herb Winer, and concludes: “These few names symbolize the 900 individual men and women, who came to our laboratory and displayed their humanity for the benefit of human understanding.”
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I knew that at least two of the six men he named had taken up their complaints directly with Milgram. If Herb was anything to go by, Milgram would likely have taken each man into his confidence, making them feel like co-researchers engaged in a study of terrific import.

This idea was supported by his private papers. He wrote:

I have been on the friendliest terms with several of the subjects. . . . Sometimes, after I encounter a professional psychologist who [criticizes] the experiment’s “brutality” and cruelty (these qualities being attributed to the investigator) and I am suitably depressed for the day, I sometimes come across a subject in the Post Office or on the street, and such subjects seem invariably delighted to meet me, pump my hand with warmth and may even say: “That was one of the most fascinating experiences I ever had; I want to thank you for that; and don’t forget to include me in your next study.” Only then do I remember that the . . . criticism has no foundation in reality—the only reality of importance here . . . is—the subjects themselves, the people who were in the experiments.
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But it was an odd statement from a man so unsympathetic in some of his character portraits. It’s one of the curious inconsistencies of the experiments, and indicative of Milgram’s ambivalence toward his subjects, that he demonstrated an almost sentimental view of some subjects while lambasting others in print. It is ironic that, on the one hand, he gave his subjects the ultimate authority for judging whether the experiments were acceptable, and yet on the other he discounted their experiences, thoughts, and feelings in his book. He excluded almost all of the vast material from their point of view. And when he did include some, it was with a warning to the reader about its reliability.

Far from being a scientific monograph,
Obedience to Authority
includes photographs, anecdotes, case studies, transcripts from television news reports, and references to popular culture from
The Caine Mutiny
to
Dr. Strangelove
. But amid the wide-ranging cultural references, the details of elaborate preparations, and the character portraits, Milgram’s purpose was serious. He was determined to defend and bolster his results.

With
Obedience to Authority
, Milgram was anxious to rebut some of the academic criticism that had dogged him for over a decade. Banished from the pages was any information that might give his critics ammunition. And just as Milgram’s subject portraits were carefully crafted, so was his own. He presented himself as a thorough, careful, and neutral scientist who had discovered, not planned, the profound and disturbing results of his research. He had merely set the stage; it was his subjects who had behaved in a “shockingly immoral way.”
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The vast majority of the subjects were glad to have taken part, and the psychological insight gained dwarfed any trauma to subjects. Anything that might undermine this portrait of an unbiased man of science was gone. Condition 24 was not mentioned; subjects’ skepticism or disbelief was dismissed in an appendix; and the laughter of his subjects, which he made so much of in his first paper, received only a passing mention.

A critical issue for scientific credibility is whether an experiment can be conducted in other laboratories and produce the same results. Milgram reported that his experimental results had been replicated in Australia, South Africa, Germany, and Italy, all finding even higher rates of obedience than he had. This was a key claim to support the universality and importance of his findings. However, it was misleading. Contrary to what he wrote, the Australian study found significantly lower levels of obedience than Milgram’s; the authors of the Italian study had gone so far as to send him a newspaper report on their findings, which showed that they had also found lower levels. The German study appeared to find similar results, but had used university students and variations on Milgram’s conditions. As for the South African replication, Milgram provided no reference details, but Tom Blass succeeded in tracking it down, finding an unpublished student report involving only sixteen subjects.
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Why the deliberate obfuscation? Milgram seemed irrationally intent on proving that he had identified something universal. This
was in stark contrast to Solomon Asch, who, when a replication by two British researchers failed to mirror his results, commended the researchers for their “intriguing” finding and acknowledged that he had probably captured something transient about American culture, a fleeting mood inspired by the Cold War.
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But Milgram, his experiment beset by criticism, could perhaps not afford such magnitude. Or perhaps he was unwilling to give it.

Apart from this misleading information, did he address the criticism successfully, and convince readers that his results were persuasive?

Milgram sent out sixty-nine copies of his book when it was published. At the top of the list was Hannah Arendt. His publisher sent review copies to over 170 newspapers in forty-two states and to sixty magazines around the United States.
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The reaction from the mass media was immediate. Milgram’s book gave his research new power. His publisher made the most of the attention, organizing a range of high-profile interviews, including on national and international television, in newspapers, and on radio. Parts of the book were serialized in London’s
Sunday Times
, and the BBC made a
Horizon
program about it that was broadcast in September 1974. Milgram’s British publisher urged him to agree to the program:

Horizon
have very high standards and they do not devote programmes to individuals of merely transient importance. I should hesitate to say that an appearance on
Horizon
is a passport to immortality—but it certainly counts very very heavily with the intellectual community in this country. And it also has striking effects on the sales of books.
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But reviews were mixed. Many promoted the importance of his findings, some calling them groundbreaking, but several worried about the ethical dimension, bringing the moral issues under public scrutiny in a way that had not been done before. Unlike the more sensational reports of the research in the early 1960s, with their focus on the results, this time reviewers displayed more sensitivity to, and interrogation of, research that had exposed people to such stress.
³³
Many questioned the price paid for the knowledge that Milgram claimed.

His results and theory were not immune from criticism, either. Most noticed that Milgram had largely ignored the 35 percent who disobeyed and commented on his tendency to make statements about humankind by generalizing from a 65 percent (and, in some variations, even lower) obedience rate. Some focused on the shortcomings of Milgram’s theory to account for obedience and bemoaned the fact that such a high-profile piece of research had yielded so little in terms of understanding.

Others criticized the book’s literary merit. Milgram wasn’t accomplished at character portraits. The chapters that describe the staff and the setup are vivid and lavish in detail, but the ten subjects remain wooden—one reviewer complained that they were “flatter than New England witches pressed beneath Puritan barn doors.”
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Nonetheless, the book was a National Book Award finalist.

I found forty-nine book reviews in Milgram’s papers at Yale. But I didn’t find the one with the highest profile among them. Stephen Marcus’s review ran on January 13, 1974, as a double-page spread in the
New York Times Book Review
. In addition to teaching English at Columbia, Marcus had been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford that year. While Milgram had expected controversy, Marcus’s criticism went far beyond the ethics or the results. It examined Milgram’s role itself.

The review began with a recap of the experiments, describing them as a “sinister combination of melodrama and visual excitement.” Marcus deftly summarized the ethical debate that had erupted in the 1960s and wrote that it was hard to know if the “furore” was about the methods or the results. He found it difficult to know which position to take: on the one hand, the effect on Milgram’s subjects was “incalculable,” and, on the other, “it’s important that we know or that we do not forget these things about ourselves.”

Having lulled readers with a general outline of the issues, Marcus then twisted the knife. When it came to analysis, it was “hard to know where in this woeful and lamentable performance to begin.” How
could he choose, he wondered, among the “intellectual calamities that make up this book”?

Marcus focused on three points. First, he alleged that Milgram was far from impartial. By paying attention to the language, readers could see how Milgram’s judgmental attitude revealed his “outright contempt” for some subjects. Second, Milgram’s use of abstract and vague terminology such as “autonomous man” and “malevolent authority” reflected woolly thinking. Last, and worst of all, in using mechanistic terminology borrowed from general systems theory and cybernetics, where people are “automata,” Milgram denied his subjects’ individuality. “In short,” Marcus concluded, “nothing has been explained. And a considerable part of that nothing has to do with the 35% or more who disobeyed in the experiments. About these, Milgram has nothing to say.”
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Roger Brown, one of Milgram’s mentors at Harvard, sprang to his defense. Brown’s reply to Marcus was published in the same pages on February 24.
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Alongside it was a letter from Saul Rosenzweig, a psychologist who supported Marcus’s point of view.

On
The Dick Cavett Show
soon afterward, Milgram was asked what he thought of Marcus’s review. He dismissed it as “not serious” and the reviewer as “not competent to review the book from a scientific standpoint, since he is a teacher of English.”
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Defenders made this point, too, the implication being that the book was best reviewed by a social psychologist. But I for one don’t buy this: it was written for the mass market, so if only a social psychologist could appreciate it, Milgram had failed in his aim.

I also wasn’t sure if Milgram had been as unaffected as he claimed. Harold Takooshian told me that, when the book was published, he and his classmates had ridden the emotional roller coaster of Milgram’s reactions to the reviews. “It showed in class. He didn’t conceal things about himself; he was open. He got very upset if it got negative reviews.” But at a celebratory dinner party to mark the book’s publication at Judith Waters’s house (presumably before the reviews began to run), Milgram had been able to admit that the book had flaws. He asked Waters’s twelve-year-old son, Mitchell, what he thought of it. Mitchell answered that “in the beginning of
the book when Dr. Milgram was first describing the experiment it was excellent but that, in [his] estimation, the interpretation at the end went far beyond the actual data.” Milgram took the boy’s feedback good-naturedly, and told him that his editor “had said much the same thing.”
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Two weeks after Marcus’s review, on March 24, the
New York Times Book Review
took what it said was an unusual step of publishing another letter because they considered it of “exceptional interest.” It was from Lawrence Kohlberg, a friend of Milgram’s who had interviewed some of his subjects. Kohlberg felt that the experiment fell short because Milgram merely reassured subjects rather than engaging in “moral dialogue.” Such a dialogue would have involved the experimenter reflecting on his behavior and recognizing his “moral vulnerability.” Kohlberg described standing behind the one-way mirror with Milgram, watching the subjects’ anguish as the experiment progressed. Just as the mirror acted as a buffer between them and the subjects, Milgram’s belief in “objectivity” prevented him from understanding the impact of the experiment. “He was another victim, another banal perpetrator of evil. Serving the authority science under the banner of ‘objectivity,’ he himself inflicted pain on others for greater social welfare.” Kohlberg admitted that he had been equally culpable by “turning it to my own intellectual advantage by researching it”: “I, too, used a utilitarian logic to justify my action, blinded by the idols of scientific psychology.” He regretted his passivity: “At the time I did not have what I now have, a conviction that I could have intervened, not by force but by moral reason to aid my friend Milgram in clarifying and developing his own moral reasoning about what he was doing.”
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I didn’t find this letter in the Yale archives either. It must have stung. Milgram would have felt betrayed because they had been friends, and he shared a particular bond with people he invited to stand with him behind the mirror.

Kohlberg’s description of the one-way mirror obscuring Milgram’s vision reminded me of what Hank Stam had said about the ethical debate obscuring the much bigger issue of whether the results meant anything at all. Judith Waters wrote that she didn’t think Milgram
ever expected the degree of notoriety or the passionate, often personal, criticism he got, and I think she was right.
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He seemed to maintain a curious attachment to the idea of scientific entitlement that he expected others to share.