Behind the Shock Machine (4 page)

My time at Yale was to mark the beginning of a project that would take up an increasing amount of space in my life in the years to come. I would find the voices of Milgram’s subjects in the archives—in audio recordings and in the notes they wrote on the questionnaires—and I met some, hearing firsthand what they remembered and how they felt. I also found Milgram’s voice, repeatedly editing, suppressing, and
shaping the story of his research to portray himself and his results in a particular light. My four-week trip turned into a four-year journey; as it turned out, I would find myself in New Haven many times. I expected to find a more complex story than the one I knew, but I was unprepared for the number of troubling questions that my research would raise. What I found led me to doubt issues I had once felt confident about. It caused me to mistrust Milgram as the narrator of events and, in turn, to question my own role as storyteller.

1

THE MAN BEHIND THE MIRROR

As I entered Yale, the sound of traffic died away, swallowed up by the stone walls. The buildings would have looked exactly the same when Milgram’s subjects arrived for their appointments in the summer of 1961. I imagined them walking here at the end of the working day, in the heat of the late afternoon: the office workers with their jackets thrown over one arm, hats tipped back, mopping the sweat from their foreheads with large handkerchiefs; the working men in checked shirts with rolled-up sleeves, pausing, like me, to stare. I saw the women in cinched-waist dresses, hair swept into lacquered beehives, tip-tapping across the flagstones, cardigans slung over their shoulders. Some strolled, some hurried; some arrived with anticipation, others with no expectations at all. Many must have felt intimidated by stepping inside Yale for the first time. None could have foreseen the impact of the experiment in which they were about to take part.

I followed my Yale map to find the library. Eventually I found the manuscripts and archives section and entered through a studded wooden door framed by a sandstone archway. But I was dismayed to find that I couldn’t just start looking at Milgram’s papers. Most of the archival materials were stored offsite and delivered upon request, transported on trolleys through underground tunnels twice a day. The librarian glanced up at the clock—if I hurried and put the form in now, he said, the boxes themselves would be delivered in a couple of hours. In a rush, I filled out the form, flipping quickly through the finding aid that provided an overview of the contents of the 158 boxes.
But I didn’t know how big the boxes were, or how much material each contained. I quickly selected three that didn’t look as if they contained too many folders, conscious even as I did that this seemed a haphazard way to begin.

For the next couple of hours, I wandered the grounds of Yale impatiently until it was time for the boxes to rumble upward and into the light. I greedily opened the first box I’d ordered. It was filled with beige folders, each numbered and titled. I pulled them out, flipped through, and glimpsed funding applications, letters to government agencies, pages and pages of lists—disappointingly, it all seemed to be related to the funding and planning of the experiment. I was hoping that somewhere in all the boxes—those 90.25 linear feet of files—I’d hear from Milgram’s subjects. I pulled the second box toward me, fighting a sense of anticlimax and the desire to rush. I told myself to slow down and begin at the beginning.

I stood outside My Most Favorite Dessert, a kosher restaurant on West 45th Street in New York, holding a copy of Tom Blass’s book so that he would recognize me. It was 10
A.M.
but already baking hot, and no one else was nearby. I felt conspicuous standing there in the nearly empty street and studied the book’s cover to give me something to do. After three years of phone calls and e-mails, this was the first time that Tom and I were to meet, and I felt strangely nervous.

I had read Tom’s book
The Man Who Shocked the World
before leaving Australia. He had done such a great job: reading it, I was reminded of things I had forgotten and learned plenty I hadn’t known. For instance, it was Milgram who was responsible for the “small world” study, now known as “six degrees of separation,” proving that we are each connected to a stranger through six links in our social networks. But what had interested me most when I first heard about Tom’s book was what he might have to say about the subjects who’d been involved in the obedience experiments and what had happened to them afterward. Yet the book told me little more than what Milgram himself had said and written. Despite being a solid and well-researched account of Milgram’s life, it did little to answer the questions that had intrigued me for so long.

In preparation for our meeting, I had gone over all the notes of our conversations over the previous three years and noticed a change in myself. In my first talks with Tom, I could hear a kind of breathless enthusiasm in the questions I put to him—they weren’t questions so much as statements that invited confirmation. They were certainly not the questions of an impartial interviewer. Like Tom, I had shared the view that Milgram was a misunderstood genius, a risk taker who had paid the price for holding up a mirror to a truth about ourselves that we’d rather not know. But over time, I had come to wonder more and more about the people in his experiment, and what price they’d paid for taking part. I was aware that the infatuation was waning.

I recognized Tom before he saw me: his hurried, already apologetic gait gave him away. He was a few minutes late, but I wasn’t about to quibble. He’d left his home in Baltimore—where he was a professor of social psychology at the University of Maryland—before 6
A.M.
in order to meet me in New York for breakfast. He rushed toward me, apologizing, hustling me through the glass doors and into the welcome coolness of the restaurant.

Tom was a warm and likable man. He was tall with a gray beard and large, wire-framed glasses that emphasized his eyes. The enthusiasm in his voice over the phone was even more evident in person and was contagious. He told me that it had taken ten years to write his book and that his family had had enough of all things Milgram (as mine were already beginning to), so it was refreshing to talk to someone who felt similarly fascinated by him. Soon we were in full flight, trading Milgram trivia and arcane and obscure Milgram facts without having to worry that the other person’s eyes would glaze over. He talked quickly but with plenty of feeling. I told him that I had been in touch with Bob McDonough, the son of Jim McDonough, who had played the learner, and Tom was as excited as if he’d found him himself. Tom told me about some of the Milgram material that had passed through his hands or that he had collected over the years—Milgram’s fragmentary unpublished memoir, love letters, and the script for a stage play that Tom had tried to have videotaped. The waitress had to come back three times before we stopped talking long enough to look at the menu.

I was surprised that Tom seemed to be enjoying himself so much. I would have thought he would know plenty of unequivocal Milgram fans, more so than me—but maybe there were fewer such people than I had realized.

Tom’s fascination with Milgram was both intellectual and personal. In 1944, when Tom was two, he had escaped from Budapest with his mother, carrying forged Christian identity papers. Later, in a new land with a new life, the Holocaust grew distant, a part of family lore instead of everyday life. But when he read about Milgram’s obedience research as a graduate student in the 1960s, Tom remembered his childhood bafflement at how an environment that had been safe had suddenly turned so dangerous. In the pages of an academic journal, he wrote, “The question was: how do normal people who one day are your friendly neighbors are the next willing to be your killers? How does that transformation take place?” It was a question, he realized, that had haunted him since he was a child.

Tom’s admiration of Milgram showed in his tone, which revealed a mixture of awe and something close to envy. They had met just once, at a conference in 1982, two years before Milgram’s death. Tom introduced himself, but they did little more than discuss a mutual acquaintance before both moved on. I could tell that Tom regretted it was so brief. Later, he was approached to write a literature review of the obedience research and found himself spending three years immersed in everything ever written about it. “And I realized there was much more to him than just the obedience research,” he told me. “I became fascinated by the man who was doing this fascinating stuff. He brought art to science. He was playful, unconventional. He liked creating things that had flair and originality. He followed his impulses. What he was curious about, he pursued, regardless of what other people thought. He was as much an artist as a scientist—he wrote poetry and prose, he made films. For him, art and science were not distinct domains.”

In the recordings of the experiments, Tom told me, you only had to listen to understand the strain and tension that many of Milgram’s subjects went through. Witnessing the human drama unfolding was tremendously compelling—it was arresting to hear such details as a volunteer’s voice quivering as he expressed concern about the well-being
of the now-silent learner and the scraping noise of a chair as a volunteer backed away from the shock machine after refusing to continue.

It was when I asked Tom about the ethics of the experiment that I understood my earlier nervousness. Tom had already been so generous—sharing references, sending me contact details of people to interview, paving the way with strangers by sending notes to tell them who I was and what I was doing—that it seemed ungracious to argue with him. For Tom, the stress that Milgram had put his subjects through was a “necessary evil”: “In order for the experiment to be a success, he had to create a powerful and highly believable drama—a drama in which the subjects were involved in a highly stressful and tense situation.” But I wasn’t so sure. What about the ethics of putting people through it? I asked Tom. Did he feel concerned about what Milgram had done? Tom acknowledged that Milgram’s ambition had blinded him to his subjects’ distress: “I think, really, he was driven by the need to make a mark for himself. I believe that his ambition made him overlook or minimize the suffering of some of his subjects.” However, he went on, there was no evidence that the stress they had felt lasted any longer than the duration of the experiment. The very fact that Milgram had sent out a follow-up questionnaire showed that he was interested and concerned about their long-term well-being, and the responses to the questionnaire revealed that only 1.5 percent of the subjects said they were sorry to have taken part. Tom told me this was proof that Milgram had helped them to come to terms with what they’d done. But I was not convinced. How could people that Milgram had described as having agonized, sweated, stuttered, and groaned through the experiment later say that it had no effect on them? How could you shock a man without it having an effect on you afterward? Something about it just didn’t ring true.

I leaned back in my chair. By now, the restaurant was filling up, and more waiters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “My Most Favorite Dessert” were taking up their station by the doorway. The name of the place irritated me: a dessert was either your favorite or it wasn’t, but there were no degrees of favorite, no shades of gray. It was either/or, black or white. I realized that in meeting Tom, I had wanted definitive answers about Milgram—facts without shades of gray. But here I
was, faced with the mystifying fact that, despite a highly stressful and for many horrifying experience, only 1.5 percent of Milgram’s subjects had said that they were sorry to have taken part. My skepticism made me uneasy. Was I one of those people who Milgram had said were critical of his experiments only because they revealed an unwelcome truth about human nature? Was I one of those unwilling to face the truth?

As if he could sense my discomfort, Tom said that Milgram’s results were so powerful and unsettling because he put his finger on a blind spot: “the gap between what we think we might do in a particular situation and what we actually do.”

So how would Tom himself have acted, I asked, in the same situation? It was a question that I thought I already knew the answer to: could he have conducted the obedience experiments? He looked sheepish and shifted in his seat. “I could not. Just by nature . . . because of my temperament, my personality. It’s kind of odd on one hand to appreciate Milgram, and say on the other hand I couldn’t do it, but that’s the way it is. People are complex,” he said, and laughed. “I think you have to be a certain kind of person and I’m not . . . especially knowing what some of his subjects went through . . . I don’t think I’d be prepared to do it.”

I could see in Tom’s body language how uneasy the prospect made him. It is the same for most of us: we can admire Milgram from afar, marvel at the elegance and ingenuity of his experiment, but put us in the lab, instructing someone to put her or his hand on the first lever, and most of us squirm at the prospect. Deep down, something about Milgram makes us uneasy. There is something icy cold at the heart of these experiments.

Textbook accounts of the history of psychology tend to celebrate the pioneers of the discipline—mostly men—and portray them as entirely objective, untainted by values, culture, or politics. Researcher Benjamin Harris points out that the American Psychological Association’s (APA) official history, released on its hundredth anniversary, made no mention of racism, anti-Semitism, and the Great Depression as events that shaped North American psychology. He argued that reports on famous experiments are often sanitized and selective, edited and shaped to
portray the discipline in a favorable light. Such omissions and distortions shouldn’t surprise us. Social psychology, an infant science driven by a need for acknowledgment and status, celebrates iconic experiments as evidence of its achievements.

There was little point in reading psychology textbooks if I wanted to find out more about Milgram and the origins of his research. I had to look to his biography.