Behind the Shock Machine (40 page)

Still, it seems that, if popularity is the ultimate test, Milgram was vindicated.
Obedience to Authority
is still in print today, thirty-nine years later. It has sold consistently and has been translated into at least eleven languages.
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I would never be able to read
Obedience to Authority
again without a sense of all the material that Milgram had left out, the stories he had edited, and the people he had depicted unfairly. I wondered how many of those people he’d reassured had read his harsh portrayals. After leaving Hank Stam’s office, I went back to my hotel and decided to leave Milgram’s book there, in that anonymous hotel room. Snow had begun to fall, and in the square below, the shapes of park benches and trees were being erased. Tomorrow the snow would be gone, but for the moment I enjoyed the obliteration of everything dark and sharp-edged, the blurring, the white.

11

REPRESENTING OBEDIENCE

The black-and-white film opens with a slow pan of Yale’s familiar sandstone buildings, their shadowy archways and studded doors. We hear Hitler shouting and a crowd roaring “Sieg Heil!” in response. Yale dissolves, replaced by images of the führer, Nazi soldiers shoving prisoners onto trains, a mushroom cloud, and the atomic bomb. It dissolves again, and we are in a classroom. From this opening scene onward, Professor Stephen Turner’s interest in obedience is portrayed as a sinister obsession—one that he will pursue with reckless disregard for the consequences.

In August 1976, the TV movie
The Tenth Level
, inspired by Milgram’s obedience research, screened to around 30 million viewers as part of CBS’s
Playhouse 90
series. William Shatner played Stephen Turner, a handsome, solid, normal-looking guy. But two minutes into the film, viewers get the sense that Turner is far from normal. Spooky music plays each time he gazes at secret drawings of a lab and a machine or listens to interviews with SS men.

Yet while he’s sinister and driven, he’s not a monster. For all its flaws, the film attempts to explore and understand the scientist. Turner is single-minded, ruthless, and hell-bent on scientific knowledge, but he has his vulnerabilities. He yearns for the affection of fellow scientist Barbara (only ever identified by her first name) and seems fragile and unsure of himself when she fends him off. His friend Benjamin Franklin Reed, an African American fellow academic, attributes Turner’s obsession with Nazi behavior to a WASP-like “guilt in reverse”
because “you’ve never been a victim of a pogrom or lynching.” But Turner is driven: despite his friend’s advice and the protests of Barbara (who calls the research “a fiendish concept”), he plunges on with his plans.

The inevitable confrontation between Turner and Barbara takes place once it has all gone wrong for Turner—a hearing has been held, subjects have revealed how traumatic the experiments were, and Turner’s evidence (that his research has been replicated internationally and subjects confessed that they knew themselves better as a result of participating) has failed to persuade his colleagues. Barbara finds him wandering disconsolately through his lab. He is desperate for her approval but also accusing: “You hate my results! My ethics!”

Barbara tells him that he has failed his own test. “You watched them pushing those switches every day and you can’t admit to yourself that they were tortured! . . . Admit it! That’s all I ask of you,” she pleads. “You had a choice. You could have stopped them. But you chose to go on.”

Turner finally breaks down. “I don’t deny the pain they felt!”

“Deny it? You measured it!”

He loosens his tie. Gulps.

“Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!” she cries in close-up, as if calling him back from the edge of an abyss.

Turner’s face crumples. They hug, and he sobs. We see a close-up of her face over his shoulder, saying quietly, “Enough pain. Enough. This place has seen too much.” Turner’s shoulders shake, and he continues to sob as the credits roll.

While some of it seems pure soap opera—one unkind online commentator called the film “
The Andromeda Strain
meets
Days of Our Lives
”—parts of it seem eerily true to life.
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The hearing that the “Federation” (read: APA) convenes to establish whether there was harm to subjects, for example, uses authentic details in the evidence that’s given, and the casting of a thin, ascetic-looking experimenter and a rotund, friendly victim is appropriate, too.

What I found interesting is that the film, while it dramatizes the experiments, has as its major focus the role of the scientist. We see Turner in the lab, coldly instructing the first subject to continue. We
see the excitement in his eyes as the man, despite protests and stress, continues to the maximum voltage. We catch glimpses of other subjects—one who calmly puts on his jacket midway and leaves; another who laughs maniacally and has to be helped out of his chair; and a third, a young man who throws the Williams character to the ground, smashes the machine, and runs across the university campus, chased by Turner. But the focus is on Turner and his struggle to reconcile scientific endeavor with the morals of those around him. It marks a shift away from the sensationalization of the results to a fascination with the man behind them.

The film was made during Milgram’s lifetime, with his participation and consent. It’s intriguing because it explores many of the problems with which Milgram had privately struggled, as well as elements of the drama that was unfolding in his professional life. This led me to wonder if Milgram had confided in the screenwriter, George Bellak, or whether Bellak, having met Milgram and interviewed him, had intuited much of the story that became
The Tenth Level
.

I wondered if any of its reported 30 million viewers were former subjects, and what they thought of it, seeing themselves and Milgram as Bellak did. For others, it would have been the first introduction to the experiments—apart, perhaps, from the snippets on
60 Minutes
when Milgram’s book came out. What would those viewers have thought of the experiments and of the determined scientist behind them? And Milgram, depicted as eccentric, proud, brilliant, and sensitive—I wondered how he felt about being portrayed in that way.

Depictions of Milgram’s experiments have morphed and evolved over time, and the representations map society’s changing view of the research. Since news of the experiments was first published, they have been cited and repurposed to demonstrate the human propensity to obey orders, explore ideas of ethics and science, and provide popular entertainment.

Early newspaper articles delivered the shocking results first, following them with factual reports of the details of the experiment, with
little or no attention on the man who conducted them. Fast forward ten years, to the mid-1970s, and the dramatic potential of the events was being explored onstage and on the small screen, with Milgram’s motivation as much the focus as the seeming transformation of his subjects. Things went quiet in the 1980s and 1990s, but another surge of representations in the past decade has shown that society’s interest in, and ambivalence toward, the experiments has not abated. In 2006, Derren Brown, a British psychological illusionist, drew on the experiment for his television program
The Heist
. Recruiting participants with a newspaper advertisement much like Milgram’s, Brown used techniques such as suggestion, hypnosis, and manipulation—as well as plain showmanship—to convince four ordinary people who had volunteered for what they thought was a “motivational seminar” to rob a security van in broad daylight. In 2010, the experiment surfaced on international screens as a form of documentary-cum-reality-television program. French documentary filmmaker Christophe Nick devised a modern version of Milgram’s setup with
The Game of Death
, a pretend game show. Contestants thought they were taking part in a real show, complete with a cheering audience and cash prizes. The game? You guessed it—shock another contestant to 450 volts and win a prize.

Watching these television shows and reading the changing depiction of the experiments reminded me of a note that Don Mixon had sent me after our last meeting. He had written: “What people believe about Milgram’s experiments comes from
descriptions
of the experiment.” Don was speaking from experience: he had replicated Milgram’s “prediction study,” describing the experiment to a group of psychiatrists and asking them to predict how many people would obey. He found that psychiatrists predicted much lower rates of obedience when he told them the story from Milgram’s point of view, one in which the situation seemed clearly and unambiguously defined. But if he told the story from the subjects’ point of view, with all of its ambiguity and contradictions—the details of the gradual foot-in-the-door process of entrapment—they predicted that many more people would go to the maximum voltage. Don found that they predicted obedience rates between 0 and 100 percent, depending on
how he described the experiment. He wrote, “Something as complex as Milgram’s experiment can be described in many, many ways. What the public believes about the experiments comes from Milgram’s very compelling descriptions or from descriptions based on Milgram’s descriptions.”

We have been dependent on Milgram’s descriptions, too, because it would be almost impossible today to gain university approval to conduct such research. Unless, of course, you could find some way of quelling their concern—some way of pulling off a version that was close to the original but lacked the ethical ambiguity.

Professor Jerry Burger managed to do just that.

Burger has been a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University for twenty-eight years. He leapt to national attention in 2007, when he repeated the Milgram experiment for American television.

In July 2005, the producer of ABC’s
Primetime
contacted Burger. “The first thing she said was that they were interested in Milgram and they wanted to replicate the study.” The idea had occurred to the show’s producers because of recent media attention on the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib. “They wanted to see if we were more independent thinkers now because that was back in the sixties, when people were more obedient, more robotic.” The producer had contacted the APA, who had given them Burger’s name. He laughed. “And I’m pretty sure my first words to her were, ‘Can’t be done. Period. Discussion is over. It’s just not possible.’”

Burger told them he wouldn’t be part of a full replication, even if ABC had somehow figured out how to conduct one, so they came up with a compromise. Revisiting Milgram’s book, Burger noticed that in condition 5, when the learner mentioned that he had a heart problem, there was a critical point at 150 volts. “When they hear the man on the other side of the wall yelling, ‘Let me out,’ if people are going to stop, that’s the most likely place they are going to stop. And, in fact, if they don’t stop, there’s a 79 percent chance that they will continue all the way.” After consulting widely, including with the APA, he proposed an experiment in which subjects would be taken to 150 volts to see how they responded. Burger believed that this was a responsible place to
stop, because it was beyond 150 volts that Milgram’s subjects began to experience signs of trauma.

After a lengthy approval process with his university’s institutional review board, in 2006 he began. Using Milgram’s descriptions, film, and transcripts from the experiment, and with Tom Blass’s help, Burger set about reproducing the obedience experiment as closely as he could.

Burger, like Milgram, was responsible for every last detail. And he had the added pressure of having to keep the project secret so that ABC would not be scooped by a rival station. He was allowed to tell his wife and son but no one else, unless they had a need to know. That meant keeping it from his colleagues and doing everything clandestinely, on evenings and weekends, on his own.

The preparations took months. “And every day there was another challenge: finding the right kind of chair, table, the right kind of contact paste for the electrodes—and the lab coat, even the lab coat. Milgram didn’t want a white lab coat because it suggested something medical, so I had to get a gray one, but they don’t make gray lab coats, so I had to make do with a blue one. This is the kind of thing I had to wrestle with. I bought these tables that would work with the machine, and I brought my saw from home and cut off the legs so they would be the right height. Then I had to figure out how to get the learner to escape. Milgram never explained the Houdini part of it. He straps this guy in—how does he get out?”

Burger also organized the building of a shock machine. When he saw the original, he realized he would have to make one that looked more contemporary if his experiment was going to be believable. “It looked like something out of Frankenstein’s lab, really old-looking. I told the guy building it to make it modern, but keep it as close as possible. The dimensions are the same, the levers are in same place, the words are the same.”

As Milgram had done, he put ads in the local paper to recruit volunteers. “The first morning, I ran out when the paper was delivered, and the ad was perfect except for two mistakes—the phone number was wrong and the e-mail address was wrong. I could have shrugged it off, but I had people on planes flying out here from New York.”

Unlike Milgram, Burger had a clinical psychologist screen out any people who might be particularly vulnerable to stress, which meant he lost almost 40 percent of his subjects. He was “horrified,” having expected that he would lose no more than 5 percent. “I had to scramble around then and find more because we were starting the next week.” In the end, he had a total of seventy-six subjects.

This screening process would also expose Burger to criticism. In an article in
American Psychologist
, Alan Elms called it “obedience lite,” the connotation being that it had all the substance taken out of it. He argued that this psychological assessment had the effect of screening out the potentially disobedient.
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