Behind the Shock Machine (43 page)

Dateline
tracked down Jack Williams in what may have been his only public interview about the research. His shoulders seemed broader; the thin young man had filled out. It suited him. He also looked more distinguished, dressed in a dark suit and tie.

“That’s disturbing,” the journalist, Dawn Fratangelo, said of the footage they’d just seen.

“We thought so. I thought so,” Williams answered.

“When you first saw that machine, did it ever occur to you that people would go to the very end?”

“No.” Williams was emphatic.

Was it cruel? Was it possibly damaging? Interestingly, Fratangelo posed this rhetorically, speaking to the camera rather than Williams. Maybe she asked him questions that he refused to answer. Keith Williams told me his father “was very annoyed with their line of questioning. . . . He almost got up and walked out on them because of their manipulation of the interview. They tried to make it dramatic.” The program clearly put much more emphasis on Williams’s role and less on the ethical controversy that had repeatedly dogged Milgram.

In recent times, television depictions of the experiment have proliferated, unfettered by the restraints of ethics committees or review boards. On YouTube,
South Park
–type cartoons,
Gumby
-style Claymations, and student reenactments proliferate.

In the clamor of representations, Milgram’s message has been contaminated, simplified, and milked for its entertainment value. In May 2009, BBC’s
Horizon
—which had made a program about Milgram’s book in 1974—revisited the topic with a program as part of its
Violence
season called “How Violent Are You?” The show reproduced the Milgram experiment, interspersed with interviews with a Sudanese former child soldier who had tortured and slaughtered those who had killed his parents, among others. Described as “thought-provoking” and “uncomfortable,” the program was promoted as taking viewers on a journey to the disturbing side of human nature, asking “if anyone can be driven to deliberately kill.”

In March 2010,
Dateline NBC
screened what they called a “
Dateline
experiment,” in which the experiment as performance was taken to extremes. The subjects were aspiring actors who arrived for what they thought was an audition for a television show called
What a Pain
. They were told that, as part of the audition, they must give shocks to a contestant that would hurt but wouldn’t do permanent damage. Each actor “auditioned” while hidden cameras recorded their reactions. In the promo, there was Latifa, a young African American woman, grimacing and wincing as the man’s cries increased with the voltage. Over her shoulder, we could see the handsome host behind an antique desk, looking at the camera with an eyebrow raised. “Our brains are hardwired to obey authority,” a voice-over told the viewer. But the worried-looking presenter asked in a deep voice, “What were they thinking?”

What were they thinking indeed? Viewer reactions reflected the full gamut of praise and criticism that have been directed at the experiments over the last half century. Comments posted on the program blog called it everything from “awesome” to “exploitative,” “unethical” to “terrifying.”

Most recently, horror director Eli Roth hosted the television show
How Evil Are You?
, which aired in the United States on October 30, 2011. The program was billed as carrying out a series of experiments “that will shed light on the capacity for evil that lurks within ordinary men and women.” A reviewer in
Variety
commended the production, noting that it was hard to argue that the “temporary
discomfort” of those involved outweighed what it told us about human nature.
¹⁹

But what about us, the ones watching these programs? Are we better than people who used to watch the Christians being thrown to the lions in ancient Rome? Or does the fact that such programs tout themselves as probing the inner recesses of our psyches make it okay, a rationalization for the kind of sadistic voyeurism that has us watching with fascination at home? Network executives offer all sorts of justifications for why they make such programs, but I can’t help feeling that viewers are complicit in something more shameful than the experiment itself. Perhaps, for some, they explain contemporary events in a way that makes sense. But for me, the uncritical mirroring of the original and the simplistic take-home message puts a new spin on the term “banality of evil.” It’s certainly banal if we can watch and marvel at torture from our living rooms.

For better or worse, whether you believe his work had more in common with performance art than psychology, Milgram lives on—in art, in culture, and in our imagination. Milgram sensed this: he knew it in his early, worried notes about the experiment being more like art than science in 1962, and he knew it twelve years later when he was writing his book. Anticipating criticism, he described himself as “a hopeful poet who finds metaphoric illumination between what subjects do at Yale University and what happened in Germany.”
²⁰

Artistic representations of the obedience experiments seem to provide an insight into our darkest natures. As with a horror movie, in which we enjoy the thrill of a good fright, they allow us to return, gratified, to the safety and comfort of the familiar when they end. In addition, the experiment and its replications continue to shock, thrill, and be evoked as a powerful moral lesson. Fresh news of torture or incomprehensible violence by those under authority still brings new comparisons with Milgram’s work. It taps into a fascination that humans have with knowing more about ourselves. It is the same curiosity that has us watching reality-television shows or doing quizzes and questionnaires that claim to tell us who we “really” are, which we believe because they are produced by “experts.” Perhaps we seek answers like these because we are more exposed than ever to violence
and mindless brutality in modern society. Perhaps, in a strange way, Milgram’s obedience experiment reassures us not only of our predictability, our frailty, and our weakness but also that science can continue to explain us to ourselves.

CONCLUSION

What you think of the Milgram obedience experiments depends on which story you are told and who is telling it. The standard version that has been reproduced in the media and handed down to generations of students through lectures and textbooks tells it in the third person. We are invited to take the perspective of an omniscient observer and to imagine subjects like Fred Prozi arriving for their appointments. Some details are delayed to make the story more engaging, to heighten tension. Crucially, we’re often not told that the experiment is a hoax until later, after the horror of discovering how many seemingly normal people like Prozi went on to electrocute another man.

But what if I told the story in the second person, asking you to identify with one of Milgram’s volunteers and imagine yourself arriving for an experiment at the lab? Maybe I’d get your attention for a few lines, but soon I would lose you. Maybe it would be when you had to imagine yourself agreeing to give electric shocks to someone; perhaps it would happen later, when I asked you to imagine hearing the man cry out after you had pressed a switch. It’s hard for anyone to imagine themselves as anything other than a defiant subject. We just can’t imagine doing what they did.

Milgram understood that his research was a powerful piece of theater, that the seeming transformation of ordinary men and women into Eichmann figures was a compelling story. It was startling, counterintuitive, and it reinforced the notion that we might like to think
we know ourselves but social psychologists know better: inside all of us is a concentration-camp guard just waiting to be called into service.

Milgram’s experiment can be viewed as a form of performance art.
¹
Jeffrey Shandler points out that Susan Sontag made the same observation about the Eichmann trial. “No longer confined to the virtual world of the theater,” she argued, tragedy has become

a form of history. Dramatists no longer write tragedies. But we do possess works of art (not always recognized as such) which reflect or attempt to resolve the great historical tragedies of our time. . . . As the supreme tragic event of modern times is the murder of the six million European Jews, one of the most interesting and moving works of art of the past ten years is the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.
²

But while the influence of Milgram’s research has waned in the field of Holocaust studies, the two are still inextricably linked in the public imagination, reinforced in the past fifty years by the accompanying visual images—of Hitler, concentration camps, and the horrors of genocide—that introduce the research to new generations.

One of the reasons that Milgram’s obedience research remains powerful is because it seems to provide an answer to something we still don’t understand, François Rochat told me by phone from Switzerland, where he is a psychology lecturer at the University of Fribourg. “We are still looking for ways to understand what went on in Nazi Germany, and although it’s a bit too easy, Milgram’s obedience research seems to provide an answer.”

François’s research interest focused on those who had rescued others from the Nazis in World War II and what drove them “to make a choice between closing their eyes or doing something.” He admired the fact that “Milgram wanted to take part in the discussion about Nazism and felt he had an answer to it.” François felt that the research does tell us about the dynamics of face-to-face interaction between ordinary people and an authority figure because, as I too had come to feel, “there’s more, much more going on in history than goes on in the
lab”: “You have to take from the lab what you can take from the lab, not more.”

Should we call what Milgram measured “obedience”? “Obedience is a general term; it’s not precise enough to tell us about what was going on,” said François. What
was
going on, he thought, was the inexorable subordination of the less powerful by the powerful. He believed that Milgram, in his focus on outcomes, missed the social interaction between Williams and each subject. He overlooked a powerful and unacknowledged variable: the relationship between the subject and the authority figure.

François analyzed the interaction between Williams and the subjects and concluded that people arrived at the lab in a spirit of cooperation, pleased to be taking part in an experiment “for the advancement of science.” Once it began, subjects were faced with either giving electric shocks or ruining the experiment they came to assist. Few people appreciated how difficult it was for subjects to call a halt once the experiment had started. “It’s like being on a highway—if you go fast you miss the exit. There is a rhythm to the experiment that goes faster and faster.” If you were cued in, François said, you could watch the subordination unfolding in a sequence. By analyzing the tapes, he and his colleague Andre Modigliani identified a sequence of steps by which people, after first feeling cooperative, began to hesitate, question, object, and sometimes disobey. “Both obedient and disobedient subjects had a hard time inflicting pain on their fellow participants. It was obvious they were all looking for a way to get out of the experiments.”

When I thought about this later, I could see how Milgram had accounted for Williams’s influence as an aspect of the environment, a feature that could be controlled in much the same way he controlled how far away or how audible the learner was. Milgram captured behavior at only one moment in a person’s life, François said. A week, a month, or a year later, the same people could have behaved differently. He contrasted Milgram with a friend of his who had worked for twenty-six years with the same fifteen Holocaust survivors, interviewing each person repeatedly, “because his or her story is always changing.” Milgram had tried to fix subjects’ behavior like points on a map:
“He describes his subjects as if they would be like that forever, like statues. They are alive, these people.”

I thought of some of the people I had spoken to, still blaming themselves after so many years for what they saw as an enduring flaw, fixing themselves as static and unchanging in exactly the same way.

The one fixed feature in the obedience experiments was the shock machine. Between August 1961 and May 1962, as subjects flowed in and out of the lab, it was the constant. Later, the machine was occasionally taken out of its home at the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio for traveling exhibitions—most recently for the hundredth anniversary of the APA in 1992. Titled “Psychology: Understanding Ourselves, Understanding Each Other,” the exhibition toured fourteen science museums across the United States from 1992 to 1996, then spent five years at the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix.

The exhibition’s goal was to present three-dimensional exhibits of psychology experiments. Curator Caryl Marsh wrote that her first reaction when she was told the shock machine was in the archives was that “the APA would never let us display it.” It was such a controversial piece of equipment. But a colleague persisted. For the exhibition to work, it needed controversy: the machine would be a draw. When Marsh took the idea to a dinner meeting with APA officials, “I might as well have dropped a bomb.” But she eventually got her way.

Some psychologists were outraged by its inclusion. Others felt just as strongly in favor of it, arguing that it had earned a place in an exhibition about the history of psychology and promoted the profession.

The exhibit for the shock machine, Marsh wrote, was inspired by
Candid Camera
. Visitors arrived at an enclosed passageway with a black-and-white checkerboard floor. A sign read, “Attention! Please walk on the black squares ONLY!” Ninety percent of visitors obeyed, hopscotching down the walkway to the end of the corridor, where Milgram’s machine sat in a Plexiglas case with a description of how it was used to measure our propensity to follow orders. In visitor surveys,
the shock machine was the most mentioned exhibit, but people were polarized by it. They reacted either with amusement or with anger at being duped. They were disgusted, admiring, curious.
³
Milgram’s experiment had lost none of its power to provoke.