Behind the Shock Machine (5 page)

Stanley Milgram was born in the Bronx in 1933 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, his mother from Romania in 1913 and his father from Hungary in 1921. With the rise of Nazism, Milgram’s parents worried constantly about the fate of Jewish relatives still living in Europe, a worry that was transmitted to their children—particularly after the outbreak of war in 1939, when six-year-old Stanley gathered with the family around the radio, listening anxiously to the news.

Milgram was a precocious child singled out for his above-average intelligence. He would have known from a young age that he was expected to go far, further than his working-class parents and siblings. His bedroom walls were plastered with pictures of the old masters, and while his peers played stickball in the street, the sports-shy boy spent his time on science. His only problem—and it would become a tension that would last a lifetime—was which way to channel his creativity: toward visual art, music, or science?

At James Monroe High School, Milgram joined a cohort of ambitious male students who eschewed girlfriends in their single-minded focus on getting into college and making a name for themselves academically. He was accepted into New York’s Queens College, where he studied arts and majored in political science. It was here that he and fellow students failed to take action when their “favorite” teachers were sacked for not cooperating with the McCarthy hearings, a passivity that he later regretted.

When he was twenty, Milgram spent a summer backpacking around France (where he took an intensive language course at the Sorbonne), Italy, and Spain. He ran out of money to return home, but managed to talk his way onboard a German ship headed for the United States.

After his travels, Milgram briefly considered a career as a diplomat,
but by 1954 he had settled on the newly emerging field of social psychology. He had become disenchanted with the philosophical nature of political science, and social psychology seemed to offer a more practical approach to the kinds of issues, including leadership styles and group persuasion, that interested him. Perhaps it also appealed to him because it seemed to combine drama and art with the status and seriousness of science. He applied to Harvard but was rejected because he had not studied psychology as an undergraduate. While others might have been deterred, this seemed to galvanize Milgram, and he spent the summer of 1954 cramming in as many psychology classes as he could. Each day he crisscrossed New York to attend classes, taking five subjects at three different colleges—Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and New York University—while working nights as a clerk at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan. Harvard subsequently offered him a place and, with a highly competitive Ford Foundation fellowship under his belt, Milgram could afford to take up the offer.
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At Harvard, Milgram met Solomon Asch, who would have a profound influence on his work. Asch was renowned for his 1952 and 1956 studies of group pressure. In Asch’s experiments, a volunteer arrived at a laboratory for what he or she believed would be a visual perception test and joined a group of seven people. They were introduced as volunteers but were in fact Asch’s confederates. The group was seated at a table and shown two large cards. One had a single vertical line, while the other showed three vertical lines of different lengths. Each person was asked which of the three was the same length as the single line. The confederates gave their previously arranged wrong answers first, leaving the subject to answer last. He had the choice of being a lone voice or agreeing with the group’s answer. In total, twelve pairs of cards were shown, and the group gave the wrong answer seven times. Asch found that three-quarters of the answers given by the subjects were correct, but that individuals varied greatly in their levels of independence. Some remained completely independent from the group, many gave the wrong answer at least once, and others yielded to group pressure more than once or twice.
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Asch’s interest was not so much in the number who stayed independent or conformed but in how they came to resist others’
opinions or surrender their judgment to fit in with the group. As a result, his post-experiment interviews lasted anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes, as he explored with the subjects how their thoughts and feelings had influenced their decisions. Asch found that fear of disapproval, a desire to belong, guilt, and a sense of duty had played a role among those who gave in. He concluded that those who had resisted, while just as confused and dismayed by the group’s answers and also tempted to give in, had more robust self-esteem, so they were more able to tolerate the discomfort of being a lone voice.

Whether they had agreed with the group or stood their ground, most of Asch’s subjects showed tension during the experiment. Asch described them as fidgeting uncomfortably and looking distressed and bewildered. And for many, it was humiliating and embarrassing to find out that the whole thing had been a con. One of Asch’s research assistants recalled: “Their response was often very dramatic when you told them it was a lie. . . . There was certainly some emotion, in some cases, some crying.”
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Asch and his assistants were sensitive to the feelings of those they had tricked. Once the experiment was over, Asch wrote at length about his ethical responsibilities toward his subjects, his efforts to reduce their distress, and how he had worked with them to help them gain some benefit from their participation. This attention to the ethics of deception was unusual at the time. Probably because of his respect for his subjects and his disappointment with “the view of human nature present in much of psychology at that time,” Asch was never quite able to resolve the ethical dilemma; forty years later he was still troubled by what he had put his subjects through and reluctant to talk about the way he had deceived them.
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Milgram worked as Asch’s teaching assistant during his second year at Harvard. He observed Asch’s experiments and debriefing process firsthand. For his PhD in social psychology, Milgram decided to replicate Asch’s experiment in Norway and France to compare cultural differences in conformity. He initially planned to compare conformity in Germany, England, and France but eventually had to scale it back to something more achievable. He finally settled on a comparison between the Norwegians and the French and spent a total of eighteen months in Oslo and Paris conducting his research.
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Milgram’s experimental design had all the hallmarks that would later make him famous—ingenuity and trickery, the use of confederates, elaborate props, and a tightly scripted scenario. Volunteers were asked to arrive at a lab at an appointed time. When they walked in, they found a bench piled with several coats and a corridor with five closed, numbered doors, indicating that five other subjects were already seated in booths. The last volunteer was seated in a sixth booth and given headphones and a microphone. The task was to listen to two sounds and judge which of two was longer. The volunteer was the last to give his answer, and through his headphones he could hear the other five giving theirs. They were, of course, confederates, who had been instructed to give wrong answers to just over half of the tasks. Milgram found that his subjects conformed 62 percent of the time, giving the incorrect response to agree with the others.
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In order to see whether the seriousness of the consequences would affect conformity, Milgram varied the experiment, telling volunteers that the results would be used to improve safety signals on airplanes. The differences were insignificant, with conformity dropping to just under 60 percent. The Norwegians, he found, were more conformist than the French. Milgram said that his French and Norwegian subjects indicated in follow-up interviews that they were glad to have participated, mainly because they felt that the advancement of scientific knowledge justified any deception involved.
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Milgram’s PhD research revealed as much about him as it did about conformity across cultures. He was a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker conducting research in two European countries and in two different languages, one of which he spoke not at all, the other with which he had only a passing acquaintance. He was clearly keen to make his mark.

The year after completing his European research was disheartening for Milgram. He took a part-time job with Asch, helping to edit a book on conformity. He came to Princeton fresh from his PhD research and must have felt the thrill of knowing that he was going to be “somebody.” Yet when he arrived, there was no office or even a desk for him. Asch had not only an office but also a well-established reputation, respect, academic clout, and an influential book about to be
published. Throughout the year there was tension between the two, fueled by what Milgram saw as Asch’s lack of acknowledgment of his input.
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Perhaps this feeling of being treated like a nobody made him even more determined to make a splash.

When Milgram arrived at Yale in September 1960, he must have felt the pressure to succeed. He certainly had the drive and the ambition, as well as prestigious mentors and a successful dissertation behind him. What he needed was a research project that would make his name: for an untenured assistant professor at the bottom of the academic ladder, the surest way of cementing his position was to find a research program that would have a major impact. This meant discovering something surprising, even counterintuitive, putting his finger on something that humans didn’t already know about themselves.

He knew his new research at Yale would be on the topic of conformity, building, as his dissertation had, on Asch’s famous study. But one aspect of Asch’s experiment bothered him: the fact that people were pressured to agree verbally about the length of lines on a diagram. Milgram was more interested in actions than in words. He wondered how far a group could pressure someone to
do
something they disagreed with, such as act aggressively toward someone else. He envisaged a group of people, all but one of them actors, each with their own electric-shock generator, egging one another on to give a person more and more intense electric shocks. How far would an individual go in order to fit in with the group? Milgram knew that before he could run the experiment, he would have to test a control group, to see how far people would go without peer pressure. Suddenly he realized that this was it—the twist on Asch’s experiment that he had been searching for.

Throughout his life Milgram painted and drew, composed songs and librettos, wrote children’s stories and poetry, and directed films. His notebooks are full of ideas for inventions and business opportunities: radio-transmitting dog collars, guidebooks for unmarried pregnant women, even a fake newspaper article service (“You write the story,
we’ll send you the clipping. Impress your girlfriends that you have gotten in the papers”).
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Yet despite his bright beginnings in social psychology, Milgram felt uncertain at some level about his choice of career. Art still exerted a powerful pull. In a letter describing his life in New Haven to his friend Helen Wittenberg, the tension between his scientific and artistic sensibilities is clear: “I am glad that the present job sometimes engages my genuine interests, or at least, a part of my interests, but there is another part that remains submerged and somehow, because it is not expressed, seems most important.” He described his typical week, dragging himself out of bed to make his weekly classroom appearance, where:

I misrepresent myself for two hours as an efficient and persevering man of science . . . it does suggest that perhaps I should not be here, but in Greece shooting films under a Mediteranean [
sic
] sun, hopping about in a small boat from one Aegean Isle to the next. In fact, when in Paris last April, I nearly sold my car to buy movie equipment . . . but went back to Harvard instead. Fool!
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Like Milgram, psychology suffered from a tension between having one foot in the humanities and another in the sciences. The discipline was born in 1879, in physiologist Wilhelm Wundt’s lab at the University of Leipzig. Wundt adapted his training to the study of consciousness, observing and reporting on his own reactions to stimuli; he was the first to translate what had been philosophical musings into a distinct science of the mind. In the second half of the nineteenth century, around ten thousand American students flocked to Europe, mainly to Germany, for graduate training in psychology and philosophy.
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Wundt saw psychology as closely aligned with the social sciences—with philosophy, linguistics, history, and anthropology—and believed that only some aspects of psychology could be subject to lab-based experimentation.
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But on North American soil, psychology aligned itself exclusively with the natural sciences, aided by an almost evangelical belief at the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth that science had transformative qualities; it had become the new religion.
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Science, the force behind the industrial revolution, had changed the world within a lifetime. It was natural to think that once it turned its gaze upon humans, it could make the same sort of improvements.

Wundt’s methods were adopted and adapted, gradually replaced by what were seen as more scientific techniques borrowed from the natural and physical sciences. Physics, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy were considered important, well-established sciences, and in order to be taken seriously psychology had to be seen as similarly exacting and methodical, relying on facts, observation, and testable hypotheses. A hierarchy gradually replaced the collaborative style of Wundt’s lab, as techniques of introspection and self-observation were substituted with the scientist’s objective observation of “subjects” (a term with medical origins, originally referring to bodies available for dissection).
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The scientific gaze could be turned on humans the way an astronomer turned his telescope on the stars. The serious psychological scientist adopted not just the techniques of measurement and observation, but also a cold precision and an objective distance from the subject he was studying. The break with Wundt was completed in 1913, when John B. Watson, then head of the APA, defined psychology as “the science of behavior”; introspection and consciousness had been banished, and so had the human subject.
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Behaviorists like Watson, influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, believed that by studying one animal, you could understand another: “The behaviorist . . . recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.”
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