Elephants on Acid (26 page)

In their write-up of the study, the experimenters noted that the shocks were amperage-limited and did not cause the puppy any permanent physical harm. However, they made no mention of psychological harm. If the poor creature later shook with terror whenever it came to a traffic light while out on its walkies, you could understand why.

The young woman holds the white rat in her hand. It struggles to get free, so she grips it tighter. “Do you seriously want me to do this?” she asks. The researcher standing in front of her nods. “But why?” As she says this, the woman suddenly laughs. It’s a nervous, awkward laugh, as though she can’t believe the situation she’s found herself in. “It is important for the experiment that you proceed,” the researcher says. The woman’s laughter turns into tears that roll down her cheeks. “Please don’t make me do this,” she begs. “Please . . .” “The experiment requires that you do it,” the researcher states firmly.

Decades before Stanley Milgram shocked the world by demonstrating how readily people will obey a repellent order, a young graduate student at the University of Minnesota witnessed a similar phenomenon in his lab.

It was 1924, and the student was Carney Landis. As part of his doctoral research, he was studying facial expressions. He wondered whether every emotion produces a characteristic expression. Is there one expression used by everyone to show fear? Another to show disgust? Another for arousal? And so on.

To find out, he brought subjects one at a time into his lab. He drew lines on their faces with burnt cork, to better observe which facial muscles they were using. The lines made them look a bit like painted tribal warriors. Then he contrived ways to make them experience emotions. As they expressed each emotion, he took their photos.

The situations in which Landis placed his subjects began with the mundane. They listened to some jazz music. They read the Bible. They told a lie. They smelled ammonia.

Gradually, the situations became more unusual. BANG! A firecracker went off behind a curtain, and the camera snapped as their faces registered shock. Landis brought out pictures of skin-disease patients, pornographic scenes, and artistic nudes. The camera clicked away as the subjects browsed the images.

Next came the mystery bucket. “Reach into it,” Landis told them, “and tell me what you feel.” Carefully they placed their hands inside.
Ewww
. Their faces wrinkled with displeasure as they touched three slimy frogs sitting in a puddle of water. “Yes, but you have not felt everything yet,” Landis said. “Feel around again.” They did so and—ZAP!—they received a powerful electric shock from wires attached to the bucket.

But all this was a mere prelude to what came next—the experimental coup de grâce. Landis carried out a live white rat on a tray. “Hold this rat with your left hand,” he told them, “and then cut off its head with the knife.”

The subjects stared at him in disbelief. They hadn’t been expecting this. They questioned whether he was serious. When he assured them he was, they hesitantly picked the knife up and put it back down again. Many of the men swore. Some of the women started to cry. They pleaded with him to stop the experiment. Nevertheless, Landis urged them on. Hovering over the rat with their painted faces, knife in hand, they now looked even more like members of some strange tribe preparing to offer a sacrifice to the Great God of the Experiment.

It took a lot of coaxing, but eventually 75 percent of his subjects—fifteen out of twenty—complied. They decapitated the rats while the animals were still alive and squirming in their hands. This percentage was similar to the obedience levels Milgram would later find in his electric-shock experiments at Yale.

In general, the procedure went badly. Landis noted, “The effort and attempt to hurry usually resulted in a rather awkward and prolonged job of decapitation.” Nor did the rats get a reprieve if the subjects refused to obey. In the five cases of noncompliance, Landis simply picked up the knife and did the job himself. He was determined not to let those rats live.

Most of Landis’s subjects were fellow graduate students at the University of Minnesota, but Landis also tested a thirteen-year-old boy suffering from high blood pressure. Doctors had referred the boy to the department of psychology because they suspected his symptoms were caused by emotional instability. You have to wonder how much being forced to decapitate a rat added to his issues.

Landis stumbled upon the phenomenon of experimental obedience almost forty years before Milgram, but Landis never realized the significance of what he had found. It never occurred to him that the willingness of his subjects to obey bizarre commands was far more interesting than their facial expressions as they did so. As it turned out, their expressions varied so widely he failed to find any one look that typified a situation. For instance, expressions shown while decapitating a rat included pained smiling, crying, and what Landis called “fascinated attention,” produced by “a slight contraction of the risorius, medium contraction of the zygomatics and lowering of the upper eyelids.” Landis died in 1962, just as Milgram was conducting his more famous obedience studies.

It is often this way with experiments. A scientist sets out to prove one thing, but stumbles upon something completely different, something far more intriguing. For this reason, good researchers know they should always pay close
⁶⁷
attention to strange events that occur during their experiments. A great discovery might be lurking right beneath their eyes—or beneath the blade of their knife.

Oregon State University, 1967. It is a cold winter day. A car pulls up to the curb. The passenger door opens, and a man enclosed in a black cotton bag stumbles out. Only his feet protrude from beneath the fabric. As he sways back and forth trying to gain his balance, the car pulls away with a screech of the tires. Having steadied himself, the man in the bag proceeds forward with an air of determination. He walks up the stairs of Shepard Hall, through the doors, and into the classroom of Charles Goetzinger. The students in the room turn to stare as he enters. Dr. Goetzinger looks up from his notes. “Ah, welcome back, Bag. Good to see you again.”

Most of the students who attended Charles Goetzinger’s class, Speech 113: Basic Persuasion, in the winter quarter of 1967 wore normal clothes—shirts, shoes, slacks, or skirts. But one student opted to show up in a large black bag. He shuffled into class on the first day and took a seat at the back. He didn’t say a word.

The Black Bag, as he came to be known, showed up for every class. At first he maintained his silence. When members of the class were each required to give a short speech, he stood before his fellow students for four minutes without saying a word, then returned to his seat. Eventually, as the quarter wore on, he loosened up and let fly with a few cryptic remarks such as, “I’m not Jesus Christ or anything. I’m just one of you in a bag.” Reportedly, the Black Bag spoke with a New England accent.

More curious than the man in the bag, though, was the reaction of people to him. Initially the other students tried to ignore him. However, that proved impossible. Although he did nothing to impose himself on others—he barely even spoke—his mere presence dominated the room and seemed to antagonize people. One student threw punches at him. Another tried to pin a
KICK ME
sign to his back. When the Black Bag responded by sitting next to that student and staring at him, the student poked the Black Bag with his umbrella and screamed, “Get away from me!”

The media picked up on the story of the Black Bag, and reporters soon were descending on the classroom in droves, at one point outnumbering the students. The reaction of the American public resembled that of the students. It was a mixture of curiosity and anger. People wrote letters demanding Goetzinger be fired for allowing such a charade. One alumnus declared that OSU had degenerated to the level of UC Berkeley.

Why did the Black Bag inspire such anger? Professor Goetzinger had one theory: “We always have a frame of reference for events. Then in walks a black bag with a human inside it. Nowhere in our frame of reference has there been such a thing. So we resent.”

An experiment conducted a year later on the other side of the country offers another clue.

Philip Zimbardo, a professor at New York University, was researching the concept of deindividuation. According to this theory, our sense of social responsibility is strongly tied to our feelings of individuality. In situations where we lose our sense of being a unique, identifiable person—for instance, if we blend into a crowd or make ourselves anonymous by putting a bag over our head—we suddenly feel freer to engage in behavior considered antisocial or taboo. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, both rampage around in mobs and conceal their identities with hoods.

Zimbardo demonstrated the phenomenon by asking two groups of college coeds to electroshock an innocent victim after they had listened to a tape-recorded interview with her. He made the first group feel anonymous by placing large bags (flower-patterned pillowcases) over the participants’ heads—making them look, oddly enough, like Klan members. He addressed them by number (never by name), sat them in darkened cubicles, and told them he would not know which one of them was pressing the shock button because all their buttons led to a common terminal (which was a lie). With the second group, he emphasized the subjects’ identities. He addressed each one by name and gave them large name tags to wear instead of bags.

The bag-wearing coeds held down the shock button far longer than the non-bag-wearing group. In fact, they often jammed down the button for as long as they could, despite the screams and cries of the victim—who was acting and never got shocked. “These sweet, normally mild-mannered college girls,” Zimbardo observed, “shocked another girl on almost every one of the twenty trials on which they had an opportunity to do so, sometimes for as long as they were allowed, and it did not matter whether or not that fellow student was a nice girl who didn’t deserve to be hurt.” Wearing a bag—even a flower-patterned one—had unleashed their most violent, antisocial impulses.

But while the bag-wearing subjects of Zimbardo’s experiment were the ones being aggressive toward another person, at OSU it was the guy in the bag who was suffering abuse. How do we account for this difference?

Zimbardo suggests that the phenomenon of deindividuation works in both ways. Anonymity loosens the restraints on aggressive behavior in situations that permit such behavior, but when victims are anonymous, and therefore dehumanized, it similarly grows easier to commit violence against them. Zimbardo notes numerous reports of children at Disneyland striking hapless costumed characters for no apparent reason.

The idea that we are aggressive toward those with whom we share no comparable identity might also explain what happened as the academic quarter at OSU neared its end. The students warmed up to the Black Bag. They went from bullying him to becoming his strongest supporters, vigorously defending his right to wear a bag. Evidently, in their eyes, he had acquired a recognizable, albeit eccentric, identity. And though he may have been a bag, he was
their
bag. One of them even declared, “If my mother tried to take that bag off him, I’d beat the hell out of her.”

When the quarter ended, the Black Bag slipped back into the shadows without revealing his identity. To this day who he was is unknown. So why did he wear the bag? One theory is that it was a stunt inspired by a cryptic remark once made by Anthony Cox, the second husband of Yoko Ono. He had said, “The world would be better off if everyone wore a large,
⁶⁸
black, cloth bag.” Another theory is that Goetzinger put the Black Bag up to it as an informal experiment in persuasion—which was, after all, the theme of the class. One OSU faculty member, convinced this was the case, openly criticized Goetzinger for not including proper sociological controls in his study. However, if this was an experiment in persuasion, it’s not clear what the Black Bag was trying to persuade anyone of. That, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, remains, like the Black Bag himself, a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in a mystery covered by a black cotton sack.

The light turns green. Your foot hovers over the accelerator, but the car in front of you hasn’t moved. A few seconds pass and you think, “What is this idiot doing? Why do they let people like this on the road?” A few more seconds go by, and your hand reaches for the horn. “Come on, buddy! I haven’t got all day.” You start shouting, even though no one can hear you. “Move it!” The anger flows through you, out of your hand, and into the horn. The blaring honk becomes your scream of rage, the sonic weapon with which you assault the driver blocking your path. You allow it to blast on and on. Inside the other car, the driver looks at his watch and chuckles.

If you’ve ever been stuck behind an unmoving car at a green light, you know the feeling. You can’t help but suspect the driver of the stationary car is sitting there on purpose, just to annoy you. As it turns out, you might be right.

Sitting at green lights until people start honking is a favorite experimental technique of anger researchers. When anger experiments are performed in a lab, it’s difficult to guarantee subjects will act naturally. They know they’re being observed, so they’re on their best behavior. But in the naturalistic setting of a traffic intersection, people don’t expect a scientist to be watching them. Researchers can study their unguarded reactions, investigating exactly which variables promote an anger response and which inhibit it. This setting also allows researchers a speedy getaway, in case subjects become a little too mad.

Anthony Doob and Alan Gross conducted the first such traffic-intersection experiment in 1968. Drivers in Palo Alto and Menlo Park were their unlucky, unwitting subjects. Doob and Gross wanted to know whether signs of wealth and high status would inhibit displays of aggression. So they drove around, pausing for an obnoxious length of time at green lights, in two separate cars—a black 1966 Chrysler Crown Imperial hardtop, recently washed and polished, and a decrepit gray 1961 Rambler sedan. They recorded which car got honked at more often.