Influence: Science and Practice (41 page)

After initial greetings and pleasantries are exchanged, the researcher begins to explain the procedures to be followed. He says that the experiment is a study of how punishment affects learning and memory. Therefore, one participant will have the task of learning pairs of words in a long list until each pair can be recalled perfectly; this person is to be called the Learner. The other participant’s job will be to test the Learner’s memory and to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks for every mistake; this person will be designated the Teacher.

Naturally, you get a bit nervous at this news. Your apprehension increases when, after drawing lots with your partner, you find that you are assigned the Learner role. You hadn’t expected the possibility of pain as part of the study, so you briefly consider leaving. But no, you think, there’s plenty of time for that if need be and, besides how strong a shock could it be?

After you have had a chance to study the list of word pairs, the researcher straps you into a chair and, with the Teacher looking on, attaches electrodes to your arm. More worried now about the effect of the shock, you inquire into its severity. The researcher’s response is hardly comforting. He says that although the shocks can be extremely painful, they will cause you “no permanent tissue damage.” With that, the researcher and Teacher leave you alone and go to the next room where the Teacher asks you the test questions through an intercom system and delivers electric punishment for every wrong response.

As the test proceeds, you quickly recognize the pattern that the Teacher follows: He asks the question and waits for your answer over the intercom. Whenever you err, he announces the voltage of the shock you are about to receive and pulls a lever to deliver the punishment. The most troubling thing is that, with each error you make, the shock increases by 15 volts.

The first part of the test progresses smoothly. The shocks are annoying but tolerable. Later on, though, as you make more mistakes and the shock voltages climb, the punishment begins to hurt enough to disrupt your concentration, which leads to more errors and ever more disruptive shocks. At the 75-, 90-, and 105-volt levels, the pain makes you grunt audibly. At 120 volts, you exclaim into the intercom that the shocks are
really
starting to hurt. You take one more punishment with a groan and decide that you can’t take much more pain. After the Teacher delivers the 150-volt shock, you shout back into the intercom “That’s all. Get me out of here. Get me out of here, please. Let me out.”

Instead of the assurance you expect from the Teacher, that he and the researcher are coming to release you, he merely gives you the next test question to answer. Surprised and confused you mumble the first answer to come into your head. It’s wrong, of course, and the Teacher delivers a 165-volt shock. You scream at the Teacher to stop, to let you out. He responds only with the next test question—and with the next slashing shock, when your frenzied answer is incorrect. You can’t hold down the panic any longer, the shocks are so strong now they make you writhe and shriek. You kick the wall, demand to be released, and beg the Teacher to help you. However, the test questions continue as before and so do the dreaded shocks—in searing jolts of 195, 210, 225, 240, 255, 270, 285, and 300 volts. You realize that you can’t possibly answer the questions correctly now, so you shout to the Teacher that you won’t answer his questions anymore. Nothing changes; the Teacher interprets your failure to respond as an incorrect response and sends another bolt. The ordeal continues in this way until, finally, the power of the shocks stuns you into near-paralysis. You can no longer cry out, no longer struggle. You can only feel each terrible electric bite. Perhaps, you think, this total inactivity will cause the Teacher to stop. There can be no reason to continue this experiment, but he proceeds relentlessly, calling out the test questions, announcing the horrid shock levels (above 400 volts now), and pulling the levers. What must this man be like, you wonder in confusion. Why doesn’t he help me? Why won’t he stop?

The Power of Authority Pressure

For most of us, the previous scenario reads like a bad dream. To recognize how nightmarish it is, though, we should understand that, in most respects, it is real. There was such an experiment—actually, a whole series—run by a psychology professor named Milgram (1974) in which participants in the Teacher role were willing to deliver continued, intense, and dangerous levels of shock to a kicking, screeching, pleading Learner. Only one major aspect of the experiment was not genuine. No real shock was delivered; the Learner, who repeatedly cried out in agony for mercy and release, was not a true subject but an actor who only pretended to be shocked. The actual purpose of Milgram’s study, then, had nothing to do with the effects of punishment on learning and memory. Rather, it involved an entirely different question: When it is their job, how much suffering will ordinary people be willing to inflict on an entirely innocent other person?

The answer is most unsettling. Under circumstances mirroring precisely the features of the “bad dream,” the typical Teacher was willing to deliver as much pain as was available to give. Rather than yield to the pleas of the victim, about two-thirds of the subjects in Milgram’s experiment pulled every one of the 30 shock switches in front of them and continued to engage the last switch (450 volts) until the researcher ended the experiment. More alarming still, almost none of the 40 subjects in this study quit his job as Teacher when the victim first began to demand his release, nor later when he began to beg for it, nor even later when his reaction to each shock had become, in Milgram’s words, “definitely an agonized scream.”

These results surprised everyone associated with the project, Milgram included. In fact, before the study began, he asked groups of colleagues, graduate students, and psychology majors at Yale University (where the experiment was performed) to read a copy of the experimental procedures and estimate how many subjects would go all the way to the last (450-volt) shock. Invariably, the answers fell in the 1-2 percent range. A separate group of 39 psychiatrists predicted that only about one person in a thousand would be willing to continue to the end. No one, then, was prepared for the behavior pattern that the experiment actually produced.

How can we explain that alarming pattern? Perhaps, as some have argued, it has to do with the fact that the subjects were all males who are known as a group for their aggressive tendencies, or that the subjects didn’t recognize the potential harm that such high shock voltages could cause, or that the subjects were a freakish collection of moral cretins who enjoyed the chance to inflict misery. There is good evidence against each of these possibilities. First, a later experiment showed that the subjects’ sex was irrelevant to their willingness to give all the shocks to the victim; female Teachers were just as likely to do so as were the males in Milgram’s initial study.

Another experiment investigated the explanation that subjects weren’t aware of the potential physical danger to the victim. In this experiment the victim was instructed to announce that he had a heart condition and to declare that his heart was being affected by the shock: “That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.” Once again the results were the same; 65 percent of the subjects carried out their duties faithfully through to the maximum shock.

Finally, the explanation that Milgram’s subjects were a twisted, sadistic bunch not at all representative of average citizens has proven unsatisfactory as well. The people who answered Milgram’s newspaper ad to participate in his “memory” experiment represented a standard cross section of ages, occupations, and educational levels within our society. What’s more, later on, a battery of personality scales showed these people to be quite normal psychologically, with not a hint of psychosis as a group. They were, in fact, just like you and me; or, as Milgram likes to term it, they
are
you and me. If he is right that his studies implicate us in their grisly findings, the unanswered question becomes an uncomfortably personal one, “What could make
us
do such things?”

The Milgram Study
The picture shows the Learner (victim) being strapped into a chair and fitted with electrodes by the lab-coated experimenter and the true subject.

Milgram is sure he knows the answer. It has to do, he says, with a deep-seated sense of duty to authority. According to Milgram, the real culprit in the experiments was his subjects’ inability to defy the wishes of the boss, the lab-coated researcher who urged and, if necessary, directed the subjects to perform their duties, despite the emotional and physical mayhem they were causing.

The evidence supporting Milgram’s obedience-to-authority explanation is strong. First, it is clear that, without the researcher’s directives to continue, the subjects would have ended the experiment quickly. They hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim’s anguish. They implored the researcher to let them stop. When he refused, they went on, but in the process they trembled, they perspired, they shook, they stammered protests and additional pleas for the victim’s release. Their fingernails dug into their own flesh; they bit their lips until they bled; they held their heads in their hands; some fell into fits of uncontrollable nervous laughter. An outside observer to Milgram’s initial experiment described one subject.

I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh, God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end. (Milgram, 1963, p. 377)

In addition to these observations, Milgram has provided even more convincing evidence for the obedience-to-authority interpretation of his subjects’ behavior. In a later experiment, for instance, he had the researcher and the victim switch scripts so that the researcher told the Teacher to stop delivering shocks to the victim, while the victim insisted bravely that the Teacher continue. The result couldn’t have been clearer; 100 percent of the subjects refused to give one additional shock when it was merely the fellow subject who demanded it. The identical finding appeared in another version of the experiment in which the researcher and fellow subject switched roles so that it was the researcher who was strapped into the chair and the fellow subject who ordered the Teacher to continue—over the protests of the researcher. Again, not one subject touched another shock lever.

The extreme degree to which subjects in Milgram’s studies obeyed the orders of authority was documented in yet another variation of the basic experiments. In
this case, the Teacher faced two researchers who issued contradictory orders; one ordered the Teacher to terminate the shocks when the victim cried out for release, while the other maintained that the experiment should go on. These conflicting instructions reliably produced what may have been the project’s only humor: In tragicomic befuddlement and with eyes darting from one researcher to another, subjects would beseech the pair to agree on a single command to follow, “Wait, wait. Which is it going to be? One says stop, one says go. . . . Which is it!?” When the researchers remained at loggerheads, the subjects tried frantically to determine who was the bigger boss. Failing this route to obedience with
the
authority, every subject finally followed his better instincts and ended the shocks. As in the other experimental variations, such a result would hardly be expected had the subjects’ motivations involved some form of sadism or neurotic aggressiveness.
¹

¹
The basic experiment, as well as all these and other variations on it, is presented in Milgram’s highly readable
Obedience to Authority
, 1974. A review of much of the subsequent research on obedience can be found in Blass (2004).

To Milgram’s mind, evidence of a chilling phenomenon emerges repeatedly from his accumulated data. “It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study” (Milgram, 1974). There are sobering implications of this finding for those concerned about the ability of another form of authority—government—to extract frightening levels of obedience from ordinary citizens.
²
Furthermore, the finding tells us something about the sheer strength of authority pressures in controlling our behavior. After witnessing Milgram’s subjects squirming and sweating and suffering at their task, could anyone doubt the power of the force that held them there?