The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (34 page)

Greenhouse gas

Animals

Beyond the shock machine

Gina Perry

You may have heard of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments – perhaps you have read about them in a textbook at school or at university, as I did. Even if you haven't, you've likely come across them without knowing it – in the episode of
The Simpsons
, for example, where a therapist hooks the family up to a shock machine, and they zap one another as Springfield's electricity grid falters and the streetlights flicker. Perhaps you read in the news about an infamous 2010 French mock game show where contestants believed they were torturing strangers for prize money, or you might have heard the experiments mentioned in a documentary about torture or the Holocaust.

Milgram's obedience research might have started life in a lab 50 years ago, but it quickly leapt from academic to popular culture, appearing in books, plays, films, songs, art, and on reality television.

Despite its fame there has always been a missing piece to the story of Stanley Milgram's research – the voices of the people who took part.

In 1961, Milgram, an assistant psychology professor at Yale, recruited ordinary people through an advertisement in the local newspaper calling for volunteers for an experiment about
memory and learning. When they arrived at the lab each volunteer was met by a stern experimenter in a lab coat. He introduced them to a second volunteer, who had ostensibly just arrived. The experimenter explained that one volunteer would be the teacher and one the learner, and they drew lots for the roles.

The experimenter took the learner into a small room, strapped him into a chair, and fitted electrodes to his wrists while the teacher looked on. The experimenter explained that the experiment aimed to test the effect of punishment on learning. The teacher's job was to read out a list of word pairs to the learner and then test his recall, administering an electric shock each time the learner gave a wrong answer. The learner mentioned that he'd been treated for a heart condition, and asked if he should be worried about receiving the shocks. The experimenter answered that they might be painful, but they weren't dangerous.

The teacher was taken into a larger room and seated at a table, in front of an imposing machine. It had 30 switches, labeled from 15 to 450 volts, and from ‘slight shock' to ‘very strong shock,' then ‘danger: severe shock,' and eventually simply ‘XXX. If the learner gave a wrong answer on the memory test, the experimenter explained, the teacher should punish him with an electric shock, increasing the voltage with each incorrect response. Things began well, the learner got the first two answers right. But then he started making mistakes, earning 15, 30, and then 45 volts for successive incorrect answers. At 75 volts, the learner grunted in pain; at 120 volts he complained loudly; at 150 he begged to be released, at 285 he screamed in agony and soon after, fell silent.

Though confronted by the sounds of the learner's pain, and despite their own agitation and stress, 65% of Milgram's volunteers followed the instructions of the lab-coated authority figure and administered what they believed to be dangerous and perhaps even fatal electric shocks to people just like themselves.

In fact, as the volunteers would learn at the end of the experiment, the electric shock machine was a prop, and both the experimenter and the learner were actors; the screams were scripted; and the subject of the experiment was not memory at all, but how far people will go in obeying orders from an authority figure.

The story of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments always felt unfinished to me. I wanted to know more. I was left wondering what happened to the volunteers afterwards – how did they reconcile what they had done in the lab with the people they had believed themselves to be? What did they say to their wives and children when they returned home, and what did they think about their behaviour weeks, months, and years later? I set off to find out.

I was nervous about meeting Bill Menold. We had exchanged emails and talked on the phone; he had even helped me to book a room at the Holiday Inn in Palm City, Florida, for my visit. On the phone he had sounded warm, helpful, but I couldn't think of anything other than the fact that he had continued to shock a man he thought might be dead.

I met Bill in the lobby of my hotel on the morning of a sweltering day in August 2007. He was a tall, bearlike man, with muscular legs like a tennis player's emerging from baggy beige shorts. Sandy hair, a reddish complexion. A big, ready laugh. He looked so different from what I had imagined that for a moment I felt unsure of what to say.

I had come to Florida to find out what had driven people to continue to the maximum voltage on Milgram's shock machine. But how could I phrase the question? How could I ask how it felt to torture someone, without showing how much it horrified me?

We introduced ourselves. The lobby was noisy, and we went to my room to talk. Bill told me that he hated Florida and hated George Bush even more, which put him on the outs with most
people he knew. He had spent most of his working life further up the East Coast or on the West Coast and would have moved away from Florida if he hadn't met Barbara, his third wife, who has strong ties to the state.

We soon got to talking about the experiments. Back in 1961, Bill, a newly married 25-year-old, commuted the eight miles each day from his home in Milford to his job at a New Haven credit union, which was just a short walk from the Yale campus. Although he had been a university student at the University of Connecticut before military service interrupted his studies, he had never set foot inside Yale. ‘I was intimidated – this was being done at Yale University, and having grown up in that area, Yale was like God.' Curiosity drove him to answer the ad for volunteers in a memory and learning test. ‘I thought it would be fun to try it. I thought, well, let me find out how smart I am.'

Still, Bill was nervous when he arrived at Yale's Linsly-Chittenden Hall, a rather forbidding gray building. At 6.45 pm, he was right on time. He saw a sign on a post outside stating that the memory and learning experiment was downstairs, in the basement. ‘One of the Yale students had written “don't forget” on it in pencil. I thought it was funny.' Still smiling at the joke as he walked down to the basement, Bill had no idea of the threshold he was about to cross or that he would emerge 45 minutes later, shaken, distressed, his world tipped on its axis.

Inside, Bill was met by the experimenter John Williams – ‘very straightforward and professional, just what you'd expect from Yale' – and soon after a second volunteer arrived, introduced as Mr Wallace. He was Jim McDonough, the actor that Milgram had chosen to play the role of the learner. ‘He seemed like a nice guy, genial, friendly. He was probably twenty years older than me.'

Williams explained what was involved in the experiment and exuded an air of confidence. But when he started connecting
electrodes to McDonough's arms, Bill began to feel apprehensive. ‘I was kind of, holy mackerel, what is going on here?'

McDonough, Bill remembers, seemed a little apprehensive too, mentioning that he'd been at the VA hospital some time back with a heart problem. But Williams reassured him that this was nothing to worry about. ‘He said something like, “We do this sort of thing all the time, nothing to be upset about”. Just another day at the office, you know.'

For naive volunteers such as Bill, the whole experience must have suddenly felt a bit like stepping onto a fast-moving escalator. When he heard about the shocks, his first thought had been of one of those joy buzzers advertised on the backs of comic books, along with Whoopee cushions and X-Ray Specs – you hid the buzzer in the palm of your hand and used it to play a prank on your friends, giving them a mild tingle that felt more like a tickle than a shock. But then he saw the machine.

I was taken a little bit aback by how complex it was. It was a large white panel with many switches … at least a dozen from left to right … and you could see there was a degree of severity as you went up the line. I just said to myself that these people know what they're doing and I'm just going to go along with it and see what happens here.

The test began. Bill read the list of word pairs into a microphone so that McDonough could memorise them.

To Bill's relief, McDonough got the first few right. When he got one wrong, Bill gave him 15 volts and did not hear any reaction. Bill kept going, and it wasn't until the fifth shock, 75 volts, that he heard anything. ‘I think the first sound that I heard – and I can't tell you how far in it was – but it was like “oooh”, like he felt something. It wasn't a scream, I don't think; it seemed to me that it was an indication of discomfort.'
Bill began to feel uncomfortable, but Williams urged him on. McDonough gave an even louder cry the next time. Williams seemed unperturbed and again urged Bill to continue. He began to dread McDonough's answers. The test didn't seem that difficult, and Bill knew that if he were the learner he would be sure to get more right. ‘I tried everything that I thought I could get away with, accenting the right word … like dog, cat,
chair
, rabbit, and like, “I'm giving you the hello there, I'm giving you a hint”, and time after time he'd still get them wrong.'

The test continued. Wrong; 90 volts. Then McDonough got one, then two, correct, and Bill felt himself relax. But the next one was wrong; 105 volts. A noise that sounded like ‘uugh'. And the next; 120. ‘When he yelled out … that's when I started to feel really uncomfortable … and I thought, oh God … What the hell am I doing here? What is this all about?'

McDonough's sounds of discomfort grew louder with each shock. Then he mentioned his heart problem.

Bill
: White: cloud, horse, rock, house?

[McDonough buzzes wrong answer]

Bill
: Incorrect. One hundred and fifty volts. [
gives shock
]

McDonough
: Let me out of here! I told you about my heart problem; let me out of here!

Bill hesitated, turned to Williams. He told me, ‘I remember distinctly saying, “You know what, I'll switch with him. I'm smarter than this guy and you can ask me these questions”'. But the experimenter was adamant that they couldn't change places once the experiment had started.

By now they were confronting the 11th switch, 165 volts.

I was under a lot of stress; I was really starting to sweat. I wasn't in control of the situation and I also suspected that I was being set up. I mean, Yale doesn't go round torturing people … but I really wasn't sure, so the question in my
mind was, am I really hurting this guy or am I the guinea pig here? Is this a setup, are they testing me to see if I'll do this stuff? I didn't have any answers to this conflict that was going on. It was unbelievably stressful.

One hundred and eighty volts. One hundred and ninety-five volts. Sweating and trembling, Bill continued.

It sounds really strange, but it never occurred to me just to say, ‘You know what, I'm walkin' out of here', which I could have done. At this point I was just soaking wet. I was just so disturbed by all this because this had gone out of my realm of reality and I was in a bizarre environment and I didn't know what I was doing, but I was sweating bullets and I was starting to laugh almost like a maniac, hysterically. I'd kind of lost it.

Then McDonough, after receiving a shock of 330 volts, went silent. Bill thought, either he's unconscious, he's dead, or this thing is a complete sham.

When McDonough didn't answer, Bill told Williams that he wasn't going any further.

I said, ‘I'm not taking responsibility for this,' and that's when he said, ‘Don't worry about it, Yale University is taking full responsibility'. I was under such enormous stress – I mean, I just did not know what to do – and when I said he's not answering anymore and the guy said, ‘Well, just continue with the experiment,' I thought, I'm just going to go along with this thing. I don't know what's going on but let's just get it over with.

Bill stopped talking at that point and looked down at his hands.
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. A door slammed in the hallway outside, and laughter and voices tripped down the corridor before fading. Bill took a sip of water. If I was reluctant to hear this, I thought, how must Bill feel, having to tell it? I tried to imagine him as he would have been that summer: a young man, muscled, tan, and fresh-faced. Curious and eager, unprepared for such cruelty.

He leaned forward, his hands joined loosely between his knees. He told me that he had continued to shock the now silent McDonough until he reached the final switch, 450 volts, although he couldn't remember much about it.

When it was all over, Williams told Bill that he would release the learner and Bill prepared for the worst, taking comfort from the fact that he was fitter and younger than the other guy. ‘I remember thinking, I'm gonna have to calm him down if he gets upset. If he was gonna take a swing at me, I thought, I'm just gonna restrain him … I was scared to death.'

Yet what happened next was surreal.

‘He came out and said, ‘Hello, how are you?' He was very friendly, a nice guy who just, you know, relieved any concerns I had about any hard feelings or animosity. We shook hands. They wanted for me to see that he was okay, physically and emotionally. The debriefing, if you wanna call it that, didn't last two minutes. We talked for a few minutes and then he and I left together and we walked out of the building and we got out onto the street and he went one way and I went the other.

I was in this crazy situation … I was just gonna walk out of there … nobody was gonna shoot me or put me in a prison cell. I still didn't know what had happened. I was a basket case on the way home.

Bill went straight to his neighbor, an electrician, and told him what had happened. His neighbor tried to reassure him that the shocks couldn't have been real, or McDonough wouldn't have walked out smiling afterwards.