Behind the Shock Machine (13 page)

I asked him whether the subjects were told that the shocks weren’t real. Alan scratched his mustache and responded, “For most people who took part, the immediate debrief did not tell them there were no shocks.”

Alan told me that he thought they were sent a written explanation “a few weeks later.” But he had finished working for Milgram by then. I later found out that it was almost a year before the people Alan and Milgram had watched together received an explanation. Alan went on to say, “I still think that Milgram did a good job of protecting the subjects, and that the experiments were important enough that some temporary discomfort and emotional distress justified the overall value. I observed Stanley’s concern during the debriefing sessions, making sure no one left the lab still feeling really upset. And with his follow-up explanations, and my interviews with subjects, I felt that Stanley had really paid more attention to these ethical issues than most psychologists up to that time.”

But I wasn’t really listening to Alan’s explanation—I was reeling from what I had heard. The subjects had left the lab still believing they had shocked a man. Did Milgram really think that reassuring them that things hadn’t been as serious as they thought, that the shocks were only weak, that the learner had been overreacting would absolve them of their distress? I thought about Bill Menold, who had left the lab with the new and unwelcome knowledge that he’d been talked into torturing a man.

I considered this all the way back to San Francisco. The train passed right along the edge of the bay. The tide was out, revealing what I thought at first were huge lobster pots, but turned out to be abandoned shopping carts, upended, gray with mud. Nothing was as it seemed. The debriefing that I had always regarded as a kind of catharsis, a coming to terms, had turned out to be just another fiction.

* * *

By offering subjects another cover story at the end of the experiment to make them feel better about what they had done, Milgram was still, technically speaking, complying with the then current professional guidelines for debriefing. At the time of his research, the definition of debriefing as expressed in the APA’s 1953
Ethical Standards of Psychologists
was “the reduction of distress.” The guidelines made no reference to telling subjects the true purpose of the experiment or interviewing them for their reactions.
⁸

Milgram had anticipated the ethical objections that might be raised and addressed the issue of debriefing in his original application to the NSF:

A final but important note must be added concerning the investigator’s responsibility to persons who serve in the experiment. There is no question that the subject is placed in a difficult predicament and that strong feelings are aroused.

Under these circumstances it is highly important that measures be taken to insure the subject’s wellbeing before he is discharged from the laboratory. Every effort will be made to set the subject at ease and to assure him of the adequacy of his performance.
⁹

The NSF, however, continued to be concerned about the effect of the experiment on those whom Milgram had recruited as subjects. On July 5, 1961, Milgram rang the NSF to see why the letter confirming his grant had not yet arrived. To his dismay, he was told by a Mrs. Rubinstein that approval had hit a snag: the NSF’s director was still undecided about “possible reactions from persons who had been subjects in the experiments and whether the NSF should support research of this sort.”
¹⁰

It was the first of many signs of the uneasiness that his research would cause, and thereafter Milgram repeatedly mentioned his debriefing procedures and their effectiveness in alleviating subjects’ stress in his dealings with the NSF.
¹¹
But Milgram’s intention was to make reassuring, soothing noises to his subjects without revealing the truth, probably because he didn’t want word to spread in the New Haven community about the real purpose of his research.

Now I understood why Bill Menold had gone straight to his electrician neighbor for reassurance. I spoke to Bill again, this time asking when it was that he found out that the experiment was a setup. It’s something that still makes him angry. “One of the things that really disturbed me is what they’ve told people—they said it was about six months later that they explained what happened. In my recollection it was a lot longer than six months . . . and then I get this letter, this form letter!” He clenched his fists. “I don’t have much regard for Milgram . . . because I think that was terribly unethical—and I’m not just saying that because I did all this stuff. I think it’s immoral to use people. They might say, ‘Well, it’s for the greater good,’ but that doesn’t make it right!”

The report that Milgram sent out to subjects in July 1962—eleven months after the experiments began—was the first time they were told the full story.
¹²
The comments that Milgram’s participants wrote in their questionnaires show that, far from being a systematic and detailed process, debriefing varied across time, and in most cases was not a debriefing in the sense that I had understood it at all. Subjects in conditions 1 to 18—around six hundred people—left the lab believing they had shocked a man.

After people received Milgram’s report and questionnaire, many wrote back describing how they had left the lab mystified, trying to work out afterward what had actually gone on by talking to wives, neighbors, and workmates. Some worked it out for themselves, either immediately or in the months that followed. Subject 629 wrote: “As I left the laboratory and walked to my car, I reflected [on] the situation and felt certain at that time I was the one who had been observed. On the few occasions I’ve thought about the experiment I’ve wondered about its purpose, and appreciate knowing your true motive now.”

And Subject 805 noted, “About a week after the test, while discussing it with friends, it dawned on me that I was probably the one who was being tested, although I didn’t suspect that the ‘student’ was an actor.”

Many expressed their relief at receiving the report and described how worried they’d been about the learner. Subject 716 recorded, “I
actually checked the death notices in the
New Haven Register
for at least two weeks after the experiment to see if I had been involved and a contributing factor in the death of the so-called learner—I was very relieved that his name did not appear in such a column.”

Subject 1817 wrote:

I’ve been waiting very anxiously for this report to really put my mind at ease and [have my] curiosity satisfied. Many times I wanted to look up a Mr. Wallace, who was my student. I was just that curious to know what had happened. Believe me, when no response came from Mr. Wallace with the stronger voltage I really believed the man was probably dead.

Subject 711 confessed, “The experiment left such an effect on me that I spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the fear that I might have killed that man in the chair . . .”

Herb was right to worry about screening people before they took part in the experiment. And he wasn’t the only one who made the point to Milgram. Subject 216, who described the experiment as “the most unpleasant night of my life,” wrote on his questionnaire, “I would here inject a word of caution—since taking part in the experiment I have suffered a mild heart attack—the one thing my doctor tells me is that I must avoid any form of tension. For this reason I feel that it is imperative that you make certain that any prospective participants have a clean bill of health.”

Other subjects criticized Milgram for sending them home without telling them the truth. Subject 829 stated, “I was pretty well shook up for a few days after the experiment. It would have helped if I had been told the facts shortly after.”

Subject 623 stated, “I seriously question the wisdom and ethics of not dehoaxing each subject immediately after the session. . . . Allowing subjects to remain deceived is not justified, in my opinion, even if such continued deception was thought necessary ‘to avoid contamination.’”
¹³

But if they had been told at the end of the experiment that the learner was fine and the voltage wasn’t as strong as they had thought, why were so many subjects still worried that they had hurt or injured him?

In February 1963, nine months after the experiments had ended, Milgram arranged (at Yale’s insistence) a series of follow-up group interviews to be conducted by psychiatrist Dr. Paul Errera. One hundred and thirty of Milgram’s subjects were invited back to Yale to take part in the sessions in order to establish whether any had been harmed by their participation in the experiments. From the transcripts of Errera’s interviews, it’s clear that some subjects didn’t get even the standard, rather flawed “dehoax” that Milgram had scripted. For some subjects, there had been no reassurance at all and no explanation that the learner was unharmed before they left the lab. Milgram might have been surprised to learn this because, as far as he knew, the standard explanation had been offered to all subjects—if not by him, then by his staff. But in one of Errera’s interviews, Subject 501, who had been in one of the heart-attack variations and had brought his wife along to the interview for support, explained how distressed he was after the experiment. Milgram came out from behind the one-way mirror to quiz him, and during their conversation it dawned on Milgram that the minimal “learner is alright” dehoax had not happened. Subject 501 described how, after going to the maximum voltage, he was shaking so much he didn’t think he’d be able to drive home. His wife was waiting for him outside, in the passenger seat of their car. She told the group: “He was shivering. I was parked out in front—it wasn’t cold—and I thought, What in the world are they doing in there? And he came out and I said, ‘Well, what was it like?’ I said, ‘You want me to drive, was it that bad?’ So he proceeded to tell me. . . . Then we, we, we got through New Haven somehow and then we got out to the turnpike and he was [going over] it until midnight that night. On and on and on.”

Milgram: Now, there was supposed to be a dehoax after the experiment in which you met the guy
[the learner]
. Now Mr.
[blank]
, did you meet the man after the experiment?

Subject 501: Oh yes, I recall he stomped out saying something about that the teacher had the best part of it, or something like that.

Milgram: But it wasn’t supposed to work that way at all. Did the experimenter tell you that the shocks were not painful afterward?

Subject 501: No. I certainly expected him to, but—

Later in the same interview, Subject 501 quizzed Milgram about the dehoax.

Subject 501: You say you’re supposed to dehoax the whole thing?

Milgram: Everyone was supposed to be told that the shocks weren’t painful and they were supposed to shake hands with the man who had been shocked. Did that happen in your case?

Subject 501: Well, no, he came out and he was—he meant business or something like that—

Subject 612: He still was indignant about it.

Milgram must have been disturbed at Subject 501’s description. He seemed shocked to find that some subjects were not even given the basic dehoax. After Subject 612 and Dr. Errera left, Milgram stayed on in the room with Subject 501 and his wife, talking through how the man felt, with Milgram trying to persuade him that he shouldn’t feel guilty or upset about his obedience.
¹⁴
And on a number of occasions during the remaining Errera interviews, he questioned subjects about the debriefing they were given.

How had this lack of debriefing occurred? At the time he wrote his first article, about the first condition, Milgram’s description of the debriefing process (although misleadingly labeled “dehoax”) was an accurate account of what occurred in conditions 1 to 4. I heard Milgram on the tapes of condition 3, telling subjects that the learner had been overreacting and the machine was only for administering shocks to small animals.
¹⁵
Alan had described Milgram’s “careful debriefing” as he had observed it in the early stage of the experiments. He and Milgram watched conditions 1 to 3, and Milgram had gone out from behind the mirror to handle the debriefing himself if he felt that a subject was particularly upset.
¹⁶

But while the first four conditions ran through the summer break of 1961, subsequent variations coincided with the academic year. Milgram would have been less available to supervise the experiments, and Alan had left his job as research assistant. Milgram admitted to one subject in the group interviews that he was present at only about “a third” of the experiments.
¹⁷

Alan agreed that Milgram didn’t go far enough in his debriefing. But, if anything, Alan felt that Milgram, in his desire to make his subjects feel better, let them off the hook. He felt that more of them should have been troubled by their behavior.

It was Saturday and this was my second visit to Davis, and this time we’d gone to his university office to talk. The building was deserted except for the sound of a custodian rattling a bucket at the end of the corridor. The office was small and cramped—he shared it with two others—and it felt stuffy.

Alan conducted interviews with forty of Milgram’s subjects in 1961 as part of a study of personality and obedience and was frustrated to find how few had learned anything useful from the experience. “I remember one man who had been fully obedient told me that he would never even harm a squirrel, that he always braked for wild animals. Okay, so he’s a good person in that sense, but he has gone through this whole shock board, administering what he thought were dangerous shocks to a human being, but he doesn’t seem to make the connection. I felt that maybe Stanley was giving these people too much justification for their own behavior.”