Behind the Shock Machine (16 page)

I imagined what the campus would have felt like to Hannah and the thirty-nine other women who arrived here in March and April 1962. It would have been buzzing with tall, athletic-looking men in suits and ties hurrying from one building to another, some perhaps stopping to smoke a cigarette before the next lecture began.

My vision of attractive, all-American men wasn’t facetious: Yale had a tradition of looking for what it called boys of “character,” a term that encompassed personality, leadership skills, and appearance. Yale undergraduates were chosen for their looks and “manliness,” and sound bodies and physical prowess were viewed as indicators of strong character and leadership potential. Interviewers even used a checklist of desirable physical characteristics as part of the selection process. Freshmen entering Yale as late as 1965 were still measured, weighed, and photographed naked as part of their induction process.
⁶

Few Jewish men would have been among these freshmen. Since the mid-1920s, Yale and Harvard, both located in areas with large numbers of Jewish immigrants, had limited the intake of Jewish students by imposing a 10 percent quota. This was relaxed in late 1961, a year after Milgram arrived at Yale, in recognition of the fact that the exclusion of Jewish applicants was at the expense of intellectual excellence. But at the time of Milgram’s experiment, they still made up only 15 percent of Yale freshmen, although there were Jewish staff on
the teaching faculty, including in the psychology department where Milgram worked.
⁷

And there would have been few, if any, women in evidence. It wasn’t until 1969 that Yale admitted women as undergraduates. Female graduate students had been admitted since 1892, but numbers were small. The largest number of female students was probably at Yale School of Nursing, which was established in 1923 (with a female dean), but was located two miles from the main campus. Few of the staff were women—the first woman to receive tenure had been awarded it only in 1952. And while half of the librarians were women, some libraries were still off-limits to female students until as late as 1963.
⁸

The women arriving for their appointments in Milgram’s lab would have left behind the buzzing, noisy streets of New Haven, the demands of work and marriage and perhaps motherhood, to enter another world—a masculine world of wealth and power. A world that would have made them look around and feel the privilege of being there.

Condition 20, the variation in which Hannah had taken part, was notable not just because the subjects were female, but also because it was the first variation in which subjects were told of the hoax.
⁹
It’s not clear why Milgram introduced debriefing at this point. After all, he was still trying to recruit subjects. Clearly, secrecy was still important: he wouldn’t have wanted news of the experiment to spread. In fact, Williams can be heard telling women at the end of the experiment to keep what he’s told them secret, even though “we know it makes a good story to tell.”
¹⁰

Perhaps Milgram had become aware of the gathering chorus of concern about the perceived cruelty of the experiment. His research had been able to flourish in a relatively unsupervised environment. Linsly-Chittenden Hall was blocks from the psychology department, and the experiments were conducted largely in the evenings and on weekends. Milgram was slow to discuss his results with his mentors and, on at least one occasion, refused to discuss it with colleagues while it was in progress.
¹¹
It’s likely that subjects’ complaints to Yale had led to questions about what the young assistant professor was
doing, and Milgram would have been anxious to head off further complaints.

Milgram recruited forty women for the experiment, which followed the heart-attack script he had used in conditions 5 and 6. Each believed, as previous participants had, that they were being recruited for an experiment about memory and learning. As he did for all other subjects, Milgram kept a file on each woman. If she were married, the folder also included a summary of her husband’s details, including his name, age, occupation, and educational level. A complete file contained anything from ten to fifteen pages. All forty files in the archives have had the woman’s name blacked out, as with all subject files that have been sanitized for public viewing.

It is clear from the files that the women volunteered for a range of reasons. Some were interested because it was Yale; others came to learn something new. One attended to test whether the shock treatment she’d had in a psychiatric hospital had damaged her memory. A significant number—at least a third—came not because they had volunteered but because their husbands had returned the coupon on Milgram’s ad. These men had presumably been contacted by Milgram and his staff, who had explained that they were now seeking women and asked if their wives would participate. This was not unusual at the time, and Milgram would have observed how Solomon Asch had recruited new subjects by asking former subjects to recommend their friends.
¹²

As soon as a woman either refused to continue or reached 450 volts, Williams asked her to answer some questions—about her feelings about the experiment, how painful the sample shock had felt, how upset she had felt during the experiment, and how painful she thought the shocks were—and recorded her answers on another sheet. I found these sheets in several of the folders. Some also had a completed copy of the questionnaire that Milgram had sent some months after the experiment was over. Also included was a two-page form upon which Williams recorded how far each subject went, as well as his observations of her. Sometimes he recorded comments the woman made, or how often she laughed; other times, he noted something about her behavior or appearance. For example, Williams wrote that
Subject 2021, a twenty-three-year-old home economics teacher, was “a beautiful blond, young, luscious.” He described Subject 2025, a thirty-four-year-old Swedish clerk, as “lovely.” Another woman, a forty-nine-year-old housewife, was described as “big” with a “little girlish” voice and “mincing steps.” Before the experiment had begun, she had asked Jim McDonough what he did for a living and Williams had written, “Is she looking for a man?”
¹³

Milgram made notes on the first two female subjects from his spot behind the one-way mirror. His notes, like Williams’s, described the woman’s appearance, but were more factual than evaluative, such as “a nurse—dressed in a nurse’s uniform.” However, they included statements about her physical and emotional reactions, such as “squirming in seat,” “exceedingly nervous,” and “shaking all over.” He may well have been making notes for a future work, as comments about the nurse as “high compliance, low aggression” suggest he was relating her performance to a theory.
¹⁴
Some of the women would feature later in his book
Obedience to Authority
, although the one-page summary of this condition was measly in comparison to the space allocated to his male subjects.

Still, these kinds of detailed records brought me closer to any of the subjects than I had been before. By reading a complete file, I could listen to the experiment as it unfolded and read Williams’s and Milgram’s observations of it, as well as the woman’s reflections about what had occurred. On my next visit to the library, I looked through the forty women’s files, searching for Hannah—a forty-year-old housewife, married—and I found her, the name replaced by a subject number. As soon as I heard the tape, I recognized her voice, which had changed very little in almost fifty years. On the recording, a much younger Hannah sounded perky and confident as she talked to Williams at the beginning of the experiment. But you could hear her confidence getting shakier once the learner started to give incorrect answers, and it became clear that his memory was not reliable. By the third shock, 45 volts, she was stumbling over the words. At the fifth shock, 75 volts, when the learner made his first sound of discomfort, there was a pause. Then I heard the following exchange.

Hannah:
[to Williams]
Is he all right?
[into the microphone]
The correct one was “hair.”
[to Williams]
Is he all right?

Williams: Yes, please continue.

Hannah: All right. Cool: day, shade, water,
cave. [learner buzzes incorrect answer]
That is incorrect. I will now . . . give . . . you . . . a shock . . . of 90 volts.
[gives shock]

Williams: Push it all the way to the bottom, please.

By 105 volts, McDonough’s cry of pain was much louder, and Hannah turned again to Williams, asking for reassurance.

Hannah: Is he all right? I’m afraid.
[laughs nervously]

Williams: No, the shocks are not dangerous.

Hannah: Is he all right because I’m really afraid.
[pause]
The correct answer is “cool cave.” Gold: dollar—I’m really scared—necklace, moon, paint.

By the seventh shock, 105 volts, Hannah sounded rattled and began to laugh, although it seemed more like a sob. She tried to sound firm when she spoke into the microphone, but she was mixing up words, getting muddled.

After she had completed the experiment, when Williams asked her why she kept going, she said, “I knew you were trying to prove something. I really thought I was helping you in the experiment.” He then asked her to explain her laughter. “It was laugh or cry! To me, I don’t know what I was proving! . . . if I took away [my boys’] two-wheeled bicycle, that is the greatest punishment. I could slap them all I wanted . . . but it doesn’t mean anything unless I take something away from them. I’ve found now that’s their punishment, if I say no television of a certain show, that’s a tremendous punishment. But to go in and actually physically hit them, which I felt this was—why, I would only be angering myself!”

Williams continued to probe.

Williams: You feel—well, why did you laugh? Do you have a reason, I mean do you have a reason, can you think of a reason, why you were laughing?

Hannah: As I said before, I didn’t know if I was gonna laugh or cry. To me it was just pho—I don’t know, something like in the circus where you throw the balls at the man who’s got his head through the hole in the sheet.
[Williams laughs]
To me it was punishment that wasn’t serving any purpose!

Hannah’s relief was obvious when Williams told her McDonough wasn’t being shocked.

Hannah: Ah, I felt so sorry for that man, I can’t tell you.

Williams: Did you really?

Hannah: Because I thought that I was just hitting him for no reason, just whipping him at the post . . .

Williams: Well, how do you feel about it now? Do you feel a little more relaxed now that you know he wasn’t getting shocks?

Hannah: I know that he wasn’t physically hurt. That’s the most important thing.

Williams: Yeah, I tried to point that out to you in the beginning, when I told him in there that they’re not dangerous, although they were painful.

For some reason, Williams seemed solicitous of her. Perhaps he could tell from the way she looked that she was putting on a brave face, or maybe he, McDonough, and Milgram were generally more protective of women.

After McDonough was unstrapped, he joined Hannah and Williams in the lab.

Williams: Here’s Mr. McDonough.

Hannah: Oh! You just lost a friend. Ooooh! You have—especially when he gave me this heart routine! Oh! You just lost a friend!
[McDonough laughs]
Oh, I was ter—Oh! I feel—this is terrible!

McDonough:
[to Williams]
She’s a good subject.

Williams: She’s a very good teacher.

Hannah: Oh.

Williams: Very, very good.

Williams reassured her again and said he hoped that she had “relaxed” now, and thanked her for coming. Hannah pushed her chair back, her heels tapping across the floor as their voices receded. She was heading for the door when she gave a sharp little cry and said, “Isn’t this awful? I feel like I’m on
Candid Camera
!”

This must have been the moment that David had told me about in his e-mail. Williams had turned on the lights behind the mirror to reveal “a roomful of students who were observing her every reaction.” She was “horrified,” David had told me. It was clearly an experience that had stayed with Hannah for many years.

On the tape, there was the sound of a door opening and Milgram’s voice as he entered the lab. In the room behind him, the students continued to watch from behind the glass.

Milgram: Hello, my name is Stanley Milgram.

Hannah: Oh, how do you do?

Milgram: You feel like you’re on
Candid Camera
?

Hannah: Yes.
[laughs nervously]

Williams: Most people do.

Milgram: I know it is very much like, er, um . . . the difference of course is that. . . . Yes, it’s not unlike it in that they take a real-life situation and they use it for entertainment purposes, and we’re using it for a somewhat different purpose. For example, forty women will be put in the situation you were put in and you said before that, ah, you felt that most women would stop before you—actually, that hasn’t generally been the case yet.

Hannah: Hasn’t it really?

Williams: No, one person—

Milgram:
[interrupts]
Some are much less, ah, concerned about the tea—the learner than you were. Some have rather coldly . . . you were obviously so, you know, ah—