Behind the Shock Machine (20 page)

The experiment began: Joe read the words, with Williams seated behind him and the learner giving his answers from the room next door. Joe remembered feeling increasingly uneasy. “I thought, This is bizarre. . . . Why is he watching me? What was the business with
drawing straws? He picked me for this! Why did he give me a shock? He didn’t give the other fellow a sample shock. All of these things were tumbling about in my mind while I was reading the words and thinking, I’ve gotta stop this, there’s something wrong here—I’m not sure what, but I’m gonna stop.”

Joe wasn’t sure when he stopped but thought it was after the fourth or fifth shock. He remembered the learner calling out that he wanted to stop, and he reached the point where he “just felt very uncomfortable with it.”

But stopping wasn’t straightforward. When Joe told Williams that he’d had enough, “the professor” insisted that he continue, as they had “a lot invested.” “I said, ‘If you want the five dollars back you can have it, but I’m not going to go any further.’” Williams refused and asked Joe why he wanted to quit. And Joe told him his suspicions—that punishment had been proven ineffective in improving learning and that he didn’t believe they would shock a man who hadn’t been checked medically first. He also suspected that the learner had been faking his cries. “I said I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I had my suspicions about it. I thought, if I’m right in my suspicions, then he [the learner] is in collusion with them; he must be. And I’m not delivering shocks at all. He’s just hollering out every once in a while.”

According to Joe, instead of trying to allay his doubts or confirm his suspicions, Williams sidestepped his questions and gave up pressuring him to go on. His tone, Joe remembered, turned from commanding to conversational. Now “detached and polite,” Williams took Joe through a series of tests to establish how much responsibility he felt toward the learner and what his attitude to authority was. Joe remembered a picture that Williams showed him, which I would later find in the archives. Joe’s recall of the picture was uncannily accurate, and the memory of its amateurishness still made him laugh. “It showed something that happened in the 1700 or 1800s. It showed a young kid, a student in a school who has a ratlike face—he’s so ugly he deserves to be punished, you know? Standing next to him is a handsome young man with a coat, looking like a teacher in a school, with a whip in his hand aimed at the boy. Facing them is
an older man with a beard, pointing his finger, ordering the teacher to punish the boy. And the experimenter asked me what I thought about the picture, and I said it’s too obviously a setup—it’s obvious you want me to sympathize with the teacher who’s being instructed to beat the boy, and you have no sympathy for the boy because he’s such a weird-looking character, and obviously no sympathy for the headmaster who’s ordering it all to happen. I always thought a good psychologist doing an experiment would come up with a better picture than that thing.”

After the tests were over, the experimenter told Joe that he would go next door and unstrap the learner. By now Joe was convinced that he was the one being tested, rather than the learner. Why else, he reasoned, would the experimenter be sitting in the room watching him, instead of watching a man who was being hurt? So Joe was “flabbergasted” when the learner came back into the main room, looking “haggard” and upset. “He came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face. He came up to me and he offered his hand to shake hands with me and he said, ‘I want to thank you for stopping it.’ He said, ‘It wasn’t that it hurt so badly, but the anticipation that I was going to get another shock was dreadful, and that’s what made me cry out.’ When he came in, I thought, wow, maybe it really was true!”

Out on the street after they had talked, Joe was still worried, despite the learner’s assurances that he was okay. “I waited outside the building for about a half hour for him to come out so I could talk to him, and he never did come out. And all the way home I was wondering to myself, could it be? And then I’d think, it can’t be. The only thing that makes logic and sense is that I was the subject of the experiment to see how far I would go.” Joe shook his head and laughed. “The other man must be the best actor I’ve ever come across. He deserved an Academy Award for that.”

Much like Joe in the lab, I found a confusing jumble of thoughts going through my mind as I listened. His description, particularly of how the learner continued with the act despite Joe’s suspicions, sounded bizarre, but then I remembered Alan Elms telling me something similar. Joe’s memory and mind were so sharp, and his recall
of detail was so clear. I had discounted Joe’s account not just because it contradicted Milgram’s but also because I viewed the scientist’s account as the more naturally reliable.

The next time I visited, Joe was tickled by the politics of the upcoming presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, a woman, looked likely to be endorsed as presidential candidate by Puerto Rico. “Latin Americans hold the power!” he said delightedly.

I asked Joe why he thought he had been ignored in the Milgram story, and he said that it was his political views—and in particular, how his article had contextualized the experiment against what he saw as the bravery of Israeli soldiers who defied orders to shoot at Palestinians. Many people would dismiss him on those grounds. Joe said that he could tell someone’s view on the West Bank by the language they used—whether they called it the occupied or disputed territories.

This stayed with me. It suggested that obedience, in a similar way, could mean something either positive or negative, depending on your view. If you believed that an authority’s commands were legitimate, then obedience was good and correct. If you believed that the authority’s commands were wrong or illegitimate, then obedience was not a virtue but a failing, and disobedience was to be admired. Joe’s upbringing had encouraged him to make the distinction between a benign and a malevolent authority, but would Milgram’s other subjects have been as skeptical?

In some of the variations of the experiment, it wasn’t at all clear whether obedience was a good or a bad thing; in several, Milgram reversed the definitions altogether. For example, in one condition it was the experimenter who told the teacher to stop and the learner who pleaded with the teacher to continue. Despite the pain, the learner argued, he wanted the teacher to shock him because a friend of his had also been in the experiment and he wanted to prove his “manliness” to this friend. In this instance, all the people who obeyed the experimenter and
stopped
giving the shocks were counted as disobedient because they had refused the learner. But in an unpublished version, the experimenter left the room and the learner implored the subject to resume the shocks. Seven people agreed to give the learner the shocks
he demanded. So what did that make them—obedient because they obeyed the learner or disobedient because they were flouting the experimenter’s instructions?

In another variation, the learner said that he would take part only if the experimenter tried it first. The experimenter was strapped into the chair, and it was the learner who urged the teacher to continue, despite the protests of the experimenter in the next room. In this condition, obedience was defined as refusing to shock the experimenter or giving up at some point at or before twenty-nine shocks (425 volts).

Joe told me that there was nothing to be particularly proud of when it came to his resistance in the Milgram experiment. He’d had experiences that were much tougher tests of his principles—particularly when, as chairman of the Communist Party of New Haven, he was arrested and put on trial. “I think that experience led me to be skeptical. It led me to volunteer for this sort of thing, too, to see what’s new in the world. But it certainly led me to have the stubbornness and the grit to say to a man in a white coat with horn-rimmed glasses that I am not going to do what you want.” Joe said that he might have behaved differently if the authority had been one he respected: “At the same time, I also have said to myself sometimes, ‘What would I do if the Communist Party ordered me to do something like that? Would I say no?’ I think I would argue, fight, and maybe say no, but you know, there was a feeling I had at one time of wanting to belong that was very strong.”

And Milgram’s study did not deal with behavior in a group, Joe pointed out, so he wasn’t sure that it was relevant to events like the Holocaust. People will do things in groups, both good and bad, he told me, that they might not do alone. As a soldier in France during World War II, for example, he was in a truck with a group of soldiers. A few of them had been drinking but had run out of booze. When they stopped for a break, one went to a farm and came back saying that the farmer was willing to trade calvados for gasoline. But gasoline was in short supply, and Joe and some others protested. “One of the drunks said, ‘Shut the fuck up; we can get it if we want it!’ I was frightened. They looked to me like they were going to fight over it.
And I was wondering, what are we going to do—how are we going to stop them? And one of the men who had been sitting there silently—just like out of a John Wayne movie he stood up. And he stood in the open doorway of the truck and he said, ‘I’m not going to let you sell that gasoline,’ and when he did that I jumped up and stood next to him. I was a little scared about being the first one . . . but I jumped up there to support him, and once I did a couple of others did. The drunks backed down. I wished I’d been the first one to stand up, but I wasn’t.”
¹

Ultimately, Milgram ignored the fact that people could change, Joe told me. Joe wouldn’t have been as committed to social change if he thought that people couldn’t change. He had volunteered for the army, which at that time was still segregated, after Pearl Harbor. Racism was rife in his all-white company. He recalled the arguments and discussions that they’d have in his company about “our attitude to black soldiers”: “They used the ‘N’ word there, and I always was the one that didn’t use it at that time. They had all these stupid beliefs: that Negroes were lazy and had to be ordered to work, and so on. And there was always a point in these conversations where they would say, ‘If a Negro officer came along, a captain, say, would you salute?’ And people would say, ‘Well, I would salute the insignia of the rank but not the man.’” So watching Obama on television speaking to a crowd in South Carolina was inspirational. “The audience was jammed with young students—most of them white—who were obviously the people who’d been canvassing for him, knocking on doors and cheering him on, and I thought to myself, you know, some of these are the granddaughters and grandsons of the people I argued with in ’42 and ’43. It’s fantastic the change that has occurred here.”

No wonder Joe has been largely ignored. He could be right about his politics playing a part, but I think it’s more that his account of the experiment proposes that Milgram captured a momentary mood rather than an enduring truth. That would be enough to cast doubt on Joe’s reliability as a narrator. But while Joe is a heretic on a number of counts, the ultimate sin is that his experience suggests that people might have seen through Milgram’s cover story, something that Milgram always downplayed.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of Joe’s optimism that people could change. And how Milgram’s definition of obedience, despite his arguments about the power of the situation, seemed like a life sentence, as if people were frozen forever that way—fixed, stuck, like butterflies on a pin.

Milgram assured us of the reality of the experiment—the detailed and painstaking procedures that he went through to make the machine look authentic and the victim’s cries sound agonized, the brisk efficiency that he had trained Williams to portray. But now, hearing it from Joe’s point of view, there were several things about the experiment that just didn’t make sense. I wondered how many of Milgram’s subjects, like Joe, had suspected the cover story at either a conscious or subconscious level. I wondered how many were alert to clues, if not downright suspicious, during the experiment itself.

The power of Milgram’s results rests on the belief that they are valid. Milgram asked us to believe that his volunteers thought that the machine, the actors, the pain—the whole situation—was real. We know that many subjects believed the elaborate experimental setup, but what evidence is there that all of his subjects were convinced? Milgram simply told us that they were and offered as evidence the distress that many of them suffered.
²
Yet in the archives, there’s evidence that a surprising number of subjects had doubts.

Some subjects wrote to Milgram immediately after the experiment to give their impression of events. On August 29, 1961, just three weeks after the experiments began, Milgram received a letter from a subject who took part in either condition 1 or 2. It begins: “Dear Sir, I have some ‘second thoughts’ about the experiment of last night and feel that I should express these thoughts for what ever they are worth to your program.” The author writes that he had worked out that he was the object of study, and the experiment wasn’t about memory and learning. He argued that “subconsciously” he noticed details that led him to this conclusion:

Both pieces of paper probably had the word “teacher” on it [
sic
]. While the instructor was speaking the “learner” acted rather disinterested, which is not normal for a person in a strange experiment. . . . When the “learner” was strapped in the chair and the instructor casually remarked that the worst that could happen was skin burns . . . it somehow does not fit in the picture. . . . Then there were the one-way mirrors, I wondered why I was not allowed to see the “learner.” Also a point was made of giving me my check and not the “learner” at the same time.

He observed that it was well known that punishment didn’t help learning, and concluded: “I think the ‘learner’ never received any shock. Hence you were observing my behavior and I would like to know a little more about the reasons for this program. Is this possible?”