Behind the Shock Machine (23 page)

Yale was undoubtedly a powerful influence on several subjects. Many expressed their faith that the experiment must have been safe because of where it was held. One commented, “If I felt he was going to be really hurt in any way I’m sure I would have stopped regardless of what anybody said, but to me, since it was an experiment and it was supervised, I felt that it was in the interest of science and nobody, except by accident, would be hurt.” Another said, “I continued more or less because I couldn’t conceive of any other human being telling me to continue on with the—with what I was supposed to be doing, and at the same time that person allowing me to hurt anybody else. I thought they’d allow us to continue up to that certain point where the instructor or whoever was supervising would stop us if he thought we were going to do harm to an individual.” A third noted, “I became certain midway through the experiment that I was the only one involved. The learner’s protests as to his heart condition normally would have caused the Yale experimenter to halt the proceedings and check the seriousness of the learner’s condition.” And a fourth said, “I think we were all probably in a pretty amiable frame of mind when we came in, though, and it’s kind of flattering to be—the idea that you’re going to take part in an experiment managed by a well-known, lofty institution. You certainly wished to . . . I certainly wished to do my full share and cooperate.”
¹⁹

But Milgram was aware of Yale’s potential influence on his results.
He tested how much effect Yale had by conducting a variation, condition 23, at the nearby industrial town of Bridgeport. He rented a four-room suite on the main street, in the anonymous-looking Newfield Building—Milgram described it as “a somewhat rundown commercial building located in the downtown shopping area”—had the rooms painted light green, furnished it with hired office furniture, and installed the ubiquitous one-way mirror.
²⁰
Then, he sent out a letter to selected Bridgeport residents from the fictitious “Research Associates of Bridgeport” and signed by an equally fictitious “Stephen Millert PhD.” Milgram would later argue that he had successfully established “a complete dissociation from Yale” in his Bridgeport variation of the experiment. However, the letter stressed the words “scientific” and “research” to describe the study being conducted. People were asked to help out in a “scientific study of memory” by a “non-profit organization,” which, intentionally or not, suggested a serious and worthwhile study.

In addition, Milgram had underestimated the powerful authority of science itself as an influence on people’s behavior. It was a compelling motivator when it came to people’s decision to continue or refuse. Psychiatrist Martin Orne suggested that Milgram’s subjects believed that if it was science, it must be worthwhile. They arrived wanting to be helpful. In fact, Orne found that there was very little that people wouldn’t do for science—he couldn’t find a way to stop them from doing things that they would never normally do. He gave people all sorts of boring, repetitive, and useless tasks in the name of scientific research, and he couldn’t find one they would refuse.

Orne found that people invested tasks that they would normally regard as trivial or bizarre with importance because if it was of interest to a professor, then there must have been a good reason for it. In other words, people’s behavior in a lab, in an interaction with a scientist, might have little bearing on how they would interact with a nonscientist in the world outside. People didn’t object or refuse but accepted the passive role that came with being a subject. They did it willingly because it was science, and a scientist had asked them to do it.
²¹
Whether the experiments were held in the august setting of Yale or in an office building in Bridgeport, Orne would have argued, those
taking part would continue to obey the experimenter because of their reverence for science. As one of the female subjects put it, “I am not entirely convinced that a subject’s reaction in a lab is necessarily identical with his reaction in a real-world situation.”
²²

When I looked again at the subjects’ responses to the questionnaire and in talking to Errera, it became obvious that science was a powerful force in reassuring participants who may have doubted the legitimacy of the cover story. One subject said, “Why do I think I obeyed? In the cause of science, more than anything else. It was an experiment.” In an interview, Errera asked one man if he would jump off a bridge in the interests of science, and the man agreed that he would. In another discussion, Errera probed a subject’s feelings about going to the maximum voltage.

Errera: You say you had a guilty conscience.

Man: I must have had a guilty conscience that I did go that far, but I felt I should because it was a scientific experiment and I’ve always been interested in all kinds of science.
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And at the end of each of the Bridgeport experiments, before he revealed the hoax, Williams asked each man what he thought the Research Associates of Bridgeport was and why he had volunteered. Milgram had presumably told Williams to ask this to demonstrate that subjects had no idea that Yale was behind the research.
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Most said they didn’t know, but many assumed that it was an organization conducting scientific research. Williams probed this issue with several subjects, and it was obvious that even though many didn’t have the slightest clue about the organization and what it ostensibly did, they were still prepared to trust it because of the scientific imprimatur.

One man who had gone to 450 volts said that he was motivated by his six-year-old daughter.

Man: I can only say that I was—look, I’m willing to do anything that’s ah, to help humanity, let’s put it that way.

Williams: Right, that’s what we’re doing.

Man: I’ve got—I’ve got a child that’s a cerebral palsy child.

Williams: Have you really?

Man: And you know they’re experimenting steadily on trying to find a cure for it. It’s a sad thing.

Another disobedient man said he “thought it might have something to do with the new science program, you know, outer space and all that.”

Two other subjects made similar assumptions.

Williams: Tell me, who are Research Associates of Bridgeport?

Subject 2331: I have no idea.

Williams: Who am I? Other than the fact that you know my name.

Subject 2331: Well, I assume that you are either a psychologist or a doctor. You’re probably a psychologist.

[. . .]

Williams: Who are Research Associates of Bridgeport?

Subject 2333: Who are they? I don’t know. I imagine they, the way I thought, the idea I had, was that they experiment . . . they do research for education, health.
²⁵

While Milgram found lower rates of obedience in Bridgeport—47 percent were obedient and 53 percent were defiant—he concluded that they were not significantly lower than the results at Yale. The simple explanation for this may be that while Milgram may have dissociated the Bridgeport experiments from Yale, he had
failed to dissociate them from science. “There is no authority today greater than the authority of science,” said Steven Marcus, an English professor at Columbia University who reviewed Milgram’s book
Obedience to Authority
in the
New York Times Book Review
, in an interview about Milgram’s research. Marcus gave the example of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, who did extensive research on the sexual behavior of Americans in the 1950s. Masters and Johnson “were sure that they would have to hire prostitutes. Instead they discovered that some of the most respectable people in St. Louis were willing to fuck in public before someone wearing a white coat.”
²⁶

Milgram and others like him may have thought they controlled the subjects’ experience in the lab, but subjects were constantly interpreting what was happening in ways that the experimenter couldn’t control. They were curious and alert, and actively trying to divine the experimenter’s purpose. Perhaps the only thing that kept some from walking out or challenging the experimenter on his cover story was the influence of science—the belief that there was some higher, altruistic purpose to the experiments. In this sense, the experiments were a self-referential loop: science was the motivation and the result, the reason and the cause, the inspiration and the end goal.

The evening of my meeting with Taketo, I sat in the hotel bar and watched the band perform a disparate, honking brand of jazz. The band members seemed to jerk and play separate pieces, rather than playing together. I closed my eyes and tried to listen differently, to let the music speak for itself and form some sort of whole. The image of Taketo and his friend racing along the highway, fueled by fear, drifted into my mind. It was a jarring postscript to the obedience study.

But was it? The music had shifted—the saxophone had joined the drums in a seamless movement—and now I could hear a kind of melody, a theme. My thoughts fell into line. Milgram talked about obedience and its relevance to the Holocaust, but if, as he argued, our tendency to obey malevolent authority was a universal trait, what did he make of the mass civil disobedience that was erupting across
the country? What did he make of the civil rights movement, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War—weren’t they evidence that people were not programmed to obey blindly? About this, Milgram was silent.

I opened my eyes. Had he simply ignored evidence and events that contradicted or undermined his results? Or was it that the demonstrations and protests around him seemed trivial in comparison to the horrific events of Nazi Germany in World War II?

The room erupted into applause and I started then joined in, glad to have a distraction, glad of the cheering and the noise.

6

THE SECRET EXPERIMENTS

I had been looking at the same box of folders in the library for half an hour. I knew that something wasn’t right with them but couldn’t work out what it was. The finding aid told me that the folders were subject files for condition 23, the variation that Milgram had conducted in the nearby town of Bridgeport. But rather than the usual forty, there were sixty subject files inside the box, which didn’t add up.

Then I noticed that twenty of the files belonged to what was labeled as condition 24. I went back to my notes and found a passing reference to it in an early report to the NSF. What did that mean? That night I went through Milgram’s book
Obedience to Authority
, which made no mention of a second experiment at Bridgeport or of a condition 24. I studied my photos of the contents of the files. It was like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw without having a picture to guide me. But slowly things began to fall into place. Instead of one volunteer per experiment in condition 24, there were two. From their addresses I found that some lived in the same street, others in the same house. They came to the lab together. In total, he recruited twenty pairs of volunteers for this experiment. Milgram had recruited pairs of friends, relatives, neighbors, fathers and sons.
¹

The next day, I located the audiotapes of condition 24. Through my headphones I listened to Subject 2425, a thirty-two-year-old Jewish man who arrived at the lab with his friend and neighbor, whom we’ll call Doug. Williams’s patter was practiced by then: he had been giving the same spiel five nights a week and on weekends for nine months.
The two friends drew lots for the roles of teacher and learner. Subject 2425, who was in fact a high school teacher, was given the teacher role—I’ll call him Larry. From the moment he was assigned the role, I found it impossible to identify with anyone but Larry as I listened; he was drawn in by the story and was nervous, hesitant, and eager to please. As Williams strapped Doug into the chair in the adjoining room, Larry looked on. Doug was not yet in on the hoax. They both sounded worried.

Doug: Good grief. Are you sure this is . . . I don’t want to sit here and be electrocuted, now . . .

Williams: The shocks may be painful. . . . Let me explain briefly to you what’s going to happen—he’ll say “blue,” and then he’ll read four more words, and your job is to remember which of the four words was originally paired with “blue.”

Larry: Yeah, how bad do these shocks get?

Williams: They won’t be dangerous, but they may be painful.

Back in the main room, Williams explained Larry’s task to him. I imagined Milgram coming out of his hiding place as Williams kept Larry occupied and creeping into the adjoining room to Doug, whispering what he wanted him to do and say as each switch on the machine was pressed.

Larry was still concerned when they began.

Larry: Oh, boy.
[Nervous laughter]

Williams: Brisk pace, please. Attention, learner—your teacher is about to begin the test. Try and remember the word pairs. Ready? Begin.

Larry: Blue girl, nice day, fat neck, green ink, rich boy, fast bird, blunt arrow, soft hair, cool cave, gold moon, hard head, wet duck,
brave woman, white horse, sad face, short time, sharp needle, slow dance, red sunset, low noise, new book, quiet evening, tame bear, sweet taste, true story.

Having read the word list, Larry began to test Doug’s memory. After each question, I heard a faint buzz as Doug indicated his answer and it registered in the light box on top of the machine. Larry gave his friend three shocks, but it was not until the fourth shock, at 75 volts, that he heard any reaction.