Behind the Shock Machine (31 page)

In September 1961, just one month after his experiments began and a month after the end of the Eichmann trial, Milgram made an explicit connection between his subjects and Nazis. In a letter to the NSF, which began with a relatively trivial request for the installation
of a phone in the lab, Milgram provided an update on the first four variations:

In a naïve moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all of the United States a vicious government could find enough moral imbeciles to meet the personnel requirements of a national system of death camps, of the sort that were maintained in Germany. I am now beginning to think that the full complement could be recruited in New Haven. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, as long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.
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This letter marked an extraordinary leap from the idea that slavish obedience was the product of the German psyche. The Holocaust, Milgram concluded just four weeks into his research, could just as easily have occurred in the United States.

Although he described his results as “terrifying and depressing,” Milgram must have been excited by their power. Here was an opportunity to take his place alongside his mentor Asch and make a significant contribution to an event that the world was still struggling to understand. Hereafter, Milgram framed his research to his experimental staff, Errera, the NSF, and sometimes even the subjects themselves as “an analogue of Nazi evil.”
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Milgram rushed to get his results into print, sending off an article reporting his first results in December 1961. By March, it had been rejected by two scientific journals. The editor of
Journal of Personality
, Edward E. Jones, wrote:

At present your data indicate a kind of triumph of social engineering. Thus you are apparently able to produce behavior which is in some sense shocking . . . but you have no clear theory . . . and therefore the psychological processes leading up to the obedient act remain a mystery. I really feel very ambivalent about your research.
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Today, Jones’s distaste and ambivalence aren’t surprising. But
Milgram was undaunted by his criticism and seemed to have made few changes, if any, to the original article before sending it out for a third time, to the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
. This first published description of the research reveals as much about the scientist as about his subjects. Milgram chose to focus on one variation, his first, which was among those with the highest obedience rate (65 percent). Summarizing his subjects’ distress, Milgram wrote, “The procedure created extreme levels of nervous tension in some Ss. Profuse sweating, trembling, and stuttering were typical expressions of this emotional disturbance.” There was nothing surprising about this impersonal writing style—it was accepted practice to refer to research subjects simply and collectively as “S”—but the juxtaposition of his detachment with their distress was disturbing. People’s individuality was erased. They were faceless, nameless objects whose fingers on a switch became a symbol of larger, abstract concepts.

Perhaps anticipating skepticism, Milgram provided evidence that subjects believed the illusion was real and reported that they experienced considerable tension, including nervous laughter. But laughter, rather than being a sign of humor or skepticism, was presented as a sign of pathology. It was “bizarre.” A laughing “fit” became a “full blown, uncontrollable seizure, violently convulsive.” He painted a picture of one man’s deterioration and stress as the experiment progressed:

I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.

In this seventy-nine-word, oft-quoted snippet, Milgram appeared to be proud of the power of the experiment that, in twenty minutes, could take a man to the point of “nervous collapse.” And in case we had been feeling sympathy for the squirming businessman, Milgram ensured we knew that it was not the experimenter or the experiment
that was at fault. It was the subject who had caused his own downfall, slavishly following the experimenter’s “every word” and continuing to obey orders.
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Milgram’s portrait of the businessman reminded me of writer Susan Sontag’s description of the Eichmann trial: “It was not Eichmann alone who was on trial. He stood trial in a double role; as both the particular and the generic; both the man, laden with hideous specific guilt, and the cipher, standing for the whole history of anti-Semitism.”
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In June 1962, with the experiments over, Milgram traveled with his wife, Alexandra, to South America for a delayed honeymoon, but by then Jones’s criticism that Milgram had demonstrated rather than explained a phenomenon seemed to have hit home. Milgram was preoccupied with finding an explanation for the results. On notepaper from the Gran Hotel in Lima, Peru, he wrote notes on three examples of obedience he had encountered recently: safety instructions if the plane had to make an emergency landing; Eichmann’s last words, “I have shown obedience to flag and country,” before his May execution; and a book that Milgram had seen in a shop,
How to Train Your Dog to Obey
. In the note about obeying the air-cabin crew’s orders, he described his “terrific stress” on a turbulent flight from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo. He started to “tremble and turn white,” and “the most primitive intellectual mechanisms came into play as stress reducers. I could keep from falling to pieces completely by calling on God’s protective hand [even though] all religious sentiment had passed from me years before. At that time I needed some belief to control the rising tension.” He wrote that in the same way, “Our subjects resort to an even more primitive mechanism in intellectual denial.”
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Milgram returned to Yale in mid-July, and two weeks later had news that his revised journal article had been accepted for publication, although it would be another sixteen months before it appeared in print.
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In the meantime, he prepared to send out a report—the one to his subjects in which he explained what he had really been testing—and a questionnaire. The report had been long planned (Williams can be heard telling subjects that they would receive one once the research is over), but the questionnaire was a recent addition (Milgram had drafted it before his trip).

Since the end of the experiments, word about Milgram’s work had begun to spread. Around July 1962 the
New Haven Register
, a local newspaper, contacted him about doing a story, perhaps after seeing a copy of the report. But Milgram wanted to keep his findings confined to the academy, rather than making them accessible to the general public—at least at this stage. He fobbed them off, saying that the NSF did not want any publicity “for the next few years” because it might interfere with replications.
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Perhaps it was just that Milgram wanted to be the first to break his story, in a publication and at a time of his choosing. He had already started work on a book.

In November 1962, Milgram received two letters that would change his view of his research forever. The first was from Robert Hall of the NSF, who sent a lengthy, damning report explaining why Milgram’s latest funding application had been rejected. Hall, along with two others, had visited Yale in May to discuss the research with Milgram and observe it firsthand. They were obviously not reassured by what they saw. Quite apart from the effect on subjects and the lack of a theory, Hall wrote, Milgram had ignored his subjects’ interpretation of the events, had no evidence that subjects believed the situation, and had no proof that their behavior inside the lab could be applied to the world beyond it. Without a theory and without an explanation of why people behaved as they did, the research seemed to shed little light on obedience to authority.

Milgram had created a powerful scenario that was engaging and affecting for the subjects involved, but what did it mean? His depiction of subjects as Eichmann figures, implying that they acted out of a human propensity to obey orders, seemed like mere speculation—the results could have just as easily been explained by other factors, such as the subjects’ personal backgrounds or the pressure placed upon them by the experimenter.

The second letter was from the APA, which wrote to say it would withhold his application for membership until an investigation of ethical concerns was completed. Some colleagues at Yale had already expressed their misgivings, and Milgram guessed that one had complained to the APA. He told a former student, Australian psychologist Leon Mann, that one colleague “has assumed vast moral
indignation about the Milgram experiments entirely appropriate to an asshead.”
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It must have been a humiliating blow to receive these letters—both in the same month—but Milgram seemed to bounce back quickly. In fact, it gave him a blueprint of the evidence and arguments he would need to defend his results and the treatment of his subjects. And in the midst of what must have felt to Milgram like a groundswell of criticism, he had some good news: in December 1962 he was offered a job at Harvard, which would begin in July the following year. It was a chance to start afresh, free from what he felt was the envy and criticism of Yale.

It was not just the Eichmann trial that influenced Milgram’s work. Yet Milgram made little reference to other important factors—such as his personal history or prevailing Cold War anxieties—that may have had an impact on his research.

Milgram had been personally and professionally affected by the Holocaust but, maintaining his scientific persona, he was slow to publicly acknowledge his Jewish background as an influence. The Holocaust had been a dominant theme of his childhood: during the war, the family had crowded around the radio, listening for news of relatives in Europe; and in 1946, thirteen-year-old Milgram had referred to the Holocaust in his bar mitzvah speech, around the same time as relatives who had survived the concentration camps were staying with the Milgram family. In addition, much of American psychology during the period in which he was studying was influenced by the Holocaust. Milgram’s mentors Gordon Allport and Solomon Asch had formulated and interpreted their research with reference to World War II. Yet Milgram would not make a direct public reference to the influence of his Jewish background on his research until 1977, fifteen years after it was completed.
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Milgram’s research was also influenced by contemporary anxiety about American moral weakness. During the Korean War, the capture and supposed brainwashing of U.S. prisoners, a number of whom later defected and refused repatriation, had led to an “intense moral panic.” The public perception was that the independence and strong-mindedness of the American national character had been replaced by
submission and weakness.
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This was exacerbated by the tension and brinkmanship of the Cold War, which generated anxiety about the masculinity of American men compared to their Soviet counterparts. Milgram’s results fed precisely into such anxiety by suggesting that the average American was as morally weak as the Nazi murderer—and apparently as open to manipulation as Eichmann claimed to have been. Like aliens inhabiting small-town America in pulp science fiction or Soviet spies masquerading as American citizens, Milgram’s subjects became “both everyday Joes from Main Street America and incomprehensible monsters.”
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They were both familiar and frightening, known and unknown—ordinary men one minute, mysterious killers the next.

Milgram’s lab became a stage on which the political and cultural anxieties of the Cold War were played out: strength and weakness, independence and submission, and the failure of American men—a kind of moral flabbiness that left them impotent in the face of the might of the Soviet Union.
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Milgram probably didn’t refer to personal and social influences on his work because the positivist tradition in which he was trained had as its model the unbiased, value-neutral experimenter. He had embraced this brand of science and was more interested in the objectively measurable world of external action than in the subjective, inner world of the mind. He told one interviewer that he had chosen social psychology over another discipline of psychology because “there is something of a redeeming feature in becoming a social psychologist because it doesn’t make you into a somewhat sickly, Viennese analyst thinking about inner thoughts.”
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On occasion, he noted this coldness in himself, and expressed sympathy for his subjects. In a note entitled “The Experimenter’s Dilemma,” he wrote:

Consider . . . the fact . . . that while observing the experiment I—and many others—know that the naïve subject is deeply distressed, and that the tension caused him is almost nerve shattering. . . . If we fail to intervene, although we know a man is being made upset, why separate these actions of ours from those of the subject, who feels he is causing discomfort to another? . . . I feel, though I cannot quite find the words for it, that the reactions of the observers—those who sit by “enjoying the show”—are profoundly relevant to an understanding of the actions of the subject.
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