Behind the Shock Machine (33 page)

Milgram: Well, I don’t think there’s that answer. . . . It has the quality of a dilemma, at least to me.
³¹

In this exchange, it seems that Milgram wanted the same endorsement in person that he got from the majority of people who answered his questionnaire who said they felt experiments like his should be conducted and they were glad to have taken part. But despite his philosophical musings on whether it was justified, and despite the anguish he had heard expressed in the meetings he had watched, later in the interview Milgram made it clear that he would repeat the experience gladly.

Man: I’ve got a question for you. If you had to do it over again, would you do it?

Milgram: Would I do it? Yes, easily.

Man: It’s caused—you know, there are a lot of much less difficult projects that perhaps you might have chosen.

Milgram: There’s no question in my mind that I would do it over again. I mean, I may have done it a little better, but I would definitely do it over. I think I learned a tremendous amount in this project. I think I got insights into behavior that I just couldn’t have gotten any other way, and unless—it’s really my job to probe what I can identify as an important aspect of behavior,
and I think that’s terribly important. . . . That’s an easy—it’s simple—it’s such an easy question for me to answer. There’s no question that I’d do it over, even if I were—let’s just say I’m very curious about such things.
³²

In one meeting, Milgram came out from behind the mirror after a man told Errera that he didn’t think the learner was being shocked: “I continued more or less because I couldn’t conceive of anybody allowing me to continue on with an experiment knowing somebody was going to be hurt.” Milgram was dismissive when the man repeated his belief.

Milgram: So when you say, for example, that you didn’t conceive the possibility that Yale would kill a man, they would never—

Man: [Inflict] pain to another man.

Milgram: But, look, this man
[gesturing to another subject]
said this is one of the most distressing experiences of his life.

Man: But, still, like I say—

Milgram:
[interrupting]
Is it inconceivable that Yale would in fact put a man through such a procedure?

Man: It might—

Milgram:
[interrupting]
Well, they did.

Man: Well, I think if you—I think you’ll find in there
[gesturing to the questionnaire]
in one of the things I answered was possibly that you were checking us—the people instilling the pain.

Milgram:
[addressing the rest of the group]
Right. Are there any other questions I can answer?
³³

Despite the wording of the letter inviting them to “discuss frankly and intelligently their reactions to the experiment,” some discussions were clearly unwelcome.

While Milgram saw his experiment as a moral test and applauded people who disobeyed during it, he nonetheless demanded obedience in the debriefing and discussions afterward. And when subjects challenged him or the experiment, he was critical, even combative. As in his writings, he alternated between sympathy and scorn for the subjects.

Milgram’s volunteers had a hard time knowing what was real when they arrived at his lab, even for their interviews with Errera. Meanwhile, Milgram himself had a similar struggle with his changing feelings about the reasons for their behavior.

In 1962, when the experiments were over, Milgram would probably have argued with those subjects who blamed themselves for their behavior. He spelled out why in the report he had mailed them:

Situations control Behavior

. . . There is a tendency to think that everything a person does is due to the feelings or ideas within the person. However, scientists know that actions depend equally on the situation in which a man finds himself. In the studies in which you took part, we were interested in seeing how changes in the situation would affect the degree to which people obey the requests of the experimenter.
³⁴

Milgram told several subjects that going to the maximum said more about the power of the situation than the personality of the person pressing the switches. It would be wrong, he suggested, to explain what happened in terms of character traits. He reminded subjects of their politeness, desire to help, sense of having made a commitment, and fear of being disrespectful—some of the “binding factors” that had trapped them into obedience. Above all, he stressed the normality of their behavior: anyone in the same situation would have felt the same pressures, he argued.

Yet it is clear that, at the same time, Milgram didn’t really believe that. Privately he felt no such reservations about where to place the blame: during the same period in which he was soothing and reassuring his subjects, he was describing their behavior to others as
“terrifying” and calling those who obeyed “moral imbeciles” capable of staffing “death camps.”
³⁵
By framing the experiment as a moral conflict—a choice between not harming a man and abiding by an authority’s commands—he passed judgment on those he perceived had failed the test. His desire to portray his subjects as Nazis in his writings meant that he could not accept Errera’s view that subjects’ reactions were dictated by their life experiences.

Regardless of his ambivalence toward Errera’s theory, it is likely that Milgram, hoping for further funding, would have been awaiting with a mixture of dread and anticipation Errera’s assessment of whether there had been psychological damage. He didn’t have to wait long: Errera offered his impressions at the fifth meeting. He assured Milgram that, of the nineteen people he’d spoken to so far, he had found no evidence of people suffering harm. Perhaps Errera saw an uncertain and worried young man whose career was on the line and felt the need to ease his anxiety.

Milgram must have been relieved with this verdict. But, with the issue of a theory on his mind, he immediately changed tack, asking Errera’s opinion on what had motivated the obedience. “Do you feel on the basis of interviewing these subjects that—is aggression feeding their compliance or is the situation so invitingly compliant that you don’t even have to think about aggression?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Errera replied. Milgram’s study didn’t examine the reasons for people’s behavior; it measured only the behavior itself. To answer that question, he said, Milgram would have to do another experiment.

Errera’s son Claude told me that Errera was “pretty disappointed (maybe even disgusted) by the study itself.”
³⁶
Errera’s role was to assess the impact of the experiments on the people who had taken part. And, like Williams, he was left with the difficult task of confronting these people’s distress and accounting for what had happened. Milgram’s interjections, and his desire to sound out his ideas on Errera, wouldn’t have made Errera’s job any easier.

Yet it wasn’t until it came time for Errera to finalize his report that major tension between the two men arose. The report was published with the title “Statement Based on Interviews with ‘Forty Worst
Cases’”—a title that Milgram wanted but Errera was unhappy with, because it implied that he had interviewed the forty people who had been most troubled by the experiment when in fact he’d simply interviewed the thirty-two who had shown up. Errera referred to the mismatch between the title and his understanding in its opening: as if distancing himself from it, he stated that he had no information on how those he interviewed had been selected, how they compared with the total sample, or why many invited didn’t attend.
³⁷

Nevertheless, Errera’s involvement and eventual declaration of a clean bill of health regarding the impact on his subjects gave Milgram great ammunition in his future dealings with critics. With Errera’s interviews complete in May 1963, his new job about to start at Harvard, and his daring research about to make his reputation, Milgram must have felt that a new chapter in his life was about to begin. He couldn’t have foreseen that after the publication of his article, life would never be the same.

9

THE ETHICAL CONTROVERSY

I was on my way to Fordham University to meet Harold Takooshian, who had been a student of Milgram’s at the City University of New York (CUNY). I was looking forward to it. I knew from my own teaching experience that your students can come to know you in a way few others can. It’s hard to hide your moods from a group who watches your every gesture.

Harold Takooshian, all in black—with black hair and a pencil-thin black mustache to complete the look—had borrowed the president’s boardroom for our meeting. It was an imposing wood-paneled room, at the end of which was a vast table presided over by a portrait of Fordham’s founder, Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes, who famously wore a crucifix sharpened to knife point dangling over his somber robes. Harold had prepared a folder of clippings in advance and sent an e-mail to the “Milgram alumni,” inviting them to meet us for lunch. The alumni were a loose collection of people—Milgram’s colleagues, friends, students, and relatives—who first came together for a memorial service after Milgram’s death in 1984 to share their memories. They have been meeting every five or so years since.

“I feel lucky my life intersected with his,” Harold told me, his eyes shining. “He was a brilliant teacher,” he added, flinging his hands theatrically for emphasis.

Harold could still remember his first class vividly. Milgram gave the thirteen graduate students the job of moving the tables and chairs into a suitable arrangement. First, they tried an octagonal shape, and
Milgram asked them what they thought of it, encouraging suggestions and giving instructions. Next, they tried a rectangle. No good, so they tried a circle. “For two hours we were rearranging the tables and chairs, and nobody said, ‘This is ridiculous’ or ‘Let’s sit down’—nobody did. Instead, Milgram was able to do it in such a way that people tried to please him. Somebody would say, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ and Milgram would say, ‘Well then, people,’ and we’d start all over. At that point we did think he was crazy because it was just over the top. And the next class, there was no talk about chairs at all.” Harold shook his head.

What was he doing, the class puzzled afterward. Testing them? Teasing them? Was there some mysterious scientific purpose to his behavior? “This is my interpretation twenty-nine years later,” Harold said. “He was testing us to see what type of people we were, individually and as a group.” But it sounded to me as if he were still uncertain.

It was a characteristic introduction to Milgram’s teaching style, which was often puzzling and confrontational, although never boring. Sometimes his students had a hard time knowing where his teaching ended and his research began.

Still, Milgram’s students have a particular bond, Harold told me. “Very few people studied with Stanley Milgram. We feel special because we studied with this genius.”

Milgram’s reputation had preceded him when he arrived at CUNY, but it had also affected people’s perceptions of his trustworthiness. At Harvard, where he had worked from 1963 until 1967, students and staff had become wise to his tricks. On November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot, Milgram ran into a lecture theater yelling out the news—and none of the students took him seriously, putting it down instead to one of his experiments.
¹
His obedience research had just been published, and already it was shaping people’s reactions to him.

Just two months before this incident, in September 1963, the Milgrams had moved to Cambridge for the beginning of the new academic year. It must have felt like a new chapter in Milgram’s life. He was newly married, back at Harvard but as a member of faculty,
rather than a student, and being courted by publishers. His daring research was quickly making him a reputation, despite disquiet in some quarters.

His next project would be literary, rather than scientific. That month, Milgram set out to find himself a literary agent, saying that he planned to “devote more and more time” to writing fiction, and he aimed to publish in “quality” magazines such as
The Atlantic
, the
New Yorker, Harper’s
, and
The Reporter.
²
He found an agent, but a month later all plans for the literary life had to be temporarily shelved.

Milgram’s first article was published in October 1963, and he had clearly underestimated the interest that it would generate. Although he had been hoping to confine publicity to the academic world, just three days after it appeared in the
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
it burst onto the pages of the
New York Times
under the headline “Sixty-five Percent in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain.” “What sort of people, slavishly doing what they are told, would send millions of fellow humans into gas chambers?” the paper asked its readers.
³

In the following two months, Milgram was inundated with media requests, fielding calls from ABC; United Press International; London’s
The Times
and
Daily Mail
; and the magazines
Life, Esquire
, and
Popular Science
. And once the story hit the UPI wire service, several more media outlets wanted to cover it. Milgram, it seemed, had held up a mirror that reflected something deeply compelling about contemporary American life.
⁴