Behind the Shock Machine (35 page)

As a result of this furious debate, the APA tightened professional ethical standards for its members in 1973. Researchers would be required to obtain informed consent from potential subjects, which meant they would have to tell potential subjects the purpose of the
experiment and what was involved, so that volunteers could weigh the risks before deciding whether to participate. Even then, subjects would have the right to decline or withdraw after an experiment had started. Milgram’s style of research, with its potential to cause harm to subjects and its use of misinformation and deception that prevented informed consent, would effectively be outlawed. Some, such as Philip Zimbardo, would mourn the passing of the era of daring and inventive research, brought to an end by “a cabal of some cognitive psychologists, human subjects research committees, Protestants, and female social psychologists.”
²¹
Others would see it as the beginning of a new, more enlightened approach to psychological research.

Meanwhile, over time Milgram would become increasingly dismissive of criticisms about the deception, stress, and mistreatment of his subjects. His tactics in handling criticism would always be to attack and deflect: he would use psychology against his critics. He would suggest that it was not his research or his results that were the problem but the uncomfortable feelings they aroused, and that people who attacked the research did so in order to avoid acknowledging these uncomfortable feelings. He would come to view ethical criticisms as a case of shooting the messenger. It was an argument that both deflected criticism and bolstered his status, casting him as a purveyor of unpalatable truths who was being punished for the unflattering light he cast on human nature. By 1977, he would be downplaying Baumrind’s influence on the field. In an unpublished interview, he would go as far as to refer to her criticisms as little more than a domestic squabble, “a tempest in a teapot,” despite the fact that this tempest changed the APA’s guidelines forever.
²²

However, for the most part the ethical concerns about Milgram’s research would be contained to academia.
²³
Neither Baumrind’s response nor the other sustained critiques of Milgram’s research could make a dent in the public’s interest. In people’s imagination, Milgram had simply discovered something shocking about human nature. Through mass media, Milgram’s research had been absorbed into popular culture.

It seemed that the ethical furor made Milgram more cautious. While
he had taken the shock machine with him when he left Yale in 1963, his research at Harvard avoided direct contact with subjects. However, it was still bold and imaginative. In 1964, he developed a more elaborate version of the Lost Letter study. This time, he used a plane to distribute pro-Democrat and pro-Republican letters favoring presidential candidates Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. But letters got caught in trees and on rooftops or landed in creeks and rivers, as well as on the plane’s wings, and the study had to be aborted. In another study, Milgram tested the “small world” phenomenon—known today as six degrees of separation—by testing how many acquaintances it took to connect two strangers. A parcel had to be mailed from one stranger to another; how many people did it take to reach the target person? Milgram’s answer: six.
²⁴

While Milgram’s fame was growing, his colleagues continued to make their mixed feelings about him known. Milgram had arrived at Harvard with one article about the obedience research in print. By the time he left in 1967, he had published three additional articles, each bringing fresh academic attention. During his time at Harvard, Milgram weathered both increasing fame and criticism; while there were those who dismissed the research, there were just as many who defended it. American psychology developed a deep ambivalence toward him, as reflected by the Harvard committee responsible for assessing his application for a tenured position. After months of debate, the committee, whose decision had to be unanimous, could not agree on Milgram, offering the job to someone else. Milgram told an interviewer that it was “a trauma” and “an exceptional blow.” He blamed it on the fact that he didn’t pay enough attention to the “social context” (“I suppose I was never very good, nor very interested, in the politics of the profession”), but it probably had less to do with his inability to play politics than his seeming inability to quell people’s concerns about criticisms of his research. In addition, his manner tended to be dismissive, if not arrogant, which wouldn’t have helped his cause. Some among the committee thought he was “manipulative.”
²⁵

By 1967, Milgram’s job prospects were grim. Few “prestigious research departments” would hire him. Fortunately, a colleague and
friend, Howard Leventhal, was negotiating for a job at CUNY and made it a condition that if they took him, they would take Milgram, too. Moving from an Ivy League institution to CUNY would have been a comedown for Milgram.
²⁶
Nevertheless, in the summer of 1967 Milgram joined the CUNY faculty, where he would work until his death in 1984.

The tide of criticism over the experiments continued in his new role. In 1968, an article by Martin Orne and Charles Holland published in the
International Journal of Psychiatry
questioned the validity of Milgram’s results and the meaning of his research. Milgram’s subjects, they argued, viewed the experimental situation differently from him—they made assumptions about what was happening that shaped their responses, and this had to be taken into consideration in interpreting the results. How could Milgram have measured destructive obedience, the authors asked, if his subjects saw the experimenter as a benign authority? Didn’t they naturally perceive the lab as a safe place, and the experimenter’s imperviousness to the learner’s cries as evidence that they weren’t really inflicting pain?

In questioning how believable the subjects found the situation, Orne and Holland queried “the entire foundation of the obedience research.”
²⁷
Like Baumrind, they challenged the parallel between the trusted environment of a respected university laboratory and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and raised issues with which Milgram had privately struggled.

Milgram’s reply to Orne and Holland would not be published until 1972, four years after their article appeared. The reasons for the delay are unclear, but it’s possible that he needed the time to draft a response that satisfied him. With Baumrind, he could argue that whatever he put his subjects through was worth it for the result, but Orne and Holland had queried that result. His response to the latter did little to quell the controversy.

Harold Takooshian met Stanley Milgram a year before his published response, in 1971, when he applied for graduate school at CUNY. He told me that he had been nervous about his application. Like Milgram had done, Harold was applying for graduate study in social psychology without having a background in psychology,
although he didn’t know of this similarity at the time. He had applied to a number of graduate schools, but CUNY was the top of his list because it had Milgram. They first met when Harold dropped by CUNY to deliver some paperwork in support of his application. Harold explained who he was, and he found Milgram “very encouraging.”

Harold was delighted to be accepted, and even more delighted to be studying with the famous Milgram. “But when classes started, things were a little bit different.” Milgram had clear rules for the classroom—as in the obedience experiments, he was in control. He was explicit that there was to be no eating, drinking, or smoking, and no sunglasses to hide behind. He wanted to see the students’ eyes. The hierarchy was clear: while he addressed all students as “Mister” or “Miss,” they always referred to him as Professor Milgram. “I never called him Stanley when he was alive,” Harold said sheepishly, as if the very idea of being so familiar was slightly risqué.

In contrast to the rarefied atmosphere of Harvard, at CUNY Milgram was in the thick of city life—his office at the Graduate Center was in the heart of Manhattan, with a view of Bryant Park—and the surroundings influenced his teaching. Milgram encouraged his students to share his interest in the psychology of city life. His classes were almost
Seinfeld
-esque in taking the city of New York as their laboratory and its citizens as their subjects. Among other things, students conducted research on how helpful city dwellers were, compared to rural people; why New Yorkers were reluctant to give up their seat on the subway; and how many passersby would stop to help a lost child.

Classes, for Harold, were often heated and noisy, but always engaging. “We weren’t just talking about articles; we were really debating and challenging each other, and it became very exciting.” But one gesture from Milgram would stop the conversation. “He knitted his brows in a kind of upside-down V. And we knew that when he did that, we should be quiet and listen. The other thing he did was put his hand up and shake it a little bit.” Harold waved his hand like a conductor wielding a baton. He frowned as best he could and adopted a stutter: “Ah, I really don’t think we understand what is happening
here.” He smiled and shook his head. “He could restore order just like that.”

These days Harold calls Milgram “maestro,” a term that conjures an image of a conductor directing, goading, and inspiring his classes to outperform themselves. Harold felt that part of the excitement generated in classes was due to the students’ sense that anything, anything at all, could happen in their scheduled class time; the only predictable thing about Milgram was his unpredictability. He would often do things that left his students puzzling over them years later.

Suddenly, Harold leaned forward. “I want to ask your help. I want to mention an example of one of the things that Milgram did. Now, I’m going to mention this to you, and you tell me what you think about it, okay?” I nodded. “Toward the end of semester, ten minutes before the end of one social psychology class, Milgram said he needed the class’s help. ‘You people know each other better than I know you, don’t you? You speak with each other all the time. I have to give out grades at the end of the semester, and I’d really appreciate your help.’”

He told them to take out a piece of paper and write down everyone’s names. Then, to write down the grade they would give each person beside their name. “People looked at each other and began writing, but I didn’t write anything.”

After five minutes, Milgram collected and counted the papers, asking the class why he was one short. “Sheepishly, I raised my hand and said, ‘I didn’t give in a paper,’ and he said, ‘Why not?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I just felt uncomfortable,’ and he said ‘Okay.’ So what do you think he did once he collected the papers? He opened each one and he read it out. He said, ‘Let’s see, this is Jerry Cohen. Sabini, A. Silver, B minus.’ And he read the grades! And some people gave As to everybody, and some people gave Bs and Cs. I got a couple of Bs and Cs from people, and because he read out their names I knew who’d given them to me. And after he read them, he said, ‘Well, does anybody have any comments?’ Nobody said anything, so he said, ‘Well, I’ll see you next week.’ And that was it. We disbanded, and next Tuesday we met again.”

Harold asked me to speculate on why I thought Milgram did it.
Well, I said cautiously, he was probably testing how far people would go in following an instruction to do something that might make them uncomfortable. But if I were one of the students, I’d feel pretty angry if other students had given me low grades.

“You can imagine how much we thought about it that week, and that year. And he never explained it. He did this in class constantly. You really had to think about it afterward. I think he was a brilliant teacher.”

He had offered this anecdote as proof of Milgram’s brilliance. But to me, it had all the hallmarks of his most famous research. It was clever but careless about consequences, ingenious but insensitive to the feelings of the people involved. And it remained enigmatic, with people wondering what it meant.

Didn’t Milgram just seem . . . a bit strange? I asked.

Harold laughed. “There’s a psychological term called ‘idiosyncrasy credit’ that distinguishes a weirdo from a genius. The more brilliant someone is, the more odd things they can do and still be accepted. If someone didn’t have enough idiosyncrasy credit, they are seen as a weirdo. He had loads of credit. One of the more outlandish things he did—he did not like the idea of dogs defecating on the street. He felt that that was uncivilized. He actually made a film with the steam coming up off the dog poop. And he showed that film in class. He said he wanted to convince people that this was uncivilized and New York should do something about it.”

Milgram
was
unusual for a social psychologist, Harold said, because he regularly co-authored articles with his students. In addition, his research style made him one of a kind. “He was in the 5 percent who do the research to find the answer, as opposed to the 95 percent who do it to test a theory. That’s why he was a maverick. He didn’t really have a theory—theories to him were not that important.”

But Harold acknowledged that Milgram was more mercurial than most of his teachers at CUNY. At times he could be playful, witty, and endearing. One day he replaced his speech with song, serenading instead of speaking, and refusing to respond to anyone who wouldn’t sing back. He could also be warm and gracious. “I asked him if he would be my mentor, for example, and he acted like he had been just
waiting for me to ask,” Harold said. At other times, he was harsh and critical. He could be sarcastic, dismissive, and intolerant of ideas he’d heard before. “He was always interested in new ideas. And if he heard the same idea, he would just pooh-pooh it, even if it was a new idea for the student. He was somewhat selfish that way; he wanted to learn from the students.” For as many students who loved Milgram, there were just as many who loathed him. “Even the students who were happy with him kept their distance sometimes. . . . He challenged people. He did not feel an obligation to be nice to people. He could be caustic, and some students found his combative style off-putting. . . . He could be St. Nick one minute, Ivan the Terrible the next.”