Behind the Shock Machine (8 page)

[McDonough buzzes wrong answer]

Bill: Incorrect. One hundred and fifty volts.
[gives shock]

McDonough: Let me out of here! I told you about my heart problem; let me out of here!

Bill hesitated, turned to Williams. He told me, “I remember distinctly saying, ‘You know what, I’ll switch with him. I’m smarter than this guy and you can ask me these questions.’” But the experimenter was adamant that they couldn’t change places once the experiment had started.

By now they were confronting the eleventh switch, 165 volts. “I was under a lot of stress; I was really starting to sweat. I wasn’t in control of the situation and I also suspected that I was being set up. I mean, Yale doesn’t go round torturing people . . . but I really wasn’t sure, so the question in my mind was, am I really hurting this guy or am I the guinea pig here? Is this a setup, are they testing me to see if I’ll do this stuff? I didn’t have any answers to this conflict that was going on. It was unbelievably stressful.”

One hundred and seventy-five volts. One hundred and ninety volts. Sweating and trembling, Bill continued. “It sounds really strange, but it never occurred to me just to say, ‘You know what, I’m
walkin’ out of here,’ which I could have done. At this point I was just soaking wet. I was just so disturbed by all this because this had gone out of my realm of reality and I was in a bizarre environment and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was sweating bullets and I was starting to laugh almost like a maniac, hysterically. I’d kind of lost it.”

Then McDonough, after receiving a shock of 330 volts, went silent. Bill thought, either he’s unconscious, he’s dead, or this thing is a complete sham.

When McDonough didn’t answer, Bill told Williams that he wasn’t going any further. “I said, ‘I’m not taking responsibility for this,’ and that’s when he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Yale University is taking full responsibility.’ I was under such enormous stress—I mean, I just did not know what to do—and when I said he’s not answering anymore and the guy said, ‘Well, just continue with the experiment,’ I thought, I’m just going to go along with this thing. I don’t know what’s going on but let’s just get it over with.”

Bill stopped talking at that point and looked down at his hands. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. A door slammed in the hallway outside, and laughter and voices tripped down the corridor before fading. Bill took a sip of water. If I was reluctant to hear this, I thought, how must Bill feel, having to tell it? I tried to imagine him as he would have been that summer: a young man, muscled, tan, and fresh-faced. Curious and eager, unprepared for such cruelty.

He leaned forward, his hands joined loosely between his knees. He told me that he had continued to shock the now silent McDonough until he reached the final switch, 450 volts, although he couldn’t remember much about it.

When it was all over, Williams told Bill that he would release the learner and Bill prepared for the worst, taking comfort from the fact that he was fitter and younger than the other guy. “I remember thinking, I’m gonna have to calm him down if he gets upset. If he was gonna take a swing at me, I thought, I’m just gonna restrain him . . . I was scared to death.”

Yet what happened next was surreal. “He came out and said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ He was very friendly, a nice guy who just, you know,
relieved any concerns I had about any hard feelings or animosity. We shook hands. They wanted for me to see that he was okay, physically and emotionally. The debriefing, if you wanna call it that, didn’t last two minutes. We talked for a few minutes and then he and I left together and we walked out of the building and we got out onto the street and he went one way and I went the other.

“I was in this crazy situation . . . I was just gonna walk out of there . . . nobody was gonna shoot me or put me in a prison cell. I still didn’t know what had happened. I was a basket case on the way home.”

Bill went straight to his neighbor, an electrician, and told him what had happened. His neighbor tried to reassure him that the shocks couldn’t have been real, or McDonough wouldn’t have walked out smiling afterward. “But I was also really concerned afterward about what I had done, you know, ‘Gee whiz, look what I did.’ It didn’t make me feel very good. You know, the cruelty involved. The question was always geez, what can they make you do here? . . . Or what did you do? They didn’t make you. No one held a gun to my head.”

Yet in hearing Bill’s story, it seemed obvious to me that it had been more than a simple case of following orders. No one had held a gun to his head, but he’d been instructed, argued with, pressured, and coerced into continuing. Milgram’s published accounts of his experiment described his role as the objective scientist who set up an experiment to observe natural behavior unfold.
³
The conventional wisdom among social psychologists was that “the researcher is merely creating conditions for what would happen anyway, but the researcher is not creating what happens. The researcher’s responsibility is to record what happens, and the subject’s responses are the responsibility of the subject.”
⁴
Until I met Bill Menold, I had believed pretty much the same thing. But hearing his story raised all sorts of questions. I decided to return to the archives to see if I could find some answers.

The more I read, the more I understood how complicated the story I had assumed I had known actually was. It became clear to me just how enormous the pressure on Bill and others was. Milgram’s career
depended on their obedience; all his preparations were aimed at making them obey. In choosing “the boldest and most significant research possible,” Milgram was aiming for bold and significant results.
⁵

When he had arrived at Yale in September 1960, he knew that he wanted to compare national differences in obedience between Germans and Americans in much the same way as he had compared conformity between the Norwegians and the French. Milgram had adopted the then common view that Germans were far more susceptible than other nationalities to following orders. His sinister variation on Asch’s more benign line test seemed to be based on a belief, popular in America at the time, that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were highly conformist and motivated by blind obedience.
⁶
Milgram told mentors that he intended to compare obedience to authority in the United States and Germany and that the New Haven experiments were the baseline against which he planned to compare German obedience rates. But his funding applications did not mention this, instead describing the research in terms of conformity in the context of the Cold War.
⁷

Milgram improvised with techniques to come up with an experimental procedure that satisfied him. The choice of a shock machine was not surprising, as the infliction of electric shock was common in psychological experiments around this time.
⁸
His earliest musings on paper feature a sketch of a shock generator with a series of switches labeled from “very mild” to “lethal.”

On October 14, 1960, Milgram outlined his early plans in a letter to the Office of Naval Research inquiring about potential funding. His thinking had already advanced from his initial drawings: “If you are trying to maximize obedience, and command a person to do something in violation of his inner standards, with how much information do you present him? Do you tell him from the start the worst of what he may be expected to do, or do you extract compliance from him piecemeal?”
⁹

In order to create the “strongest obedience situation,” he was already wrestling with how he could overcome people’s reservations and reluctance to inflict harm on someone else. In the letter, he suggested
that one way was to ask for compliance step by step: first by providing an “acceptable rationale” for the experiment, and then by selling it to potential subjects as a learning experiment in which memory could be improved through the use of “negative reinforcement.” If the experiment could be presented as a socially useful study, the infliction of punishment would be seen as justified. This letter shows that Milgram intended to run two conditions: the experimental condition, in which a person was pressured by a group to do something in violation of his conscience; and the control group, in which he could see how an individual would behave by following instructions from another individual. He predicted that the group condition would elicit more obedience than the individual one.

From October 1960 until August 1961, Milgram developed, refined, and rehearsed his experimental scenario, beginning it as a class project for his “Psychology of the Small Group” class. Social psychologists serious about their science were expected to have storytelling, acting, and stagecraft skills as part of their professional toolkit, and Milgram no doubt saw this project as a way for students to learn the tools of the trade. But it had the added benefit of allowing him to develop the experiment for application beyond the classroom.

Together, Milgram and his class developed the experimental scenario for the control condition and a feasible cover story: that the experiment was about the effect of punishment on learning, and it aimed to test whether the learner’s recall would be improved by receiving electric shocks for each wrong answer. The victim and the experimenter would be in cahoots, the victim’s cries of pain would be faked, and no real shock would be given. The shock machine was central to the cover story, and the students came up with a prototype based on Milgram’s rough drawing. Milgram and his students didn’t expect anyone would go above the level of “strong shock,” the sixth of twelve switches. The switches increased in 30-volt increments to a maximum shock of 330 volts, beginning with “tingle shock” and ending with “danger: severe shock.”
¹⁰
Milgram’s feeling at this point was that levels of obedience in this condition would be low but would serve as a useful contrast to the “real” experiment, where he expected the urgings and pressure from a group to yield high levels of obedience.

Between late November and early December 1960, Milgram and his class ran some preliminary trials, holding five different sessions with twenty Yale undergraduates as subjects. Milgram and his students watched through a one-way mirror, making adjustments and changes as the trials progressed. The results took Milgram by surprise: even though no statistics are available, a 1970 report indicates that more than 85 percent of Yale student subjects, and possibly as many as 100 percent, went to the maximum voltage.
¹¹
Milgram and his students were “astonished”; he said they sensed they had witnessed something “extraordinary.”
¹²
Particularly surprising was the obedience rate of subjects in the control condition. Milgram realized that the experimenter’s influence was far more powerful than he had thought.

Although Milgram began the planning stages of his research with attention-grabbing results in mind, it wasn’t until these pilot studies that he received confirmation that he was on the right track. Scientifically speaking, the results were counterintuitive—no one would expect so many people to follow orders—and therefore much more likely to garner attention than research that confirmed what was already known. He now relegated his original “group pressure” studies to a minor role, and what had been his control condition became his focus.

However, privately he was still cautious about the results of his pilot studies, probably because the somewhat amateurish delivery by his student personnel may have made subjects see through the cover story, and they could have obeyed because they knew it was a hoax. From this point, he worked on developing a highly credible scenario to ensure that the maximum number of people would obey. But he had to come up with ways to both overcome their resistance and pressure them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise. Milgram later called these “strain-reducing mechanisms” and “binding factors.” Almost immediately, he stepped up efforts to source funding for further research, describing his work to one funding body as an attempt to “maximize obedience.”
¹³
Milgram could sense that this research would put his name up there with the giants of social psychology. In a letter to his former Harvard professor Jerome Bruner around the same
time, he wrote: “My hope is that the obedience experiments will take their place along with the studies of Sherif, Lewin and Asch.”
¹⁴

Milgram also had an obsession with the detail of the practical design, which comes through clearly in the files and notes. He was proud of his practical skills, describing them in an unpublished interview:

Setting up an experiment is much like producing a play; you have to get all the elements together before it is a running production . . . much to my surprise, I turned out to be a kind of whiz at this sort of thing . . . I find it almost recreational. Moreover, I have a passion for perfection in setting up an experiment, both in regard to the materials used, and the manner of execution. I can spend months perfecting the format of a document used in an experiment; and I will not allow the experiment to proceed, until everything is not only adequate but aesthetically satisfying.
¹⁵

He was stage manager, magician, scriptwriter, head of props, casting agent, publicist, and director and would eventually watch the proceedings unfold from behind a one-way mirror—his version of the wings.

Then there were the administrative details. As a junior member of staff with little or no entitlement to administrative support, Milgram was responsible for everything from ordering business cards to arranging security for the buildings after hours. He designed the shock machine himself, making it look more realistic than the prototype developed by his students. In his papers, there are first crude, and then increasingly sophisticated, sketches of it. The final sketch is annotated with an early fragment of the script: “75. Ow. 90. Owch. 105. Ow. 110. Ow Hey! This really hurts. 135 OW—150. Ow that’s all!! Get me out of here.”
¹⁶
It had to be believable, but not so believable that subjects would refuse to go to the maximum voltage. Milgram increased the number of switches from twelve to thirty, making the increments smaller, and decided to change the final switch, which he had labeled in his early drawings as “
lethal
,” then “
extreme shock—danger
” on the student prototype, to the more ambiguous “
XXX
.” He was already
tweaking and making improvements to ensure greater obedience to the experimenter’s orders.