Behind the Shock Machine (9 page)

Milgram bought the necessary electronic parts for a total cost of $261.86 and oversaw its construction by Ronald Salmon, a Yale employee. Salmon spent eighty-six hours between June 2 and July 19, 1961, assembling it in Yale’s electronic and mechanical workshop. It had a single row of thirty switches, each topped by lights, with labels beneath describing the degree of shock each purported to deliver. The first group of four switches were labeled “slight shock,” the next “moderate shock,” then “strong,” “very strong,” “intense,” “extremely intense,” and “danger: severe shock.” The final two switches were simply labeled “XXX.” The finishing touch—and, at $ 65.82, the most expensive—was the engraving on the front panel, done by Hermes Precision Engravers in New York: a small plate in the left-hand corner stated that the machine was built by “Dyson Instrument Company, Waltham, Mass.,” an area known for its electronics manufacturing.
¹⁷

Rather than relying on his staff to record the level at which people stopped, a practice fallible to human error, Milgram bought his most expensive piece of equipment: an Esterline Angus event recorder. It recorded the amount of voltage delivered, as well as how long the shock lasted, that is, how long the subject held down the switch. He was keen to streamline and automate processes as much as possible, to keep things scientific. Milgram also bought two tape recorders—one for recording each experiment, the other for playing back the learner’s cries—and timers, a camera, and speakers.
¹⁸

By mid-June, it was time to recruit subjects. This would be an arduous process, with Milgram first advertising in local papers, then sending letters of solicitation to names and addresses taken from the phone book, and finally asking the already recruited subjects to provide him with contact details of relatives or friends that he could approach.

He ran a half-page newspaper advertisement in the
New Haven Register
on Sunday, June 18, 1961.

The attention-grabbing heading, a hierarchy of text sizes, and bolding made the advertisement easy to read at a glance.

WE WILL PAY YOU $4.00 FOR ONE HOUR OF YOUR TIME

Persons Needed for a Study of Memory

* We will pay 500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning. The study is being done at Yale University.

*
Each person who participates will be paid $4.00
(plus 50¢ carfare) for approximately 1 hour’s time.
We need you for only one hour
: there are no further obligations. You may choose the time you would like to come (evenings, weekdays, or weekends).

No special training education or experience is needed. We want:

All persons must be between the ages of 20 and 50. High school and college students cannot be used.

*
If you meet these qualifications,
fill out the coupon below and mail it now to Professor Stanley Milgram, Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven. You will be notified later of the specific time and place of the study. We reserve the right to decline any application.

*
You will be paid $4.00
(plus 50¢ carfare) as soon as you arrive at the laboratory.

The tone and rhythm mimicked ads for closing-down sales, and the repetition of the four dollars, the one hour required, and the fact that there were no further obligations was reminiscent of someone making a pitch: “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, four dollars for only one hour. That’s right, just one hour of your time.” The emphasis on the lack of special training, education, or experience highlighted that unskilled men could and should apply—if they met the “qualification” (a word
perhaps used to flatter exactly these sorts of readers, given that the only qualifications were age and gender), they should act quickly in order to be “selected.” The implication was that selection was a privilege because there would be more applications than spots. The mention that the money would be paid on arrival was aimed at people who wanted to make a quick $4.50.

As well as the large display ad in the news section, Milgram paid for extra 5″ x 1″ column ads concentrated mainly in the sports pages. These pages were sandwiched between reports of Jackie Kennedy holidaying solo in Greece, the threat of communism, the exclusion of African American students from white schools, and U.S. broadcasts of propaganda to North Korean troops, as well as ads for New Haven department stores in the lead-up to Father’s Day.

Milgram was disappointed with the response to his ads. Despite the paper’s Sunday circulation of 106,000, he received only 296 replies—even fewer once he subtracted women, Yale employees, newspaper reporters, and police officers, all of whom he decided would make unsuitable subjects.
¹⁹
He blamed the weekend’s weather: that Sunday it had been a sunny 80 degrees with a welcome dip in humidity. Instead of sitting inside and reading the paper, the men he was hoping to reach had been lured out by the unseasonably beautiful weather for picnics and ball games. Interestingly, Milgram didn’t seem to consider that some readers might have seen the ad but treated it with suspicion due to its gimmicky tone, which perhaps sounded at odds with what they would have expected from Yale. Instead, it was the potential subjects who were at fault—their desire to make the most of the good weather, their fecklessness and distractibility, meant that his ad went unread.

Next he tried direct mail, sending two thousand letters to men whose names and addresses were taken from the 1960–61 New Haven telephone directory. He selected the first thousand by choosing the names at the top of each of the four columns on every one of the directory’s 312 pages (although no “business establishments and women”).
²⁰
Once that method was exhausted, he selected the first name at the top of each column in the bottom half of each page. The two thousand all received the following letter:

MEMORY AND LEARNING PROJECT

Yale University

New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Sir:

We need your help.

We require five hundred New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory at Yale University.

Each person who participates in this study is paid $4.50 for 1 hour’s time. There are no strings attached. We need you for only one hour. There are no further obligations.

No special training, education, or experience is needed. We want persons of all occupations: factory workers, businessmen, laborers, professional people, and others. We need persons from all over New Haven and the surrounding communities.

You may choose the hour you would like to participate; it may be in the evening, on weekends, or on weekdays. You must be between the ages of 20 and 50. We cannot use high school or college students.

If you meet these qualifications and would like to take part in this Yale study, fill out the enclosed postcard and drop it in the mailbox. The exact time and place of the study will be arranged later, at your convenience. (We reserve the right to decline any application.)

To repeat the facts:

1. You are wanted for a study at Yale University.

2. You will be paid $4.50 for one hour of your time.

3. There are no strings attached. This is a sincere offer.

4. You may choose your own hour: evenings, weekdays, or weekends.

5. If we can count on you, fill out and mail the enclosed card.

Your help is greatly appreciated, and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours truly,

Stanley Milgram, Ph.D.

Director

This was probably more effective, with its letterhead mentioning an impressive-sounding Memory and Learning Project at Yale and Milgram, holder of a PhD, as its director. The impassioned “we need your help,” a phrase that was repeated in variation throughout, appealed directly to people’s altruism. Milgram was aware by this point that people were more cautious than he’d given them credit for. The phrases “no strings” and “no obligations” were repeated three times, as if he felt the need to reassure the recipient that this was a genuine, benign scientific enterprise and the reader could have faith in those running it. The tone of the letter is more conciliatory and less commanding than the newspaper ad, with the personal pronoun “you” creating a more intimate, inviting feel and fostering a sense of equality between the reader and the writer: the
you must
s of the ad are replaced with
you may
s in the letter.

With the ad and letter, Milgram clearly had an idea of the men he wanted to recruit—those impressed by authority, flattered to be involved in a scientific endeavor at a prestigious institution, and likely to be glad of extra money. Yet the subject questionnaires showed that the men who volunteered were motivated by curiosity, many wanting to learn something more about their memory, including Bill Menold.
²¹

Next, Milgram chose his actors. They had to look the part, and it was Milgram who decided what that look would be. He initially considered Alan Elms, his young research assistant, for the experimenter but decided that he looked too young and an older man would wield more authority.
²²
He advertised in the local paper in mid-July for a research assistant, and of the eleven men who applied Milgram appointed Jack Williams, a thirty-one-year-old high school biology teacher he described as “impassive” and “stern” and clearly glad of the extra work over summer. Milgram selected Williams not just for his acting skills but also because as a science teacher Williams was used to exercising his stern demeanor and authoritative presence to command obedience. Milgram described Williams in early drafts of his book thus: “He is a rather angular looking fellow, technical looking, and dry, the type you would later see on television in connection with the space programme.”
²³

For the role of the learner, Milgram was delighted when he interviewed James Justin McDonough. Whereas Williams was angular and stern, Jim McDonough was “a rotund man in his late 40s, a fleshy red nose and pink complexion, probably Irish, perhaps an accountant for the railway, perhaps a bartender.” Milgram told one subject that one of the reasons McDonough was selected was he was “stout and kind of sloppy . . . he looked like a cardiac type.” The notes that Milgram took of his interview with McDonough begin with a sense of excitement:

Excellent as victim. A+ victim. Can work the acceptable hours. This man would be perfect as victim. He is mild and submissive, not at all academic. . . . Worked on the railroad for 25 years and is completely reliable. The only trouble is he cannot act too well in my estimation, but can train. Has 8 children. Easy to get along with.
²⁴

It was hardly an audition; in fact, Milgram seemed quite happy to overlook McDonough’s poor acting skills. He was just thrilled that McDonough so closely resembled what he must have felt was the perfect “victim”—an amiable, not very intelligent-looking man, the sort who would submit to being strapped into the chair without protest and whose mistakes on a fairly simple learning test would not arouse suspicion. The mention of McDonough’s eight children and his reliability could suggest that Milgram was looking for a man who needed the money and would be less likely to withdraw if he found the work distasteful, but it’s likely, too, that Milgram selected McDonough because he fit Milgram’s view of what an “average” New Haven working man was like. McDonough was in fact an executive with the railroad, occupying a position of responsibility and authority.

It seems that Milgram’s theatrical flair overtook his scientific objectivity in his choice of actors. In a kind of mirror image of the results he was looking for, Milgram cast as his experimenter a man who would command obedience and in the role of the “victim” a man who looked sure to obey. He seemed unaware of how his vision was influencing his experimental design.

Milgram trained the actors himself. He wanted to make sure that they and the script were as convincing as possible. He noted, “It took a tremendous amount of rehearsal. Two full weeks with constant screaming on my part, constant.”
²⁵
Williams’s script was a densely typed ten pages that began when the subject arrived, and ended at the point where the “memory and learning test” started. McDonough’s script was straightforward—a series of protests, cries, and screams cued to voltages on the machine. Williams’s delivery had to be rapid to get through ten pages of instructions and directions before the test began, a practice that, combined with his authoritative manner and tone, discouraged objections. Milgram rehearsed with McDonough until his “cries of agony were truly piercing.”
²⁶