Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

Soc DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9724-3 PROFILE Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Report Card 50 Years Later Augustine Brannigan # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Fifty years ago Stanley Milgram published the first report of his following the experimental methods that proved to be so studies of obedience to authority. His work (1963) forged the effective in the natural sciences. He also contributed to the mindset of how social scientists over the next two generations dogma in social psychology that ‘the situation’ is one of the came to explain the participation of hundreds of thousands of most, if not the most, important determinant of social behav- Germans in the mass murder of European Jews during the ior. His 1974 book was promoted widely in the popular press, Holocaust. Milgram’s model was Adolph Eichmann who was and created a media storm. His scientific portrayal of ‘the convicted and executed for his role in the deportation of banality of evil’ inspired an artistic outpouring of films, and European Jews to death camps created in Poland for their plays, and remains a point of relevance in studies of holocaust eradication. Eichmann’s legal defense, that he was ‘just follow- history today. Stanley Milgram died in 1984 at the age of 51. ing orders,’ suggested that the final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Europe was engineered by desk murderers remote- ly positioned in hierarchies of authority across the Nazi bureau- cracy. Submission was unquestioned because the decision to eradicate the Jews originated from the sovereign authority. Milgram’s murderers were loyal automatons. Milgram attracted his subjects from the wider community in New Haven and Bridgeport. He recruited an astounding 780 subjects. His work was identified by Roger Brown as ‘the most important psychological research’ done in his genera- tion. Where Hannah Arendt speculated philosophically that the ranks of Holocaust perpetrators such as Eichmann were unremarkable non-entities, Milgram described in an experimental idiom the ease with which New Haven citizens could be transformed into brutal Nazis without much difficulty. Milgram’s work also provoked questions about the ethical treatment of human subjects in a way that helped to shape future policies for the treatment of volunteers in experimental studies. It alerted funding agencies to the necessity of risk assessment of those deliberately misled in studies premised on subject deception. Milgram also championed the proposition that grave questions of human morality could be examined Stanley Milgram 1933-1984 A. Brannigan (*) Enter Gina Perry. Perry is an Australian journalist and Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4 writer who took an interest in the Milgram study after learning e-mail: [email protected] through personal acquaintances that several persons who Soc participated in a replication of the obedience study at La Trobe designed to create an increasingly disagreeable dilemma for University in Melbourne in 1973 and 1974 continued to suffer the subject: either shock or walk, obey or defy. Each experi- trauma decades later. That unpublished replication involved ment lasted about 50 min, and resulted in levels of agitation some 200 subjects. She turned her attention to the original among some subjects that were unprecedented in previous study, and spent 4 years researching the Milgram archives at psychological research. Milgram’s question was simply how Yale University. She listened to 140 audio recordings of the far the teacher would continue to issue painful shocks before original experiments, and dozens of hours of conversations defying Mr. Williams’s directives to continue. Milgram’s crit- involving former subjects in the postmortem debriefing with a ical finding was that 65 % of ordinary persons would admin- psychiatrist. She interviewed former subjects and experts famil- ister levels of punishment that would appear to be lethal, even iar with the research, family members of the actors, and read the where, in one condition, the learner was depicted as a person mountains of documentation and correspondence accumulated with an existing heart condition. Despite this apparently pro- during the study. The conclusions she draws from her investi- found level of aggression, the conventional wisdom suggested gation were disturbing, and will fundamentally challenge the that the agitation associated with the exercise dissipated im- way scholars interpret Milgram and his experiment. mediately as the subjects were ‘de-hoaxed.’ All the civility What is known about Milgram and his background? He that had been suspended was restored by the debriefing, and was interested in the conditions that led to the expression of having been made whole again, the subject and the scientist deep antisemitism in Germany during the Second World War. departed company on good terms. That was the myth. Some thought that pathological conformity might have had national roots. In his doctoral work, he investigated national differences in defiance of group pressure to conform to judg- ments that subjects thought were incorrect. In this work, he adopted the protocols of Solomon Asch. Indeed, he found national differences in conformity between Norwegian and French subjects, but nothing that illuminated the German case. As a young professor he sought to raise the ante by creating conditions in which subjects were compelled, not just to say something they thought to be untrue, but to act in a gravely inappropriate way. Most students with any postsecondary training in recent years will recall the experiment. The ‘cover story’ was a learning experiment in which potential teachers and learners were recruited from the public by newspaper ads Traumatized subjects and direct mail solicitation. Persons who presented individu- ally for the study drew names out of a hat for their respective Perry discovered a different picture. Herb Winer was ‘boil- roles. A lab-coated scientist explained the need to determine ing with anger’ for days after the experiment (p. 79). At the the effectiveness of punishment on the learning process. The time, like Milgram, he was an untenured professor at Yale. He subjects were deceived from the start. The learner (Jim confronted Milgram in his office with his concerns about the McDonough) and the scientist (John Williams) were amateur experiment, particularly about pressure to shock someone actors. Participants were paid $5 for participation and carfare, with a heart condition. His trauma was so intense that he a very significant compensation at the time in 1961. They confided in Perry, nearly 50 years later, that his memory of witnessed the physical restraint of the learner in an attached the event would be ‘among the last things I will ever forget’ room where he was to be ‘tested.’ The shocking appliance (p. 84). After the cover story was explained, Winer became an consisted of 30 switches numbered from 15 to 450 V. It admirer of Milgram, ‘although he will never forgive him for buzzed and snapped and exuded technological credibility as what he put him through.’ Bill Lee was another subject the teacher administered the punishments up to a level labeled tracked down by Perry. Bill Menold was unsure of whether as ‘severe shock.’ To start things, the teacher read a long list of the study was a sham or not, but he found it ‘unbelievably word pairs, and then, under the supervision of Mr. Williams, stressful…I was a basket case on the way home’ (p. 52). He the scientist, proceeded to test whether the learner retained confided that night in a neighbor who was an electrician to knowledge of the information just presented to him. Now the learn more about electrical shocks. Hannah Bergman (a pseu- drama began in earnest. The learner apparently had a terrible donym) still recalled the experiment vividly after half a cen- memory. The shocks escalated in accord with the errors. And tury. Her recollections suggested that she ‘was ashamed—and he began to protest with increasingly painful moans and frightened.’ Her son told Perry that ‘it was a traumatic event in screams. This was all piped back to the learner through her life which opened some unsettling personal issues with no speakers. The response pattern was all predetermined, and subsequent follow-up’ (p. 112). A New Haven Alderman Soc complained to Yale authorities about the study: ‘I can’t re- The Sceptical Subjects member ever being quite so upset’ (p. 132). One subject (#716) checked mortality notices in the New Haven If many subjects were traumatized, there were significant Register, for fear of having killed the learner. Another subject others who had their doubts about the cover story (p. 156). (#501) was shaking so much he was not sure he would be able One subject wrote to Professor Milgram the day after his to drive home; according to his wife, on the way home he was participation. He had inferred that the ‘draw’ for roles was shivering in the car and talked incessantly about his intense fixed, and that both pieces of paper probably had the word discomfort until midnight (p. 95). Subject 711 reported that ‘teacher’ written on them. He found the learner unaccountably ‘the experiment left such an effect on me that I spent the night ‘disinterested’, and was suspicious of all the one-way glass in a cold sweat and nightmares because of fears that I might mirrors. He also noticed that the learner was not given his have killed that man in the chair’ (p. 93). None of the previous check at the same time as himself. Another noticed that the histories of these experiments even hinted at such reactions, learner’s check was dog-eared from what appeared to be nor was any of this ever reported in the university curriculum. frequent use. Others engaged in reality testing by asking the What caused all the trauma? learner to tap on the wall if he could hear him.

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