In the early 1960s, when the Yale University psychology researcher Stanley Milgram built a “shock machine” and began recruiting hundreds of ordinary Americans to a basement lab to see how far they would go in punishing their fellow citizens, he put himself on a path to becoming one of the most famous, and controversial, figures of 20th-century psychology.
His subjects, thinking they were serving as the “teacher” in a test of memory and learning, were instructed by a man in a lab coat to deliver a series of ever-stronger jolts to “learners” as they made mistakes on a quiz. The best-known variation of the study is one in which the person being shocked, actually an actor hidden from view, would shout out more and more desperately as the voltage increased, then fall ominously silent. Despite the shouts, 62 percent of the participants obediently flipped the electrical switches up to the highest level.
Just 18 years after the Holocaust had raised profound questions about the human capacity for evil, and in the shadow of the trial of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram’s haunting reports captured the popular imagination. “What sort of people,” asked The New York Times in its news article about the study, “slavishly doing what they are told, would send millions of fellow humans into gas chambers?” The answer appeared to be: any of us. The experiments also ignited a debate within psychology about Milgram’s research ethics, given the stress his subjects went through. Many expressed anguish even as they continued to flip the switches.
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of Milgram’s first published paper on the experiment. The event has inspired at least two conferences—including one at Yale, next month—and a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues, and it is occasioning fresh examination of Milgram’s work.
Scholars working in the Milgram archives at Yale University have, in recent years, begun to suggest that the experiments told a more complicated story than most people understand: Of the many versions he ran, not all of them yielded such damning results, and their methods may not be as consistent as he reported. A new entry on the critical side is a book just published in the United States, “Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments,” by the Australian journalist and psychologist Gina Perry. Perry says she set out with a respectful view of Milgram, thinking that she would be simply fleshing out the story of the experiments by tracking down as many test subjects as she could and telling their side of the story, with the help of the archives. But, she says, she came to be appalled by the way the subjects were treated, and surprised by what she calls the sloppiness of his research. “The closer I looked at the inner workings of the experiment,” she writes, “the more contrived and unconvincing the results seemed.”
While there are certainly psychologists who agree with that stance, others worry it will induce people to dismiss a still important set of findings because the experiments don’t meet the standards of 21st-century research. But for Perry and others, the flaws and irregularities in the experiment are far more than minor details: How you parse those details may determine whether you believe we should put faith in Milgram’s work at all.
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Milgram’s experiments
made their first appearance in print in October 1963, in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. That article focused on an experiment in which the person supposedly being shocked took the shocks silently at first, then pounded on the door if the voltage reached 300 volts, and again at 315—and then went silent. Sixty-five percent of subjects nevertheless kept turning the electricity up to the highest voltage.
Milgram, cognizant of the public impact his work might have, filmed several subjects in the last days of the experiments. He went on to use that footage to make a documentary film, “Obedience.”
“Can’t you check in to see if he’s all right?” a clearly distressed subject, Fred Prozi, a central figure in “Obedience,” asks plaintively, after a once-hollering “learner” goes silent.
“Not once we’ve started,” says the experimenter. “Please continue, teacher.” Prozi continues, but also gets out of his seat, pushes his papers away, and puts his head in his hands.
The fascination followed swiftly, as did the backlash. In June 1964, in American Psychologist, a psychologist named Diana Baumrind blasted the ethics of the experiment, singling out Milgram’s “posture of indifference” toward his subjects, and asking skeptically whether the setup could provide any insight into how people would act in the real world. She also questioned whether Milgram’s short, casual debriefing of his subjects afterward, in which he told them no deadly shocks were involved before sending them back onto the streets, was sufficient to counteract the ordeal he’d put them through. Those criticisms have dogged the experiments to this day.Continued...