I was today years old when I found out that two of the most infamous experimental psychologists of the twentieth century went to high school together. Which makes me wonder if ethics class at James Monroe High School in the Bronx included the lesson, “if you do human experiments, don’t make anybody too dead.”
In part one of two for this Moments of Science… pushing Milgram’s buttons.
Stanley Milgram’s family fled Europe to New York during WWI in the shadow of widespread Jewish persecution. Many extended family members remained, joining them after the Holocaust. Their numbered tattoos served as a visible reminder to young Stanley of their treatment at the hands of the Third Reich. The family history heavily influenced the research Milgram took up. He sought to understand the nature of obedience to authority, and how it was instrumental in carrying out the Holocaust.
You may have heard about the time he tricked volunteers into thinking they killed a man. That’s just where the fuckery starts.
Volunteers for Milgram’s 1961 experiment were told they signed up to help test the effects of punishment on memory, but survey says that was a fucking lie. They told volunteers it was luck of the draw if they’d be the ‘teacher’ or the ‘learner,’ but it was rigged; the volunteer was always the teacher. The learner was a paid actor.
They were placed in a room with an instrument referred to as a ‘shock box’ along with an ‘experimenter’ ostensibly running the show. The learner was in an adjacent room so they could communicate but not see each other. Volunteers would test their learner on a series of word associations. Wrong answers resulted in the teacher administering successively stronger shocks, starting at 15 volts and working up to 450 volts. They saw the learner strapped to the chair before the experiment began, helpless.
Volunteers didn’t deliver a single shock. The experiment was designed to make them believe they were carrying out orders to hurt someone, and test if they would do it with little coercion.
Many objected when they heard the screams of pain and the desperate cries that he had a heart condition. Some told the experimenter they wanted out when he pounded on the walls and then when he fell suspiciously silent. But as the tale goes, the experimenter would give them only four gentle prompts, in order:
“Please continue” or “Please go on.”
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
“You have no other choice; you must go on.”
Milgram’s colleagues predicted that maybe 1-3% of participants would go to the very last shock.
A devastating 65% of participants delivered the maximum voltage. All of them went to 300 volts. They did this under the premise that they could just as easily have been on the other side of that switch. Zimbardo later asked Milgram how many volunteers requested to check on the learner. He said “not one, not ever.”
What did this teach us about obedience and the Holocaust? Depends on if you trust the data.
In psychologist Gina Perry’s 2013 book ‘Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments’, she researched archival data at Yale because fact checking is important, kids. In audio recordings, the experimenters went far past four gentle prompts. They improvised, coercing some volunteers to stay. One subject was prompted fourteen goddamn times.
Milgram’s team initially avoided debriefing volunteers to hide their trickery from the local volunteer pool. Interviewing study volunteers, Perry found the majority left the experiment being allowed to believe they’d tortured a man. One checked obituaries for weeks (which makes me think- only one?).
It seems about half the volunteers didn’t believe they were actually shocking someone. It was even noted by one of Milgram’s research assistants that they were more likely to push back if they believed it was real. Perhaps volunteers realized nobody was being killed for failing a vocabulary test.
How can an experiment run on deception and cooked data tell us anything meaningful? The findings have been applied to explain the worst parts of human nature, and though it feels like the ideas have merit, it’s difficult to assess with poor data quality. The study has been replicated, but the percentage of people who go to the end point is highly variable from one replication study to the next.
Maybe the takeaway is that the wrong conditions can coerce good people into monstrosities.
Maybe it’s that Milgram was capable of monstrosities when he wanted to prove we were all monsters.
This has been your Moment of Science, asking you to shock as you’d wish to be shocked.
Hey y’all, this is Yvette, the one and only human behind all of this. To help support the fact checking/dick joke effort, and for extended blog entries and exclusive bonus content, come check out patreon.com/scibabe.
Peter Gabriel’s ‘So’ album in 1986 had a song about this entitled ‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’ 37)’. I know the track well but had to check to see if it was related.