Behind the Shock Machine (12 page)

As Herb’s familiar but strange story had unfolded, I found myself faced with so many questions that I didn’t know where to begin.

The next time we met, it was so that Herb could show me around Yale before we went downtown to lunch. We met in the library and walked around the campus, Herb keeping a running commentary as we walked.

We stopped at the women’s table, a huge, flat piece of granite designed
by Maya Lin, a Yale graduate who had designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The surface was covered by a thin layer of water, underneath which was engraved, in the shape of a widening spiral, the number of women who had attended Yale each year between its founding and 1993. I trailed my fingers in the water, which bubbled up from the center and spilled over the sides. Then I ran my fingers over the figures carved into the granite, unsure if the table was a celebration or a lament. Herb was telling me how much the place had changed since he first arrived.

I took a picture of him outside Linsly-Chittenden Hall. He grinned at the camera, the white of his short-sleeved shirt seeming to glow against the stone walls and barred basement windows. We peered in through the panes of the double doors before Herb pushed them open. The building now housed the English department but was deserted. We went downstairs and into the basement, which had been converted into staff offices, with a pew-like seat in the lobby where students could wait. It looked like any other university building. I was surprised when Herb told me in an indignant voice that there was nothing in the basement and nothing on the building, no plaque or reminder that what had been dubbed the most famous experiments in social psychology had taken place here.

After we finished our tour, we had lunch on York Street. Talking about the experiment still raised Herb’s blood pressure, he said, because the recollection was still there. Yet, without missing a beat, he added that he could see “the extraordinary value of the results of Milgram’s work” and felt “delighted and honored to have been a participant and not ashamed of being a disobedient subject.” Here it was again: he moved in and out of focus, one moment the outraged subject, the next the admiring colleague. But this time I could tell that, behind his banter and professed admiration for Milgram, Herb’s anger simmered. His next statement confirmed it: “If you asked me how I felt about having participated, my answer would be I was both very angry and very glad. The two aren’t incompatible.”

Our meals arrived. I said that I had found a paper of his in the archive since I had last seen him. He stopped chewing, looking stricken. A letter, I said, to Milgram, talking about the latest report and inviting
him to lunch. I was conscious of talking quickly, of wanting him to relax. Only later did I realize that he thought I had found details revealing how far he went on the shock machine.

Leaving the restaurant, we made our way along the footpath, dodging the paraphernalia of roadwork. Herb narrowly missed tripping over a piece of metal lying on the footpath. He kicked it into the gutter and then rushed forward, toward a road worker in a luminous green vest and hard hat. “I’ll sue you! I could sue you.” He waved his arms at the worker, who simply bent down and picked up the metal, throwing it onto a pile nearby. For a moment, before he turned back to me and grinned, I hadn’t been sure that Herb was joking.

We parted, and I went back to the campus to sit on a park bench in the shade on one of Yale’s lawns. The sun glinted off the windows opposite, and I felt the beginnings of a headache. The bells in Harkness Tower started up (trainee carillonneurs practice in summer), and a discordant jangling I couldn’t recognize lurched and stuttered into the air. It seemed a suitable accompaniment, given my state of mind. Just how well did I know what had happened in the experiments? And why was Herb so angry after his had ended? Surely once it was explained to him that he’d been duped, it all made sense; and given that he’d defied the experimenter, there didn’t seem to be anything for him to feel angry about.

And most confusing of all: why had he made an appointment to see Milgram to talk about his experience—hadn’t he had the chance to do that in the lab, after he’d refused to go on?

As it turned out, I was to visit Herb five or six times in the ensuing four years, using material from the archives to make sense of the story he told me. I reread the interviews he had given, published in 2000 and 2004, and it became obvious that he forgot more with time. I read things he’d said in print that he could no longer recall. Each time we met another detail had disappeared, like a wisp of smoke. Herb was aware of it: he told me that he forgot “more and more with the passage of time,” but what he never forgot were his feelings during and immediately after the experiment. On one occasion, he told me that the emotional experience was imprinted upon his memory and would be “among the last things I will ever forget.”

In piecing together Herb’s story, I also discovered a story about Milgram and his subjects. While Herb was unusual in some ways—he was a Yale professor, for a start—he was typical in terms of how he was treated in the experiment and in what he was told. I found out that Herb was angry because, when he left the lab, he hadn’t been told that the experiment was a hoax. He left believing he’d shocked a man with a bad heart and had possibly put his life at risk.

Milgram didn’t tell most of his subjects at the end of the experiment that it was a setup: that the machine was a fake and the learner was an actor. When I went back to his early writings, I found that he never claimed to have told his participants the truth. In other words, it was quite usual for subjects like Herb to leave the lab without knowing that the whole thing was an illusion.

But why was this such a surprise to me—how had I gotten it so wrong? I went back to Milgram’s first published paper and discovered the source of my confusion: Milgram used the heading “Interview and Dehoax,” under which he described what occurred at the end of the experiment. The word “dehoax” implies truth telling. While I had assumed that Milgram had fully debriefed subjects, in fact his “dehoax” involved substituting one untruth for another.

In his first article, he wrote: “After the interview procedures were undertaken to assure that the subject would leave the laboratory in a state of well being. A friendly reconciliation was arranged between the subject and the victim, and an effort was made to reduce any tensions that arose as a result of the experiment.”
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In his second paper, published a year later—by now two years after the experiments had ended—he reinforced this impression. Addressing accusations that his debriefing would have been ineffective in preventing psychological harm to his subjects, Milgram wrote:

A most important aspect of the procedure occurred at the end of the experimental session. A careful post-experimental treatment was administered to all subjects. The exact content of the dehoax varied from condition to condition and with increasing experience on our part. At the very least all subjects were told that the victim had not received dangerous electric shocks.

He repeated that a “friendly reconciliation” with the learner took place, and that he tried to restore subjects’ self-esteem before they left the lab. Then he added: “The experiment was explained [to disobedient subjects] in such a way that supported their decision to disobey the experimenter. Obedient subjects were assured of the fact that their behavior was entirely normal and that their feelings of conflict or tension were shared by other participants.”
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Milgram’s published statements repeatedly insisted that he offered “a careful post-experimental treatment,” and his increasing use of the word “dehoax” in this context gave the impression that when the experiment was over—when the subject had either refused to continue or gone to the maximum voltage—all had been revealed.

How did Milgram think that not telling his subjects the truth could help them?

In order to find out, I went to meet Alan Elms, who had been a graduate student in need of a summer job when Milgram hired him in July 1961.

Alan Elms is an emeritus professor at the University of California at Davis. Since his stint as Milgram’s research assistant, and particularly since Milgram’s death in 1984, Alan has become the spokesperson for the obedience experiments.

Alan had done his undergraduate work at Penn State and conducted lab research with rats, then field research with monkeys. “By the time I got to Yale, I had worked my way up to human beings,” he told me with a grin. He thought the job sounded interesting, but “I didn’t realize just how interesting it would turn out to be.” The lanky student from Kentucky paired up with Milgram, and they began working together on July 5, 1961.

From the outset, Alan and Milgram hit it off. “I found him very likable. He had a good sense of humor—he was very witty, very considerate toward me. He certainly annoyed some people; he was rather brash in his approach to people and not deferential, even though he was only twenty-seven years old. He was quite aware of his own intelligence and didn’t try to hide that.”

Alan admired not only Milgram’s chutzpah but also his organizational skills. Milgram, he said, was one of the most organized researchers he’d
ever worked with. By the time Alan joined him, Milgram had started the obedience notebook, keeping a detailed record of daily events, decisions, and preparations for the experiment.

Milgram and Alan talked through the different permutations of the experiment. Alan remembered that Milgram talked about a variation using husbands and wives, but they decided after discussion that it was ethically problematic. In Milgram’s papers, there are notes on other variations that Milgram considered and discarded. These included the “real victim” condition, in which a subject was used as the learner and received real shocks; “obedience and anxiety,” in which subjects were tranquilized; and “obedience and shame,” in which the male subject would be told, if he hesitated about giving shocks, that only men with “feminine tendencies” balked at going to the maximum voltage.
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Milgram also toyed with the idea of one variation called “obedience and propaganda,” to test how people could be incited to torture by propaganda. In this variation, he would tell the teacher that the learner was paid $35, had called the teacher a “fairy,” and had been in court many times—and that, even though never convicted, there was no doubt that he’d beaten and robbed an old man at a newspaper kiosk and boasted about how he got away with it.
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Alan worked with Milgram on the first three of the twenty-four conditions, beginning in the summer of 1961. The two watched proceedings from behind the one-way mirror, initially taking bets on which people would go to the maximum voltage, but neither of them proved very good at predicting. Besides, they were each looking for different things—Alan was looking for those personality characteristics that would distinguish obedient from defiant subjects, while Milgram was interested in the opposite: “He was interested in situational variables, such as how physically close the victim was to the teacher.”

Alan said that he and Milgram were both “astonished” by the number of people who obeyed the experimenter’s instructions. But surely, I asked, it couldn’t have been that big a surprise to Milgram—wasn’t this what he’d been aiming for all along? Alan acknowledged that the number of people going to the maximum voltage, and their emotional distress in doing so, couldn’t have been completely unexpected.
After all, Milgram had seen people’s reactions in both the pilot studies and the trial runs. “Stanley got a pretty good feel for how some people were going to respond, that some people would get really upset, and he built into the situation ways of dealing with their emotional reactions.”

I thought about the issues with dehoaxing that had been troubling me. With his passion for matching words with meaning, Alan was the right person to ask about what Milgram meant when he used the word “dehoax.” He was fascinated with words. His house was crowded with books: on shelves, in stacks on tables, in piles on his study floor. In one small bookcase in his dining room, he had eighteen different dictionaries. Another was propped open on a lectern, open at a page in the Ds—I caught sight of “downsizing” as I entered the room. When we met, he had recently finished a detailed study of how the changes that Elvis Presley made to the lyrics of “Are You Lonesome Tonight” were not the results of drug abuse or memory loss but kinds of Freudian slips in which Elvis inadvertently revealed his changing feelings about the women in his life. If you listened closely to all twelve recorded versions, Alan argued, you could hear Elvis substituting lyrics to reveal an almost oedipal relationship with his mother and an increasingly ambivalent relationship with Priscilla.
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I asked Alan: when he and Milgram used the word “debriefing” to describe what they told subjects back in 1961, what exactly did they mean? What did they tell people, and why? He told me, “There were two levels of debrief. One was having a procedure of asking how they felt or thought about what they’d been through. Two was where efforts were made to reduce the stress that person has just been undergoing, telling them it’s not as bad as it looked, that the experimenter understands that person had good reason for behaving in the way they did. For example—and the experimenter would give this example—sometimes it’s necessary to hurt someone else for their own good, or for the good of science.

“Whether the subject went all the way to the maximum voltage or whether he broke off, the teacher was quickly told at the end of his participation that things were not nearly as bad as he might have thought they were. The learner would come in from the room next
door and apologize for having been so noisy, saying that the shocks hadn’t been painful—he’d just been getting overexcited or something like that. The experimenter then explained to the teacher that the shock generator had been developed for use with rats and some other small animals.” The goal, Alan explained, was to bring down people’s levels of distress.